Chapter MA-BAP to MACAREO of M by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

began on the Seine to supplant the old term barre, which is evidently the same as our bore. [The N.E.D. suggests O. N. bára, ‘wave.’] Littré can suggest no etymology for mascaret; he mentions a whimsical one which connects the word with a place on the Garrone called St. Macaire, but only to reject it. There would be no impossibility in the transfer of an Indian word of this kind to France, any more than in the other alternative of the transfer of a French term to India in such a way that in the 16th century visitors to that country should have regarded it as an indigenous word, if we had but evidence of its Indian existence. The date of Littré’s earliest quotation, which we borrow below, is also unfavourable to the probability of transplantation from India. There remains the possibility that the word is Basque. The Saturday Reviewer already quoted says that he could find nothing approaching to Mascaret in a Basque French Dict., but this hardly seems final.

The vast rapidity of the flood-tide in the Gulf of Cambay is mentioned by Mas’udi, who witnessed it in the year H. 303 (a.d. 915) i. 255; also less precisely by Ibn Batuta (iv. 60). There is a paper on it in the Bo. Govt. Selections, N.S. No. xxvi., from which it appears that the bore wave reaches a velocity of 10½ knots. [See also Forbes, Or. Mem. 2nd. ed. i. 313.]

1553.—“In which time there came hither (to Diu) a concourse of many vessels from the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and all the coast of Arabia and India, so that the places within the Gulf of Cambaya, which had become rich and noble by trade, were by this port undone. And this because it stood outside of the Macareos of the Gulf of Cambaya, which were the cause of the loss of many ships.”—Barros, II. ii. cap 9.

1568.—“These Sholds (G. of Cambay) are an hundred and foure-score miles about in a straight or gulfe, which they call Macareo (Maccareo in orig.) which is as much as to say a race of a Tide.”—Master C. Frederick, Hakl. ii. 342; [and comp. ii. 362].

1583.—“And having sailed until the 23d of the said month, we found ourselves in the neighbourhood of the Macareo (of Martaban) which is the most marvellous thing that ever was heard of in the way of tides, and high waters. … The water in the channel rises to the height of a high tree, and then the boat is set to face it, waiting for the fury of the tide, which comes on with such violence that the noise is that of a great earthquake, insomuch that the boat is soused from stem to stern, and carried by that impulse swiftly up the channel.”—Gasparo Balbi, ff. 91v, 92.

1613.—“The Macareo of waves is a disturbance of the sea, like water boiling, in which the sea casts up its waves in foam. For the space of an Italian mile, and within that distance only, this boiling and foaming occurs, whilst all the rest of the sea is smooth and waveless as a pond. … And the stories of the Malays assert that it is caused by souls that are passing the Ocean from one region to another, or going in cafilas from the Golden Chersonesus … to the river Ganges.”—Godinho de Eredia, f. 41v. [See Skeat, Malay Magic, 10 seq.]

1644.—“… thence to the Gulf of Cambaya with the impetuosity of the currents which are called Macareo, of whose fury strange things are told, insomuch that a stone thrown with force from the hand even in the first speed of its projection does not move more swiftly than those waters run.”—Bocarro, MS.

1727.—“A Body of Waters comes rolling in on the Sand, whose Front is above two Fathoms high, and whatever Body lies in its Way it overturns, and no Ship can evade its Force, but in a Moment is overturned, this violent Boer the Natives called a Mackrea.”—A. Hamilton, ii. 33; [ed. 1744, ii. 32].

1811.—Solvyns uses the word Macrée as French for ‘Bore,’ and in English describes

his print as “… the representation of a phenomenon of Nature, the Macrée or tide, at the mouth of the river Ougly.”—Les Hindous, iii.