XIX. TRINCOMALEE—SAAMI ROCK
Trincomalee Harbour—Fort Austenberg—Fort Frederick—The Saami Rock—Birds— Hot springs—Palmyra-palms—The Lily shore.
I suppose that, with the exception of Rio in Brazil and Sydney in Australia, few of the world’s harbours excel Trincomalee in beauty and security.
So perfectly is it land-locked that, as we stood on the high ramparts of Fort Austenberg, looking down on the inner harbour, on whose clear, green waters floated several British men-of-war, it was scarcely possible to believe that this was indeed an arm of that sea which lay wrapped in purple gloom beyond a wide expanse of dark palmyra-palms.
One of the officers had kindly provided for me a shelter from sun and rain by spreading a thick matting of palm-leaves over one of the embrasures, and as I sat there hour after hour sketching that beautiful panorama, I saw nothing of the passage by which these vessels had entered this calm haven from the great outer ocean, and which is protected by a reef stretching far out to sea, forming a perfect breakwater. My attention was called to the fact that, so deep are these placid waters, large vessels can lie so close inshore as to discharge their cargo without the use of boats, their yard-arms actually projecting over the wharf. I was told (but whether true or not I cannot say) that the depth is really so great that it has never been fathomed, which gives rise to a theory that this harbour is the crater of a submerged volcano.
More tempting swimming-baths could scarcely be imagined than some of the sheltered inlets of this deep, calm sea-lake; but, alas! even here danger sometimes lurks in the form of venturesome ground-sharks, and there is a sad tradition of how once, when a party of soldiers were bathing below the fort, their comrades on shore perceived the dim form of a large shark rising in pursuit of a lad who had just taken a header into the depths. All unconscious of danger, he rose cheerily to the surface, but a moment later a cry of agony rent the air as the lad disappeared, and the waters were reddened with his life-blood. Quick as thought a soldier dived at the very spot, and quickly reappeared, bringing the poor young fellow’s head and shoulders—the body having been bitten in two by the shark, who escaped safely with the lower half, and was never seen again, though many days were devoted to the attempt to capture him.
Right below me lay the Dockyard, the Naval Stores Depôt, and the Admiralty. Not the shipping only, but also charmingly wooded isles lay mirrored in that quiet inland lake; while beyond the white sands of the farther shore, red-tiled houses, embowered in pleasant gardens, indicated the direction of a town with some eleven thousand inhabitants, stretching round a horse-shoe-shaped bay, the entrance to which is guarded by two rocky headlands, on the nearest of which, overshadowed by grand old trees, stands the Government Agent’s house[163] (a spot endeared to us all by the recollection of the sympathetic and considerate hospitality which there enfolded us in a time of grave anxiety.)[164]
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Footnote 163:
The seat of the Government Agency was shortly afterwards removed to Batticaloa.
Footnote 164:
Owing to the Bishop’s serious illness.
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The farther point of the horse-shoe is a bold peninsula rising from the ocean in a sheer precipice about four hundred feet in height, and thence sloping gently towards the shore, with which it is connected by a long flat neck of grassy sand. Fort Frederick by which name this fortified crag is known to Europeans, guards the outer harbour, and is the military headquarters. To the natives, however, this bold headland is still, as it has been from time immemorial, the Saami (or, as it would be pronounced in India, Swami) Rock, or ROCK OF GOD, sacred to the worship of EISWARAMA, THE ALMIGHTY GOD.
(It is said the original name of this place was Tirukkonathamalai, i.e., ‘the Mountain of Holy Konathar,’ whoever he may have been.)
Nothing has struck me more forcibly in the course of my travels than the fact of how often the people living in a place take no interest whatever, and probably ignore the existence, of some local custom or legend which to the traveller is the point of chief interest in the district.
This I found to be emphatically the case at Trincomalee. Many years ago I had been told by Mr. Forbes Leslie that he had here witnessed a strikingly picturesque form of aboriginal worship, so one of my first inquiries on arriving in the district was whether the ancient worship on the rock was still carried on. I was assured on all hands that it was entirely given up.
However, on the very evening of our arrival at Fort Frederick, a natural instinct led me past the old Dutch burial-ground, with its moss-grown graves overshadowed by flowering surya-trees, to the brink of the highest precipice, which in itself is so very grand that I determined to lose no time in securing a picture of it.
So thither I wended my way at daybreak on Monday, September 29th,[165] returning in the afternoon to colour my morning’s pencil sketch. Just as I was finishing my work, or rather was compelled to halt for the evening in order to watch the marvellous loveliness of the sunset lights and colours which flooded the wide sea and rocks with opal tints of dreamy beauty, through which one by one the stars began to glimmer, I observed that first one, then another and another native, both men and women, were taking up positions on the crags, each carrying either a bunch of fruit or a chatty of milk or water.
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Footnote 165:
Sir James Emerson Tennant mentions this worship as occurring once a year, on the 23rd January.
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Ere long about forty had assembled, including one who acted the part of priest. He was clothed with scanty saffron-coloured cloth, and had a string of large black beads round his head. He stood on the utmost verge of the crag, and the worshippers, having laid at his feet their offerings of cocoa-nuts, lovely cocoa-palm blossoms, betel leaves, bunches of plantains, flowers, coins, small baskets of grain, or whatever else they had to give, clustered around wherever they could find a footing on the rock or the slippery grass while the priest performed his ceremonial ablutions for purification in water poured from a brass lota.
As the sunset glories faded and the stars shone out more brilliantly the priest intoned a litany, to which all devoutly responded; then one by one he took the chatties of good milk or water, and poured them out on the rock as a libation.[166] After this, while still chanting the litany, he took each gift, and from his giddy height cast it into the fathomless ocean, far, far below, a true offering to the Almighty Giver.
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Footnote 166:
Precisely as was done by our own ancestors—a custom kept up in many a corner of Great Britain long after Christianity was the only recognised religion in the land. For instances of such libations being offered even in the last century in our northern isles and Highlands see ‘In the Hebrides,’ pp. 71 and 192 to 194. By C. F. Gordon-Cumming. Published by Chatto and Windus.
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Then kindling a fire on the rock pinnacle, he thrice raised a blazing brand on high, and all the people threw their arms heavenward. Afterwards he lighted a brazen censer and swung it high above his head, till the still evening air was all perfumed by the fragrant incense. Finally, descending from his post of danger and honour, he took ashes from the sacred fire and therewith marked each worshipper on the forehead, after which they silently dispersed, and in the quiet starlight wended their way back to lower earth.
A more strikingly impressive scene I have never witnessed, and I need scarcely say that to me it proved so irresistibly attractive that again and again I found my way at sunset to the same spot, whence I commanded so perfect a view of the Saami Rock. I found that the worshippers assembled there every Monday and Friday evening, and one night I had the good fortune to witness this ceremony just at the moment when the great full moon was rising from the waters, and nothing more solemn could be conceived. There was the mellow light of the moon flooding the calm sea, and the red firelight glowing on the dark crag and on the brown skin and white turbans and drapery of the worshippers, while from across the harbour flashed one vivid terrestrial star from the lighthouse on Foul Point.
It seems that at the time when the Tamil conquerors crossed from the coast of Malabar and invaded Ceylon, they resolved to appropriate a spot so venerated by the aborigines; so having (so they said) proved from their sacred Puranas that Trincomalee was a fragment of the holy Mount Meru, which had been hurled from heaven in a celestial turmoil, they thereon built a stately shrine dedicated to Siva, and which is still remembered as the shrine of a Thousand Columns.
In the year A.D. 1622, however, the Dutch deeming it necessary to erect forts at various important points in order to secure themselves against the Portuguese, took possession of Trincomalee, and ruthlessly appropriated the great temple as the quarry to supply building material for their fortifications. Consequently sculptured and carved stones are still to be discerned here and there in the walls of Fort Frederick (a name said to have been bestowed in honour of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg).
One solitary pillar on the highest point of the crag commemorates the suicide in A.D. 1687 of Francina Van Reede, a Dutch maiden of good family, whose betrothed had forsaken her, and had embarked for Europe with his regiment. Ere the vessel could clear the coast, she had to tack, and again ran close inshore beneath this precipice, and at that moment the girl sprang from the dizzy summit, and, in presence of her faithless lover, fell a mangled corpse on the dark rocks which jut through the surging surf far below.
Although the aforesaid pillar bears a Dutch inscription recording this sad event, it is so precisely like some of the most prominent pillars in the ruined wave-washed temple at Dondra Head (the southernmost point of the Isle)—pillars with the identical alternate sections, square and octagonal—that I have little doubt that this was one of the ‘Thousand Columns’ of Siva’s shrine.
I ascertained that the officiating priest of the rock, though not a true Brahman, was one of the spurious low-caste Brahmans so common in Southern India,[167] who habitually minister at the bloodstained altars of Siva, with whom Eiswarama has been so artfully identified; indeed, I learnt that the Saami Rock is often described as Kon-Eiswara-Parvatia, thus also honouring Siva’s wife, the goddess Parvati.
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Footnote 167:
‘In the Himalayas and on Indian Plains,’ pp. 578-580. Published by Chatto and Windus. For a curious example of a very venerated and most foul Hindoo shrine being enclosed within the great Mahommedan—now British—fort at Allahabad, see p. 75 of the above.
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There is, however, no doubt that the worship of Eiswara is by far the most ancient faith of the island, and there is every reason to believe that this striking ceremonial has continued unchanged from remote ages. Whole dynasties have arisen and become extinct—conquering races from India, Portugal, Holland, and Britain have successively held sway in the fair Isle, and the one thing which has continued the same from generation to generation has been this evening sacrifice.
Not ’neath the domes where crumbling arch and column Attest the feebleness of mortal hand, But in that fane, most catholic and solemn, Which GOD hath planned. In that cathedral, boundless as our wonder, Whose quenchless lamps the Sun and Moon supply, Its choir the winds and waves, its organ, thunder, Its dome the sky.
To me it seemed a very impressive and simple act of worship, singularly free from idolatry, and in very marked contrast with the many painful forms of devil-worship which met us at every turn in the beautiful Isle of Palms.
I confess to a feeling of real regret when I learnt how, in September 1889, this solemn natural shrine had become the scene of contention between the priests of rival sects, a Pandaram priest appealing against a Brahman for declaring that he alone was entitled to officiate as priest at the Saami Rock, and there to perform Sivite religious ceremonies. The dispute ended in a civil trial before the District Judge, each party being defended by native counsel, and the case was given in favour of the Pandaram priest, to whom were awarded damages to the value of 120 rupees.
Moreover, in consequence of the increased military precautions at Trincomalee, it has been decided that henceforth worshippers will only be allowed access to the Saami Rock on the first and last Fridays of each month, no one being now admitted to Fort Frederick without a pass from the Commandant.
In truth, not for the sake of Ceylon only, but for the protection of the world’s mercantile marine, there was much need to strengthen the somewhat antiquated military defences of this magnificent harbour; and as regards Fort Frederick, isolated as it is from the mainland by the low grassy neck of the peninsula, one cannot but fear that, in case of a siege, the beleaguered garrison would find themselves in as difficult a position as were the Dutch when, in August 1795, they were here besieged by a British force consisting of the 71st, 72nd, 73rd, and 77th regiments, together with artillery, and two battalions of Sepoys, under command of General Stewart. As they entered the harbour one frigate struck on a sunken rock and was lost. At the end of three weeks the garrison was forced to capitulate, since which time the Union Jack has here floated in undisturbed possession.
Previous to that date this beautiful bay had witnessed many a struggle between the covetous European Powers, who each craved a monopoly of Singhalese commerce. First of all, in 1612, the King of Kandy, who hoped by the aid of the Dutch to get rid of the Portuguese, permitted the former to erect a fort at Cottiar, on the southern side of the Bay of Trincomalee. This, however, was no sooner done than it was captured and destroyed by a Portuguese force, which had rapidly marched across the Isle from Colombo or Negombo.
In 1622 the Dutch seized and garrisoned Trincomalee itself, but finding that holding forts on the east coast of the Isle was of no avail in securing the cinnamon trade of the western provinces, they shortly after abandoned both Trincomalee and Batticaloa.
Thus it was that when, in 1657, the Ann frigate of London, a trading vessel commanded by Captain Robert Knox for ‘the Honourable the East India Company,’ was driven to anchor in Cottiar Bay for necessary repairs, they found there no Europeans, but what seemed at first a very kind welcome from the natives. The story of the treacherous seizure of the captain, his son, and the greater part of the crew, and the graphic account of the then quite unknown interior of the island, and the customs of the king and people of Kandy, which was published by Robert Knox, junior (when, after twenty years of captivity, he at length contrived to escape, and after infinite difficulties reached the Dutch fort of Arrepa, near Manaar, on the north-east coast), is one of the most remarkable and interesting volumes of pioneer travel. The modern Cottiar is a populous village of industrious Tamils.
The Dutch subsequently reoccupied the forts of Cottiar and Batticaloa, both of which, strange to say, they abandoned without a blow, in 1672, in their panic at the sudden arrival of the French squadron under Admiral De la Haye. The French at once took possession of Trincomalee, but being unable to maintain a firm hold in the island, they disappeared as unexpectedly as they had arrived. At that time the Dutch had about a hundred ships constantly trading between Cottiar and Coromandel, whence they brought clothes and other wares to exchange for timber, areca-nuts, palmyra-sugar, and rice.
In 1782 Great Britain first appeared on the scene. War having been declared against Holland, a British force, commanded by Sir Hector Munro, took possession of Trincomalee, which, however, was so inadequately garrisoned that it was almost immediately afterwards surprised by the French fleet commanded by Admiral Suffrein, by whom the British force was removed to Madras, and in the following year Trincomalee was restored to the Dutch.
But the time had now come for British rule in Ceylon, and in 1795 Lord Hobart, Governor of Madras, fitted out the expedition commanded by General Stewart, which landed at Trincomalee, and, as I have already stated, captured the fort after a three weeks’ siege. Then, in rapid succession, Jaffna, Calpentyn, Negombo, Colombo, Caltura, Point de Galle, Matura, and all other strongholds of the Dutch, were ceded to the English, who thus became the undisputed rulers of the maritime provinces, and no clamour of war has since then disturbed the peace of this fair harbour.
In 1801, however, no less than 5,000 British troops assembled here under command of Colonel Arthur Wellesley (the great Duke of Wellington), with the intention of proceeding hence to Java; but this force was ordered to Egypt under Sir David Baird, and Colonel Wellesley returned to India.
Latterly the garrison has numbered about 400 men of the Engineers, Highlanders, Artillery, and Pioneer force, besides those employed at the Naval Depôt. Now, however, prudence requires the adoption of necessary precautions, therefore modern science is being brought to bear in all directions; and what with the enlarging and strengthening of the old forts, and building of a new one, and of extensive barracks for a greatly increased military force, while the restoration of the great tank at Kanthalay is bestowing new life on all the agricultural population of the district, Trincomalee is fast becoming a place of very much greater importance than it was at the time of our visit; but whether it will not thereby lose much of its charm is another question.
It is not often that I am attracted by the picturesqueness of Dutch buildings, but within Fort Frederick, beneath the cool shade of large dark trees, there is a most fascinating old well. Two heavy pillars coated with cream-coloured chunam, once polished like marble, but now partially stained with orange-coloured lichen, support a heavy overhanging roof of rounded red tiles, which are the playground of many squirrels. To a stout rafter is attached a pulley over which passes a long rope; to this is attached the bucket wherewith brown men (clothed only in a white waist-cloth and scarlet turban) fill their great red water-pots for domestic use. It is all very pleasant to the artistic sense, though I suppose we must admit that for practical purposes unromantic leaden pipes have their advantages!
But for a never-failing supply of sketchable scenes, one has only to turn to the nearest temple, whether Tamil or Buddhist, and here at a small Hindoo temple I found a most primitive Juggernath car, adorned with gaudy mythological pictures and thatched with dry palmyra-leaves of a pale straw colour. It was drawn on a rude wooden platform supported by four heavy unwieldy wheels, each constructed of three solid wooden planks, fastened together by cross-pieces of roughly-shaped wood. A very brown old Tamil priest, with scanty yellow drapery, stood beside the rickety old car, shading himself with part of a dry taliput palm-leaf—a fine study in colour. In the background stood the domed temple with red pillars and red wall, surrounded by cocoa and palmyra palms, each laden with golden nuts.
Close by, a statuesque brown water-carrier was drawing his supplies from a rude well by means of a red jar slung on a bamboo, which creaked ceaselessly as it rose and fell, emulating the harsh cries of sundry birds and insects.
One very attractive small bird, which walks tamely about the gardens at Trincomalee, has a purple head and breast and sienna back. It roosts in the palms, and we were often startled by its resounding sonorous call—a single note, ‘Hoop! hoop!’—so deep and far-carrying that on a still evening it is heard very far off. I was told that this was a jungle-crow, but as this name was also applied to a larger bird, somewhat suggestive of a magpie, except that instead of being black and white its colouring is brown and black and its eyes red, I cannot venture to say which bird is entitled to the name.
Still more fascinating are the dainty little sunbirds, which, with long brush-like tongue, capture insects, and also feed on nectar of flowers. Some have maroon bands on the breast, others primrose-colour; they love the fragrant pink oleander and scarlet hibiscus with glossy dark-green foliage. The Singhalese call these dainty creatures ‘Flower-honey birds.’ One of very brilliant plumage is distinguished as the tiny sunbird, being only three and a half inches long. It is, however, very rare.
Happily the lovely little purple sunbird is more common. Its head and throat are of a bright metallic green, shading into the glossy purple of back and tail, while beneath each wing is a tuft of gold, displayed when the dainty chirping creature is fluttering over flowers to extract their honey. Not that it confines itself to nectar only, for it thoroughly enjoys good substantial spiders. It builds a most artistic pear-shaped nest of grass, interwoven with hair and spider’s-web, and lined with feathers and tufts of silky cotton. This is deftly slung from the bough of some shrub, and herein in the month of April it lays two or three greenish eggs with brown specks. Of course in autumn we saw only empty nests.
Then there are the wren-babblers and scimitar-babbler (the latter so called because of its long curved yellow beak), neat little brown birds, common in the low-country jungle, which run up and down trees, hopping and jerking like woodpeckers, hunting for insects. They utter a loud melodious call, with very varied notes, and are cheery companions when one is sitting quietly sketching. There are also exquisite little flower-peckers, peculiar to Ceylon; some very gaily coloured, with dark-blue back, yellow breast, and white throat; others all olive-green except the stomach, which is grey.
Speaking of birds, a kind of swallow was pointed out to me, which is also said to be peculiar to Ceylon, and which not only builds on houses, just as our own do, but also in marshy places and near rice-fields. Its throat and breast are brown, but its back and wings are black, and its general appearance sufficiently suggestive of our own familiar friends to be very pleasant in a far country.
I found so much attractive sketching-ground in the immediate neighbourhood of Trincomalee that I did not care to go very far afield. But one lovely morning we drove at dawn to the Periyakulam, one of the ancient tanks, which is now, like so many others, simply a pretty lake covered with water-lilies. On the embankment stands a gigantic upright boulder, known as the Nine-Pin Rock, which looks as if it must topple over with the first strong gale. It would be curious to know for how many centuries it has held its ground.
One of our pleasantest early morning rides was to visit a group of seven hot springs on a wooded hill-range about eight miles from Trincomalee. Ceylon is so free from any trace of recent volcanic agency that a very special interest attaches to these.[168] The place is called Kannya, some say in ‘memory of’ seven celestial virgins;[169] others say in honour of Kannya, the mother of the arch-demon Ravana, and that she is here worshipped by the Tamils, who come to observe certain rites on the thirtieth day after the death of their kinsfolk. A ruined temple, sacred to Ganesa, the elephant-headed god of wisdom, proves that he received at least a share of homage.
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Footnote 168:
There are also hot springs at Badulla, Patipal Aar, near Batticaloa Kitool, and Medawewa, near Bintenne, and at Yavi Ooto, in the Veddah country. In all the water is so pure as to be good for cooking purposes.
Footnote 169:
Kannee, ‘a virgin.’
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Some distance to the north, at Mannakandal, in the Wanni, there are sundry Buddhist ruins in the heart of the jungle; amongst others, those of seven temples within one enclosure. These are called Kannya-Kovil, and are said to have been erected by, or else dedicated to, seven virgin princesses of the Wanni district.
The seven springs were taken in hand by the Dutch as being healing waters, and were confined within seven tanks of carefully regulated degrees of heat. All are now in ruins, but the springs are found to vary in temperature at different seasons from 85° to 122° Fahr. Marvellous to relate, even when the thermometer has indicated the latter degree of heat, live fish of several species—carp, roach, and others—have been taken from these springs, and in the streamlet which flows from them.
We were not so fortunate as to see any of these eccentric fishes, so contented ourselves with watching the play of some harmless snakes while we sat under the beautiful kitool, areca, and cocoa palms which overshadowed the dilapidated tanks, enjoying our breakfast and tea made with clear pure water from one of the boiling springs.
These families of the great clan Palm are comparatively rare in the neighbourhood of Trincomalee, where the vast cocoa-groves of the southern provinces are replaced by an incalculable multitude of palmyra-palms,[170] which form a belt of dark-green all along the coast, flourishing even on the brink of the salt coral-sand, where at high tide the blue waters bathe the roots of their sturdy black stems, which stand like regiments of well-drilled soldiers, faultlessly upright and unbendingly stiff.
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Footnote 170:
Borassus flabelliformis.
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In every respect they present a curious contrast to the graceful cocoa-palm, whose white stems bend in every variety of symmetrical curve, while their long slender fronds (each composed of a multitude of sharp glittering sword-shaped leaves) are rarely for one moment at rest, but gleam in the sunlight while ceaselessly turning and trembling with every breath of air.
The palmyra-palm, on the contrary, rises straight to a height of 60 or 70 feet, and bears a thick crown of stiff fan-shaped leaves, deeply indented. Beneath them hang clusters of beautifully glossy golden brown nuts, each about half the size of a cocoa-nut, but quite circular, and a full-grown tree bears perhaps eight or ten bunches of these, with a dozen or more in each cluster. Seen half in sunlight and half shadowed by the dark crown of foliage against a vividly blue sky, these brown and yellow nuts are beautiful, but as a fruit they have none of the charm of the cocoa-nut, although they form the staple food of the population on the north-east coast.
The glossy outer skin is so hard that only an expert hand can tear it open. Within it, and mixed with fibre, is a farinaceous pulp, at once oily and gelatinous, which even the natives rarely eat raw, but when roasted or dried in the sun and then smoked, it is largely used in making curries and cakes. It is said to be excellent when half ripe, but is then very liable to produce dysentery. Embedded within this pulp, each nut contains three very hard kernels or seeds, and of the myriads of these which are annually sowed, only a very small proportion are destined to become trees. The main crop is dug up in infancy, when the root resembles a waxy parsnip, and is either eaten as a vegetable, or dried and made into flour something like tapioca. This root is known in the bazaars as kelingu, and the dried fruit is punatu.
A cruelly wasteful delicacy is obtained from this, as from several other palms, by sacrificing a well-grown young tree for the sake of its tender leading shoot, which much resembles a gigantic stalk of very white celery, with a pleasant nutty flavour.
The palmyra-palm does not begin bearing fruit till it is upwards of ten years of age, and a comparatively small number of the trees are allowed to develop their crop of beautiful nuts, the majority being tortured into yielding only the luscious sap, which when allowed to ferment becomes slightly intoxicating and is known as toddy (doubtless so named by some early Scotch planter, in remembrance of the whisky-toddy of the North!). By exposure to the sun the toddy becomes vinegar, or, if sugar is required, a little lime is mixed with the sap, which is then boiled down to a thick syrup, and poured into baskets made from the palmyra leaf, and allowed to harden. In this state it is sold as jaggery sugar, of which a very large amount is used in the island.
In order to obtain this sap, the toddy-drawers, who are marvellously expert climbers, ascend to the crown of leaves, beneath which, each cradled in a long solid sheath or spathe, are the bunches of ivory-like blossom bearing the embryo nuts. Each spathe having been tightly bound to prevent its expansion, is ruthlessly beaten every morning with a heavy wooden mallet, till the immature flower within, instead of developing into a thing of loveliness, is reduced to pulp, but without injuring its outer cover.
After about a week of this maltreatment, the sap begins to flow, much to the satisfaction of swarms of insects, who assemble to feast thereon, and in their turn attract flocks of crows and various insectivorous birds. These again afford many a dainty meal to the palm-cat and sundry other foes, who climb the palms in pursuit of the birds.
Meanwhile, the toddy-drawer having cut off the tip of the spathe to allow the sap to drip, hangs a small clay chattie or a gourd beneath each bleeding blossom, and thenceforth for about five months he ascends day by day at early dawn to collect the sap, emptying each little chattie into one suspended from his waist, and when that is full he lowers it by a cord to an assistant below, who empties it into a larger one. Every day he cuts a thin slice off the poor bruised flower to make it bleed afresh, and each flower continues to yield sap for about a month.
Each tree yields on an average about three quarts a day (the produce of the female tree is, however, considerably more than double that of the male tree).
Only once in three years are these tortured trees allowed to ripen their fruit, in order to save their lives, as otherwise they would die under this unnatural treatment. The sweet juice from about nine hundred trees being collected from the earthen chatties, is poured into a copper still, and distilled three times over to obtain the strong and highly intoxicating spirit called arrack, most of which, however, is obtained from the cocoa-palm, which contains less sugar. Palmyra-toddy is considered by connoisseurs to be too luscious.
The work of the toddy-drawer is no sinecure, for although by the aid of a loop of flexible vine passed round his ankles, so as to enable him to grasp the trunk of the tree with his singularly prehensile feet, he contrives to climb with monkey-like agility, one man can scarcely manage to ascend more than twenty trees every morning. So, in order to lessen the toil of climbing, and enable each man to work a hundred trees daily, half-a-dozen palm-tops are connected by ropes, along which the drawer passes from tree to tree. Sometimes a second set of ropes, some feet higher, are added for security, but even with these it is a work of danger, and many horrible accidents result from this practice, besides the fatalities recorded.
In the annual report of deaths from accident, a considerable number are shown to be caused by falling from trees. I have this list for 1879, 1883, 1887, and 1890, and I see the deaths under this head are respectively 255, 250, 326, and 369, and the majority of victims were toddy-drawers, who in some cases lose their hold of the slender coir rope while collecting the sap, but more often perish from its breaking as they pass from one high tree-top to another. Sometimes the ropes are rotten, sometimes they are injured by rats, and in some cases there has been reason to suspect an enemy of half-cutting the rope.
The men engaged in this work are of very low caste, and in too many cases their hardly-earned wages returned to the toddy-merchant. There are, however, some brilliant exceptions, such as that village of staunch Christians whom we visited near Batticaloa.
As a matter of course, the dress of these athletes is reduced to a minimum, but in ascending the palmyra-palm they find it necessary to wear a breastplate of stout leather as a protection against the very rough stems. In ascending the smooth cocoa-palm this is not requisite.
That a tree so precious as the palmyra-palm should ever be sacrificed for timber seems unnatural, but so valuable is its hard black wood in house-building, that an immense trade is done therein, especially for the supply of rafters, as it is found that even white ants scarcely care to attack it. But as its value as timber increases with its age (no tree being worth felling which has not attained at least a hundred years), each tree has done a life-work of good service to man ere it commences a second century of usefulness as an almost imperishable timber. It has, however, one peculiarity, in that it causes nails to rust rapidly.
It is somewhat singular that not only is the female palm so much more generous than the male in her yield of sap, but also her timber fetches a very much higher price, as being denser, harder, and darker in colour. It is said that in order to increase these three qualities in the male palm, the natives immerse the newly-felled timber in the sea, and there leave it to season. Unlike the ebony tree, which conceals its precious heart of black wood within an outer casing of white wood, the palmyra carries its hard black wood externally, enfolding a heart of soft white wood—a pretty subject for a tree-parable.
Great as is the demand for this timber, due care is, of course, taken to keep up the supply of a tree so precious that the Tamils recognise it as the Kalpa, or ‘Tree of Life,’ sacred to Ganesa, the god of wisdom; and whereas the Singhalese talk of the hundred and fifty good uses to which the cocoa-palm lends itself, a Hindoo poet sings of the eight hundred and one manners in which the palmyra benefits mankind!
It is estimated that there are on the Isle about twelve million palms of this species, and as to the innumerable ways in which they are turned to account (besides those to which I have already alluded), I can only advise you to use your imagination, for you will find it difficult to think of any necessary of life which native ingenuity will not contrive to extract from this priceless tree—anything from a walking-stick or a thatching-needle, to a bedstead, a ladder, a plough, or a water-spout!
As its stem yields timber for house-building, the leaves supply the best possible thatch, and material for weaving mats both for ceiling and for floor; baskets of all sorts, including some which can be used as buckets for drawing water; fans, umbrellas, coolies’ hats, ropes, fly-whisks, torches. Strips of these leaves, steeped either in boiling water or in milk to render them pliable, and then smoothed on a heavy wooden roller, form the equivalent of paper and parchment—olas—only inferior to those obtained from the huge leaf of the taliput-palm.
As the fruit, root, and sap of the tree supply food, palm-wine, sugar, and oil for the use of man, the young leaves serve as fodder for his cattle, and the hard spathe, wherein the blossom lay cradled, has often been used to good purpose as a baby’s bath.
The general effect of a great expanse of palmyras is certainly dull and monotonous, but when seen near, nothing can be more picturesque than a group of these, especially when, as is so frequently the case, overgrown by some parasitic tree. During its prolonged youth, the palmyra retains its great fan-shaped leaves, set spirally round the stem like a huge corkscrew. When, with advancing years, these die off, the solid leaf-stalk and coarse net-like fibre remain, giving the black trunk a rugged, untidy appearance, but also affording support to a great variety of delicate climbing plants, and offering a cradle wherein many seeds lodge and germinate, especially those of the banyan, which take root so effectually that ere long the parent stem is completely enfolded, often strangled, by the too close embraces of the long white arms and roots which twine around it in every direction.
Such marriages of the sacred banyan and palm-tree, though by no means uncommon, are regarded by the natives, whether Tamil or Singhalese, with extreme reverence, and great was the interest evinced by some who found me sketching a very remarkable grove on the shore about a couple of miles from Trincomalee, where scores of black palmyras were each thus enfolded by white banyans twisting around them like contorted snakes. Sooner or later the ungrateful parasite strangles the protector of its infancy, and is left standing alone, twisted into every conceivable fantastic form.
In this particular instance the scene was absolutely fairy-like by reason of the exquisite undergrowth of tall white lilies, like our lovely virgin lily, but streaked with most delicate pink—truly a vision of delight. These were growing luxuriantly all along the shore, which, moreover, was richly carpeted by the goat’s-foot, Ipomea, a large lilac convolvulus, whose glossy green foliage, with profusion of delicate blossoms, mats the sands to the very brink of the sea, affording shelter to thousands of tiny crabs. This pretty plant flourishes on the seaboard in all parts of the Isle, and constitutes one of the many charms of the beach.
As to the crabs, they were a constant source of amusement, especially one odd little creature, with one claw longer than all the rest of its tiny body. It sidles along at a great pace, holding up this great claw as if to attract attention; hence it is generally known as the calling crab. (I saw myriads of these crabs in Fiji, but far more brilliantly coloured.)[171]
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Footnote 171:
‘At Home in Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 257, and vol. ii. p. 2.
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I only wish it were possible for words to convey any impression of the fascination of such a shore as that of the calm bay on which we looked down from the Government Agent’s house—clear glittering waters rippling on sands strewn with pearly Venus-car and many another shell; brown children paddling tiny canoes made of rudely hollowed logs; a lilac-and-green carpet of the marine convolvulus losing itself beneath the shadow of a grove of tall, graceful cocoa-palms bending in every direction; and then the rocky headlands, so inviting for a scramble, with their broken crags, rock pinnacles, and at least one great natural archway offering cool shade beneath which to rest while revelling in the loveliness of all around.
Just above it stands the pleasant home, with its red-tiled roofs and pillared verandah, overshadowed by beautiful trees and surrounded by aloes and flowery shrubs. Add to all this the vivid light and colour of sea and sky, and surely you can realise something of the charm of many a home on this sweet Isle.
XX. TRINCOMALEE TO GALLE
Trincomalee—A Tamil play—A luminous sea—Batticaloa—Flying-fish—Galle— Buona Vista—A kabragoya—Green corals—Uses of the cocoa-palm.
I have seen some curious specimens of plays and theatres in many lands, but none more singular than an evening open-air performance at Trincomalee by a company of Tamil actors. The ground formed a grassy amphitheatre gently sloping down to the centre, where a large circular stage was erected, and protected from possible rain by a canopy of matting. The spectators were closely seated in circles all around, those at the back being sufficiently raised to command an excellent view of the stage, which was divided into six imaginary sections, the players actually performing each short scene six times over, facing each section of the audience by turns. Wearisome as such a performance would prove if seen too often, it was certainly interesting for once, and the native spectators were evidently delighted, and waited with exemplary patience while each scene went the round of the other five sides.
A few of the actors were very handsomely dressed, to represent ancient Tamil kings and queens, and loaded with gorgeous jewellery of real old patterns. Some wore large richly jewelled animals placed on each shoulder or on the head, the front of the stage being dimly lighted by rude lamps fed with cocoa-nut oil, and stuck on plantain stems about five feet high. These details would have been invisible had not each of the principal actors been escorted by a coolie in the ordinary undress, whose duty it was to carry a small earthenware lamp fastened to the end of a stick, and this he thrust right in the face of his master that all might be able to see him and his finery.
A number of other coolies in the lightest of raiment stood about on the stage to help in various ways, and as the orchestra (which consisted of a chorus of discordant voices and musicians beating tom-toms and other drums, blowing shells and shrill pipes) was also on the stage, and all moved round together, the effect was most confusing, and the richly dressed actors were almost hidden by the scantily draped subordinates.
It is difficult to realise that it is not so very long since our own drama was even more primitive than this, and yet our kings and their courtiers could sit out a ‘morality’ or a ‘mystery’ continuing for nine or ten hours.[172]
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Footnote 172:
On such occasions the stage was a rush-strewn scaffolding, with a light cloth canopy, and that scenic effects were not costly may be inferred from such entries in the accounts of the play-giving guilds as the following:—‘Paid for mending of Hell, 2d. For keeping fire at ditto, 4_d._ For setting the world on fire, 5_d._ To Crowe for making three worlds, 3_s._’ The chief actors received 3_s._ 4_d._ each, but the prima donna only 2_s._
It is curious to learn that, as in China at the present day, so in Britain prior to A.D. 1661, no women might appear on the stage, so that for at least half a century all Shakspeare’s daintiest dames were impersonated by youths!
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Happily for the success of this open-air entertainment, the weather proved perfect, which was more than we could count upon, for (it was now the end of September) heavy tropical thunderstorms were pretty frequent and were certainly no joke. Sometimes they came on very suddenly. Dark clouds gathered with surprising rapidity, and then the blinding glare of vivid lightning and the crashing thunder-peals were succeeded by such a pitiless deluge as defied the stoutest water-proofs. Such storms, however, passed away as quickly as they arose, and seemed only to add fresh charm to the fragrant stillness of the night, illuminated by a thousand points of glittering pale-green light as the light-giving beetles which we call fire-flies flashed to and fro, and the whole air was perfumed with the fragrance of orange, lime, and shaddock blossoms.
But the chance of such soakings and the amount of ‘roughing’ which is inevitable in jungle travel form a grave risk for anyone not endowed with very robust health, and even before we reached Trincomalee it was evident that the Bishop would be compelled to abandon his northward journey to Jaffna, in the extreme north of the Isle. When, therefore, at the end of an anxious month of severe illness, the kindest and most careful of doctors (Dr. Goodwin) was able to sanction his leaving Trincomalee, it was clear that he must return to Colombo by the easiest route, namely, by the Government steamship Serendib,[173] which had only to call at Batticaloa and Galle. So, after a regretful parting with many friends whose kindness at such a time can never be forgotten, we embarked one evening at sunset, and some hours later sailed out of the beautiful harbour in the clear starlight.
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Footnote 173:
One of the many names by which Ceylon was known to the ancients and to the writers of ‘The Arabian Nights.’
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The sea there is intensely phosphorescent, and it seemed that night as though the sea-gods were holding high revel, and we poor mortals strained our eyes in the effort to peer down through the waves, which were all aglow with marine fireworks and illuminations. I never saw anything more lovely. The sky was very dark, with stormy clouds scudding before a pretty stiff breeze, but the sea was all full of dancing, glittering points of pale white fire, with here and there large dazzling stars, which gleamed suddenly, then faded away into darkness, like the intermittent flash from some beacon-light. Wave beyond wave, right away to the horizon, was plainly defined in pallid light, here and there crested with brighter fire, where the breeze had caught the curving billow and tossed it back in glittering spray.
As we looked down through the waters and watched the myriad points of light rushing upwards, some one suggested a comparison to champagne or some such effervescing drink alive with air bubbles. But these luminous globules frequently start on independent careers, and dash to right or left, according to some impulse of their own devising.
Often as I have watched the phosphoric wonders of our dark Northern seas (when, sailing through a shoal of herring, each separate fish has seemed a thing of living light), I have never seen the light so widespread as here. It seemed as if the sea-gods had issued large supplies of phosphorus for the occasion, for creatures which on other nights are quite invisible, to-night shone, probably with borrowed lustre. Large families of flying-fish darted from the water as we passed, suggesting flights of luminous birds, and here and there a school of great, heavy porpoises rushed by, leaving a trail of living fire; and thousands of delicate little jelly-fish floated peacefully along, like inverted cups fringed with fire—most lovely, fairy-like creatures.
On a night like this I always, if possible, take up a position either at the bow or stern of the ship. From the former you look sheer down, as from the edge of a precipice, and watch the dividing of the waters as the vessel cuts her way through the waves, and the startled creatures of all sorts awaken, but in their hurried flight they quickly light their lamps, and the white spray that is thrown off from the bows, in a ceaseless fountain, glitters like a shower of radiant stars. It always reminds me of the Ancient Mariner’s lonely watch, when from his eerie ship
The elfish light fell off in hoary flakes!
Coleridge must assuredly have watched on such nights as these.
Then, if you make a pilgrimage to the stern, and can endure to stand just above the throbbing, thumping screw, you see the most wonderful sight of all. For the great propeller literally churns the waters far, far below the surface; and each stroke produces a body of clear green and blue light, which rolls upwards in a soft brilliancy quite indescribable—like dissolved opals. As each successive globe of this fairy-like green fire rises to the surface, it breaks in bubbling, hissing spray, and spreads itself over the surface, leaving a pathway of fire, which remains visible for a long time after the vessel has passed, fading away in the distance, like a reflection of the Milky Way that spans the dark sky above it.
Some of my far-travelled companions, who had sailed in many seas, were talking one evening of the various forms in which this beautiful phenomenon appears. One of the officers had the good luck to see what is known as ‘white water’ as he crossed the Arabian Sea. It was a dark moonless night in summer, only the stars were reflected on the calm waters, when suddenly a soft, silvery light overspread the ocean—a tremulous, shimmering light; the waters lay smooth as a mirror. He drew up a bucketful of this gleaming water, and found it was clouded, as if tinged with milk, and luminous with phosphorus. When he emptied the bucket it continued to glow for some time.
Another officer said he too had seen a milk-white sea, in about the same part of the ocean, but when some of the men on board drew up water for examination it was perfectly clear, and they concluded that the curious appearance of the sea was due to the fact that they were passing through a soft hazy mist, and though the night was so dark that they were scarcely conscious of its influence, they supposed that it in some way refracted the starlight on to the surface of the waters, and to this they attributed the quivering of the pallid light—tremulous as a mirage.[174]
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Footnote 174:
I have myself witnessed just such an effect of dazzling light, illuminating the whole surface of the water, during two midnight storms in New Zealand. Vide ‘At Home in Fiji,’ vol. ii. p. 169.
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If this was really the cause of the light, it must have been due to some very strange condition of the atmosphere, as even in the tropics such a phenomenon is very rarely seen, and we cannot say as much for mists!
I am told that a similar appearance has occasionally been observed in the North Sea, and even on the Northumbrian coast; and the fishers have noted that its presence indicated a very poor herring season, and that the temperature of the sea was unusually high during its duration. It proved to be a very tangible form of whiteness, for when they drew up their nets they found them coated with a substance resembling lime.[175]
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Footnote 175:
The fisher-folk of Shields and Tynemouth, and the villages immediately to the north, noticed this peculiar condition of the water in the summer of 1878, which proved an exceptionally bad year for the herring-fishers.
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We reached Batticaloa about noon on the following day, and were once more cordially welcomed to the same pleasant quarters which had been assigned to us on our previous visit.
On the following morning, Captain Varian having most kindly undertaken to show me some of my brother’s cocoa-nut estates, we started before dawn in one of the Serendib boats, towed by the steam-launch a long way ahead of us—a delightful mode of travel, securing perfectly smooth, gliding motion. The morning was exquisite, and all the ranges of blue, distant hills and wooded headlands were faultlessly mirrored in the calm sea-lake.
About eighteen miles from Batticaloa we landed at the first estate, then proceeded to another, and ploughed our way through an apparently interminable grove of cocoa-palms all planted in straight lines, at regular intervals, in deep, hot sand—endless rows of tall palms, all of much the same height, extending for miles and miles as far as the eye could see, and much farther, all growing out of the arid sand—very different from lovely half-wild groves where trees of all ages grow at their own will from a cool, deep carpet of the greenest guinea-grass by the brink of some cool lake; the young ones like huge clumps of great ferns growing cup-wise, others in every stage of growth, the middle-aged ones strongly resembling tree ferns with fronds fully twenty feet in length. It would be difficult to imagine richer vegetation than that, but these orderly plantations are quite another thing.
It was very fatiguing even to walk once along that sand-track, and I realised as I had never done before what must have been the sinking loneliness of the brave young heart, exiled from one of the cheeriest and most beautiful homes in Scotland, to settle quite alone on these desolate sand-banks, and commence the toil of planting them with the nuts about which so little was then known that speedy remuneration was expected, whereas the experience of the next fifteen years was one of continual outlay, ceaseless watchfulness to defend the young plantations from the ravages of most mischievous boring beetles,[176] rats, white ants, herds of wild hogs, porcupines, troops of elephants, and other foes, and no remuneration whatever.
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Footnote 176:
Oryctes rhinoceros.
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Then, when the day of his emancipation came, the estates passed to other hands, and strangers now reap the abundant fruits of his long years of weary toil.
Planters of the present day, profiting by the experience of their predecessors, find that by a liberal application of oil-cake, ashes, seaweed, salt mud, and various other manures, they can induce young palms to commence flowering about the seventh year (some which have been fed as carefully and liberally as prize oxen have actually flowered in the fourth year), and, moreover, that the trees thus nourished will bear at least twice as many nuts, but the work at the time to which I refer was in a great measure experimental.
Even now cocoa-nut planting is a very uncertain venture, for not only do many estates wait twenty years ere yielding a full return (though probably about half the trees commence bearing in the fourteenth year), but the crop is also very variable, some estates yielding only one candy of copra to the acre, while others yield three.
The fact is, that there are in Ceylon a vast number of nameless varieties of cocoa-palms, and unless almost impossible care is observed in the selection of nuts for planting, the crops will always be variable. An experienced planter says: ‘One tree begins to flower in its fifth year on four feet of stem; its nearest neighbour, equally vigorous, runs up to fifteen or even twenty feet, and only begins to flower in the tenth year. One will have fertile germs on its first flower, and its neighbour will only produce barren flowers for twelve months. One will, within a year of opening its first flower, fall into a regular yield of a hundred nuts per annum of medium size, while another close by carries from thirty to forty very large ones, and the next in the same line carries above two hundred very small ones.’
Besides these differences in the nuts themselves, varieties of soil are responsible for many disappointments, some planters having wasted much energy on swampy or clayey soils, only to find that after ten or twelve years the palms gave no promise of fruit, while sandy soil, moist but not too wet, is the most favourable.
In Ceylon the cocoa-nuts are gathered six times a year, and when liberally manured and carefully tended should continue in bearing for upwards of a century.
We trudged through deep sand till we reached the small bungalow of the present owner, who gave us refreshing cocoa-nuts to drink, and lent us the cart, drawn by an elephant, which daily collects the fallen nuts; but I cannot say we found it pleasant, as the elephant had a faculty for bolting first on one side, then on the other, against the palms, thereby keeping us constantly on the jerk; so we very shortly agreed that even the fatigue of walking was preferable, and accordingly descended from our uncomfortable quarters, and trudged through the hot sand till we reached the site of my brother’s original house, now marked only by the fruit trees which he planted round it.
We returned to Batticaloa at sunset, and in the peaceful moonlight I stood by the grassy grave in the little ‘God’s acre,’ with an intensified sympathy for many of ‘our boys’ leaving the happy home-nest to carve their fortunes in distant lands.
Amongst minor details in a day of so great interest, I may mention the multitude of fresh-water snail-shells which we found on the banks of a small tank, and also the pleasure of finding a number of turtle’s eggs, each containing a perfect miniature turtle quite ready to be hatched—the neatest tiny creatures.
On the following evening we took leave of our many kind friends, and returned on board the Serendib, which was lying outside the harbour-bar, and fully did we realise the sudden change from the dead calm of the sea-lake thus guarded to the tossing ocean beyond.
This bar is often the occasion of very grave inconvenience to the inhabitants of Batticaloa, for when a strong sea-breeze is blowing the waves dash upon it so tumultuously that no boat dare face those raging breakers. In this comparatively tideless sea, high or low tide afford very slight variation in the depth of water on the bar, which in the spring months is sometimes barely three and a half feet. Moreover, owing to the usual deposit of silt, the mouth of the river is growing daily narrower, notwithstanding the strong current which sweeps the shore.
Happily, the singular regularity in the variation of the direction of the wind affords some security, as the boatmen well know that the sea-breeze will attain its height shortly before noon, when the bar will probably be impassable. But at night the land-breeze sets in and quiets the tumult, so that by morning there is comparative calm, and from dawn till about 9 A.M. the bar can generally be crossed in safety. But, of course, it is not always that a steamer can lie in the open roadstead to await these possibilities, and so it occasionally happens that passengers and cargo cannot get on board, while other passengers and goods cannot be put ashore. At other times the transit is effected at the cost of an hour’s hard rowing and a general soaking.
Happily for us, at the end of October, we had no such unpleasant experience, wind and waves combining to speed us on our way.
All the next day was taken up in beating about in search of a reported rock, which we failed to find; but to a sketcher ‘all is fish that comes to the net,’ and I was thus enabled to secure sundry reminiscences of the coast as seen from the sea or the inland mountain ranges.
Speaking of fish, I never remember seeing so many flying-fish as on that voyage. They rose from the waves, at our approach, like flashes of silvery spray, and flew perhaps two hundred yards, just skimming the surface of the water—then again, just touching the wave to moisten their transparent wings. They looked so like flights of darting birds that I can well understand the ancients describing them as ‘sea-swallows.’
It seems barbarous to think of these graceful little creatures from a gastronomic point of view, but certainly they are the very daintiest fish-morsels that ever rejoiced an epicure. (In the West Indies they are so highly prized that a special method of capturing them has been devised. The fishers go out at nights in their canoes, carrying blazing torches, to allure these inquisitive ‘sea-moths,’ who come flying to the light, and are captured in small nets fastened on to poles, like our landing-nets.)
I saved some of their wings (I suppose I ought correctly to say ‘pectoral fins’), which are formed of a tissue of curious gauze-like membrane, stretched on a folding framework, and must, I think, have inspired Chinamen and other early sailors with the original design for folding sails of matting on movable bamboos.
We reached Galle on the following afternoon, and found it beautiful as ever, but the masts of yet one more newly sunken steamer rose from the waters of its lovely, treacherous harbour, wherein so many fine ships have met their doom.
Archdeacon Schrader ‘the Good’ came to welcome the Bishop, and to fetch us all to his hospitable roof, and to service at the beautiful church, All Saints’, which owes its existence to his energy. It is by far the finest in the island, and one whose constant and hearty services have come as a breath of home to many a wanderer from far-distant lands, pausing here on his voyage.
On the following day the Archdeacon drove us to see the large Orphanage at Buona Vista, which crowns the summit of the steep headland which forms the southern arm of the harbour, and commands a lovely view of Galle. We were most kindly received by Mr. and Mrs. Marks,[177] who showed us their troop of very nice-looking boys and girls. This is a mission-station of the S.P.G. Society, and supplies Christian teachers, both male and female, for the surrounding village schools. We were told that, of the children who attend these village schools, about one-sixth are Christians, and it is found that, even among those who at the time appear quite uninfluenced by Christian teaching, a considerable number receive impressions, which, at a later period, develop into active principles.
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Footnote 177:
The Orphanage is now under the care of Miss Callender.
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Strange to say, the heathen parents, though perfectly aware of the heart’s desire of the teachers, make no objection whatever to their children being carefully instructed in all Christian knowledge until the day comes when the young student, being fully of age to make his own decision, desires to be baptized. Then every possible means is adopted to counteract his newly awakened faith. Buddhist priests are called in to reason with him; expulsion from home and disinheritance are all threatened, but rarely overcome the resolution once formed, and eventually the relations, finding they cannot shake the faith of the young convert, abstain from active persecution.
On another hill, bearing the very British name of Richmond, and also commanding a lovely view, stands the Wesleyan Mission and its schools. It is in connection with a large chapel in the town, at which services are alternately held in English, Portuguese, and Singhalese.
Greater interest in point of antiquity attaches to the fine old cruciform Dutch church, which is paved with tombstones of bygone generations, whose monuments also crowd the walls. Here services according to the form of the Presbyterian Church of Holland are held in English, recalling the autocratic manner in which the Dutch conquerors strove to ‘convert’ the islanders by the aid of interpreters, utterly refusing themselves to learn their language.
About ten miles inland from Galle lies Baddegama, a lovely spot on the Gindura river, where, in 1818, the Church Missionary Society commenced England’s first effort on behalf of her newly annexed colony. A very satisfactory feature of this station is the boarding-school for Singhalese girls, which has provided many well-taught Christian wives for the young men trained in Christian colleges. Some years ago the fine old church tower was struck by lightning, as was also the verandah of the mission-house, and the missionary in charge, Mr. Balding, narrowly escaped being killed, an incident of which he and his parishioners are perpetually reminded by the sound of a cracked bell, said to have previously been well toned.
Another point of interest near Baddegama is the oldest sugar-cane estate in the Isle, a cultivation which has not been largely taken up in Ceylon.
On our homeward way, as we drove through a cool shady glade, the horses started as a gigantic lizard, or rather iguana, of a greenish-grey colour, with yellow stripes and spots, called by the natives kabragoya,[178] awoke from its midday sleep, and slowly, with the greatest deliberation, walked right across the road just in front of us. It is a notoriously slothful reptile, and on this occasion fully sustained its reputation, for it did not hurry itself in the smallest degree; so we had to wait its time, and had full leisure to observe the lazy movements of this strange creature, which was fully seven feet in length, with a general resemblance to a crocodile.
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Footnote 178:
Hydro saurus salvator.
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Like that very unattractive monster, the kabragoya is amphibious, and when in danger tries to make for the water. It is quite harmless, however, except in the matter of eating fowls, and is eminently peaceful in its disposition, unless roused at close quarters, when, in self-defence, it can turn on a foe and administer a tremendous blow with its armour-plated tail, which, being provided with a sharp crest, can inflict a very serious wound on the lightly draped natives. Occasionally a rash aggressor receives a broken arm or leg, as a warning against molesting harmless fellow-creatures; consequently the Singhalese treat these huge lizards with considerable respect. The all-destroying foreigner occasionally shoots one, and notes its strange tenacity of life, the head being apparently the only vulnerable, or at any rate the only vital, spot. I believe, however, that the Veddahs are the only people who have sufficient strength of mind to eat the ugly monster.
I had not been in Galle since the memorable occasion when I first landed there on my way to India, and received my never-to-be-forgotten very first impressions of palm-trees and the tropics—first impressions of perfect novelty and fairy-like enchantment—so of course I longed to return to Wakwalla, to which we accordingly drove in the evening. But, alas! as with all else in this world, familiarity does wear off the keen sense of delight even in palm-trees, and exquisite as such a drive through mazes of tropical foliage must ever be, I felt on this second visit to Wakwalla that my own appreciation of its loveliness was somewhat dulled by the many visions of tropical beauty on which my eyes had feasted since I had first beheld it.
Nevertheless, it was with great pleasure that I accepted invitations from several kind friends in Galle and its neighbourhood, with the prospect of returning to Colombo by the lovely road along the sea-coast— a drive of seventy miles all shadowed by the graceful palms which droop right over the sea.
So the Serendib sailed minus one passenger, and I made my way to the farthest point of the ramparts to watch her safe out of the ill-fated harbour with her precious freight of truest friends. Afterwards I ascended the lighthouse, and thence looked down on the coral-reefs clearly visible through the shallow, lustrous, emerald-green waterreefs which come too near the surface for the safety of the harbour, as many a good ship has proved to her cost.[179]
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Footnote 179:
I am told that no less than twelve steamers have been wrecked in Galle Harbour, i.e., more than one-third of the total number of thirty-four which have been lost on the shores of Ceylon.
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But beautiful as is such a bird’s-eye view of the reef (which, when lighted by the rays of the noonday sun, gleams like a lost rainbow, held captive by water-sprites), its treasures of delight are only to be fully appreciated by floating over it at low tide, in a boat drawing only a few inches of water, and regardless of paint (for the sharp cutting points of the coral are fatal to a trig ornamental boat). Only thus is it possible to realise the loveliness of these submarine gardens, where coral-trees, coral-shrubs, and coral-flowers of every hue, violet and rose, red and brown, gold and lemon colour, are the homes and playgrounds of all manner of strange, beautiful fishes, crabs, sea-snakes, star-fish, sea-urchins, and innumerable other creatures, of every conceivable shape and size and colour.
Naturalists, however, note with interest the remarkable predominance of green in the colouring of many of these creatures, as though by assimilation to the prevailing verdure of the Isle. They find green water-snakes and green fishes, crustacea and star-fish, sea-anemones and sea-urchins, sea-slugs and several shells of various shades of olive or emerald greens, while a considerable number of corals are verdant as the plants they so closely resemble.[180]
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Footnote 180:
Such are the Montipora, Madrepora, Millepora, Macandrina, Astræa, Alcyonia, Anthophylla, Heteropora.
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All too fleetly the pleasant days slipped by with drives and boating expeditions to many a lovely scene, and temptations for an artist on every hand. After one long morning in search of the best point for a panoramic sketch of Galle, I came to the conclusion that the very finest view of the town and harbour was that from the verandah of Closenberg, a delightful bungalow, where we landed at some risk, as the surf was running high and dashing in cataracts of spray against the black rocks. However, skilful steering ran our boat in safety between the biggest breakers, and I was soon most cosily ensconced for my day’s work.
Looking along the lovely palm-fringed shore, I could not but think that if man does ‘mark the earth with ruin’ in some places, as in the central districts of this Isle, and wherever primeval forests are cleared by planters beginning work, we often forget how deeply we are indebted to those of past generations for much of what we accept as natural beauty. As in New Zealand, Taheiti, and other isles, where imported vegetation is even more luxuriant than that which was indigenous, so here the improving hand of the foreigner has not been confined to acclimatising the beautiful flowering shrubs which adorn the gardens, but even the multiplication of the palms, which now seem so natural a feature of Ceylon, was really greatly due to the commercial instincts of the Dutch, who, finding that about nine-tenths of the west coast, from Galle right up to Calpentyn (the whole of which is now one succession of luxuriant cocoa-groves), was then waste uncultivated land, offered Government grants thereof to all persons who would undertake to plant cocoa-palms, and thereon pay a certain tax.
It would appear that strong pressure must have been brought to bear to awaken the easy-going natives to the necessity of carrying out this extensive scheme of cultivation of a crop which brings such slow returns (ten years to wait at the very least). However, the plantations were made, and the waste lands transformed to their present beauty. But even now the apathy of the villagers is such that, although the shore may be strewn with masses of seaweed, which, if collected and dug into the earth round the roots of the palms, would materially increase the crops, they will scarcely ever exert themselves to utilise the manure thus laid ready to their hand.
At Jaffna and Batticaloa, where the cocoa-palms are now ubiquitous, and might well be supposed to be indigenous, European planters only commenced work in 1841, and, as I have already shown, many of the early plantations ruined their first owners.
It is certainly remarkable how rarely the cocoa-palm is mentioned in old Ceylonese history; it is never alluded to as food, whereas the palmyra and taliput palms are frequently referred to. Not till the twelfth century is it named as a tree worthy of cultivation. At all events its merits are fully recognised in this nineteenth century!
At Galle the heavy rainfall, attracted by the neighbouring hill ranges (and which is three inches in the year in excess of that at Colombo, the respective measurements being ninety and eighty-seven inches), must always have favoured the luxuriant vegetation, and no tree is more gratefully responsive for an abundant supply of rain than is the cocoa-palm, of which it has been calculated that those bearing fruit in this district alone exceed 5,300,000. The total number of fruit-bearing palms on the shores of Ceylon is estimated at 50,000,000, besides 200,000,000 which are either unproductive or are forced to yield their life-blood in the form of toddy, chiefly for the manufacture of arrack. But it is estimated that, even at the low average of twenty-four nuts to a tree (and very many bear from sixty to eighty), one thousand millions of nuts are annually allowed to ripen for the good of man. Unlike the date, the cocoa-palm bears male and female flowers on the same tree—in fact, on the same cluster. The number of actually barren or male palms in Ceylon is singularly small, being said not to exceed one in three or four thousand.
I speak of this palm as belonging to the shore, for it is emphatically a coast tree, flourishing in a belt about fifteen miles in width. The places where it has been successfully planted inland are so few as to be quite exceptional. Such are Mihintale, the sacred hill near Anuradhapura, where groups of graceful palms wave around the great dagobas which crown the summit. I also saw large flourishing plantations in good bearing at Matele, which is about a hundred miles inland, and about 1,274 feet above the sea-level; they also bear well at Kandy, Gampola, Kurunegalla, and Badulla, all of which are far inland, and the latter 2,241 feet above the sea. A few scattered cocoa-palms have been grown as high as 3,500 feet, but these bear no fruit.
The Singhalese have a saying that this friendly palm cannot live far from the sea, or from the sound of the human voice, and in proof thereof point out that wherever you see a cluster of these tall crowns you are sure to find a human house not far off. And what can be more natural, seeing that each tree is somebody’s private and very valuable property,[181] the precious provider of ‘golden eggs’ in the form of material for all things needful to existence?
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Footnote 181:
Here is a case in point:—
‘MURDER ARISING OUT OF A CLAIM FOR A COCO-NUT TREE.—On September 11, 1890, Josappu, a tavern-keeper of Payyagala, was severely assaulted by his cousin Bachappu and two others. The injured man was removed to the Kalutara Hospital, where he died the following day. It would seem that Josappu claimed a share of the profits of a coco-nut tree which Bachappu was exclusively enjoying. The latter could not or would not see the validity of his cousin’s claim. A quarrel ensued, with the result aforesaid.’
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The half-ripe fruits (in their hard outer cover, green or golden, as the case may be) supply food of the consistency of jelly, and cool, refreshing drink in a natural cup. The older brown nuts (as we know them in Britain) give the hard white kernel, which is scraped as a flavouring for curry, or mixed with sugar (obtained from the sap) to make cakes, or else scraped and squeezed through a cloth to obtain delicious cream, which is excellent in tea when cow’s milk is not to be obtained. I believe that the Singhalese anoint their glossy black hair with a fine oil obtained by boiling this cream, but the regular oil of commerce is extracted from the kernel after it has been left to dry in the sun, when it is known as copperah
The small native oil-mills, or ‘chekku,’ as they are called, are of the rudest construction, and turned by bullocks. Being entirely made of wood, they creak in the most ear-splitting fashion, but they do their work so efficiently and so cheaply that, happily for all who appreciate primitive Oriental scenes, they hold their ground against the costly steam oil-mills, steam crushers, and hydraulic presses set up near Colombo by foreigners, so that about nine hundred of these quaint mills are still creaking and grinding in the southern and western provinces. (In 1876 it was stated that there were in the whole Isle 1,930 chekkus worked by bullocks, beside about a dozen steam mills with hydraulic machinery.)
Many of these chekkus are quite small, and worked by manpower, and very picturesque they are, with a miniature thatch of palm-leaves over the small vat containing the copperah, and perhaps two or three brown children perched on the long handle by which their father turns the vat, and so crushes out the oil. The clothing of such groups is reduced to a minimum, that of the children often consisting only of some charm against the evil eye or to protect them from devils. The refuse left after extraction of the oil is called poonac, and is either used as food for cattle and poultry or for manuring the soil.
No refining process is required beyond a week’s exposure to the sun, by which time all impurities will have sunk to the bottom, and the oil can at once be drawn off into casks. It is largely exported, to be used in the manufacture of soaps and lubricants, also in the preparation of stearine candles, and for these purposes is in increasing demand. In Ceylon it is much used as a liniment wherewith to rub the body in cases of rheumatism and other ailments, and the Tamils, not the Singhalese, habitually oil their bodies after bathing; but as regards light, the simple lamp formed of a cocoa-nut shell, and fed with cocoa-nut oil, is now very generally replaced, even in native huts, by a kerosine lamp, as the imported mineral oil, even after all its long journey from America, is cheaper than the native product.
It is not only in rheumatism that cocoa-nut oil is esteemed as a remedy; it is also applied to counteract insect stings, and when mixed with the juice of the leaves is used in cases of ophthalmia. Another sort of oil, extracted from the bark, is applied in skin diseases, and even the root yields a medicine for the fever-stricken. An astringent lotion, bitter as alum, is obtained from the flower, which also (when bruised in the manner I described when speaking of the palmyra-palm) yields toddy, vinegar, sugar, and, when distilled, the intoxicating spirit called arrack.
Toddy, which when first drawn in the early morning forms rather a pleasant drink, commences fermentation before noon, and is highly efficacious as a leaven for bread. After standing a few hours it becomes highly intoxicating, and is frequently made more so by adulteration with nux-vomica, seeds of Indian hemp, datura, and other poisons. A fine of fifty rupees is, however, incurred by any person detected in thus drugging either toddy or arrack.
But the simple mixing of toddy and arrack (i.e. the unfermented with the distilled juice of the beautiful cocoa-flower) produces a very ‘heady’ drink, on which a man can get exceedingly drunk for a very small sum; and sad to say, here as in Lower Bengal, where Buddhism and Christianity have successively done so much to break down the restraints of caste, that gain is in a measure neutralised by the fact that the sobriety once characteristic of the people is rapidly disappearing, and intemperance is grievously on the increase.
It is a sore subject that, whereas Hindoo, Mahommedan, and Buddhist conquerors have ever abstained from deriving any revenue from the intoxicating spirits which are forbidden by each of these religions, a Christian Government should so ruthlessly place temptation at every corner both in Ceylon and in India, where, as has been publicly stated by an Archdeacon of Bombay, the British Government has created a hundred drunkards for each convert won by Christian missionaries.
The toddy is converted into arrack in small local distilleries with copper stills capable of containing from 150 to 200 gallons, which is about the daily produce from a thousand trees, to which a small quantity of sugar and about one-third of rice is generally added. When distilled, a liquor is produced which is called polwakara. A second distillation produces talwakara, a spirit about twenty degrees below proof. When the process has been repeated a third time, arrack of the desired strength is obtained, at first very crude in flavour, but after having been stored in wood for several years it mellows, and even finds favour with Europeans. It is exported from Ceylon to Madras and served to the native troops as a daily ration.
The arrack trade is entirely under control of the Ceylon Government, which derives a considerable revenue from the sale of licenses to distillers (each of whom pays a yearly fee of one hundred rupees), and from the annual sale by auction of the right to farm arrack taverns in all parts of the Isle, a privilege which, being annually sold to the highest bidder, of course makes it to his interest to push the odious trade and establish fresh centres of temptation wherever he can possibly do so. Never was the old proverb that l’occasion fait le larron[182] better exemplified, and many a planter has good cause to complain of the temptation thus brought to the very door of his coolies, who now too often barter the very food provided for them, in order to obtain fiery liquor.[183]
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Footnote 182:
Opportunity makes the thief.
Footnote 183:
I see that, at the auction of arrack rents for 1890, the successful bidder for the privilege of farming Kandy paid 43,000 rupees; Nuwara Eliya fetched 70,000; while the whole of the Central Province was knocked down for 380,000 rupees. All the provinces of the Isle collectively realised 1,803,625, being an increase of 242,171 rupees since 1888.
But ‘the appetite doth grow with that it feeds upon,’ and when the rents for the Central Province were put up for sale by auction from July 1891, to June 1892, with the strong recommendation of the Government Agent to the renters to put in good bids, and not trouble Government to call for higher tenders, his advice was so well received that 470,000 rupees were offered for the lot, being 90,000 rupees in excess of the previous year.
In further proof of the steady increase of this baneful traffic, I may also quote the sales of arrack rents for the North-Western Province in April 1891. At Kurunegala there was a large gathering of renters from all parts of the island, the Government Agent presiding. There was brisk bidding, with an exciting finish. The result was 112,200 rupees for the district of Seven Korales (i.e. 14,700 more than last year); Yagampattu and Chilaw districts, 102,000 rupees (i.e. 21,800 rupees more than last year); and Puttalam rents were purchased for 35,900 rupees, being an advance of 4,000 on last year.
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Nor is this true only of the intoxicants natural to the country. Government holds a monopoly of the whole liquor traffic of the Isle, and has therefore a direct interest in pushing the sale of drink. Hence railway refreshment-cars and refreshment-rooms at railway stations are exempt from paying licence, and the stations themselves (which are Government property) are placarded with advertisements of the whisky which, as has been so truly said, has dug more British graves in Ceylon than malaria, sunstroke, and cholera put together, and there is no doubt that these widely scattered ‘suggestions’ are largely responsible for the practice of dram-drinking, which is said to be so much on the increase.
As regards the natives, who are always so largely influenced by any indication of the will of the ruling power, the mere fact that drinking-places are sanctioned by Government gives them a measure of respectability altogether contrary to unbiassed native opinion.
For plain speaking on so grave a subject, I may refer to the official report on the Negombo district for 1890, in which Mr. Lushington, Assistant Government Agent for the Western Province, expresses his deliberate conviction that by scattering arrack taverns broadcast over the land, Government is itself encouraging the real source of crime, namely, the habits of drunkenness which lead to gambling, cock-fighting, divers forms of theft, cattle-stealing, quarrels, and murders.
He finds that men who would not go a mile to procure intoxicants yield readily to the temptation when brought to their very doors, and while pointing out that more than half of the total revenue of the Western Province (apart from customs and railway receipts) is made up of licenses chiefly for the sale of intoxicants and such narcotics as bhang and opium, he proves that an increase in such revenue means simply a corresponding increase in demoralisation and every form of crime, and increased expenditure on its repression by police and legal machinery. ‘Rather than give up a few thousand rupees of revenue, we encourage the people to sink deeper and deeper in crime by increasing their facilities for drinking.’[184]
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Footnote 184:
I have here spoken only of the pushing of the trade in arrack. A very much graver danger lies in the recent licensing of several opium dens. Here we have indeed ‘a little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand,’ but in view of the appallingly rapid extension of the use of opium in India and Burmah, the small beginning may well alarm all who desire the prosperity of Ceylon.
On the mainland, England, for the sake of ill-gotten revenue, is actually creating and diligently propagating the fatal habit of opium smoking. Even in Bombay (though the cultivation of the poppy is prohibited in that Province as being an industry resulting in widespread demoralisation) upwards of 800 persons hold Government licenses for the retail sale of opium, and each licence represents several shops, the licensee being further required, under penalty of a heavy fine, at once to open new shops at the bidding of the chief magistrate of the district, should the latter see any new openings in which the trade may be pushed.
On each licence is stated the lowest number of lbs. of duty-paid opium which the licensee undertakes to sell per annum. Month by month he gives in his report, and if the quantity sold is less than the amount specified, he is fined five rupees per lb. on the deficiency. If in the following month he can succeed in so pushing his sales as to dispose of an equal amount in excess of his contract, the fine is remitted. Should a rival offer to sell a larger quantity per annum, his licence may be taken from him at three months’ notice, and given to the more energetic salesman. Thus he is literally goaded on by the paternal government to force the extension of this iniquitous traffic.
For instance, in the small district of Broach, with a total population of 326,930 men, women, and children, the licensee undertakes annually to sell by retail 12,492 lbs. (five and a half tons!) of poison. Two years ago his sales were 2,000 lbs. less than his quantity, and the consequent fine was 10,000 rupees.
In England a chemist may only sell an infinitesimal quantity of opium without a doctor’s order. In India, any child may purchase ten tolas, which is equal to 1,639 grains—a quantity sufficient to kill 270 men!
WELL MAY CEYLON PRAY TO BE LEFT FREE FROM SO GREAT A CURSE!
Copies of the Indian Opium Licence, with explanatory notes, may be obtained gratuitously from Messrs. Dyer Brothers, 31 Paternoster Square, London, E.C.
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Mr. Lushington believes that nine-tenths of the serious crimes of the Isle are committed within a mile of a tavern, and that quite one-half arise from the desperation caused by losses at gambling. He says that in the maritime districts every village has its cockpit, every group of villages its gambling den, and near to each is either a tavern or a place for the illicit sale of arrack.
And here comes in another grave difficulty, for in this strange Isle the very men who have purchased a monopoly for the sale of intoxicants are frequently in league with the smugglers and unlicensed arrack-sellers, actually sharing in their profits. Vigilant and conscientious indeed must be the police who could cope with such a state of things.
To return to the more legitimate uses of the good cocoa-palm. Another form in which the nut is used as food (a form, however, more appreciated in the South Seas than in Ceylon) is when, in the early stage of germination, the kernel is transformed into a puffy ball, quite filling up the shell.
The said shell furnishes the household drinking-cups, spoons, lamps, and musical instruments, if I may so describe the clattering castanets. The outermost husk serves as household scrubbing-brushes and fuel, while the thick fibre in which the nut is so securely embedded in the coir used for making ropes, cables, mattresses, nets, brushes, and matting. This is prepared by soaking the husks for a considerable time, if possible, in tanks or pits on the margin of the sea, as salt or brackish water improves the fibre, whereas steeping it in fresh water deteriorates it and creates an obnoxious smell. When thoroughly steeped, the husks are beaten with heavy wooden mallets and then dried in the sun The ropes are all made by hand-machinery, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Galle and Colombo, and are used for shipping, housebuilding, lashing bridges, tethering cattle, &c.
So securely is the nut embedded in this outer packing-case, that a hungry man, not provided with a hatchet and uninitiated in the method of extracting it, might very well be sorely tantalised in the midst of plenty. In fact, it requires considerable strength as well as some skill to tear off the hard covering.
For this purpose near every cocoa-grove strong wooden stakes are driven into the ground, leaving two or three feet above ground. Each stake is cut to a sharp point, and the man who has to skin a cocoa-nut takes it in both hands and violently dashes it on to the stake so as to impale it. Then wrenching it from side to side, he succeeds in tearing off the husk, and obtains the hard nut inside with the three eyes familiar to every British boy. On a large estate this forms a serious item of labour. It is said that the coir is less brittle and of a better quality if the nuts are plucked before they are fully ripe, and these also yield a larger proportion of oil.
Such are the principal uses of only the flower and fruit of this generous tree. When we come to reckon the very varied purposes to which every separate portion of the leaves, trunk, and root are applied, we find that the Singhalese enumeration of the hundred uses of their beloved palm is no figure of speech, but a practical fact.
As further varieties of food, the young buds, when boiled, are eaten as a vegetable something like cabbage, and when a tree is blown down or stricken with lightning, a sort of sago is obtained from the pith at the upper end of the trunk. Such windfalls are only too common, but deliberately to fell a fruit-bearing tree would seem too foolish, seeing that from the time a palm commences bearing, at about ten years of age, it yields its full crop annually for about eighty years.
In this region of terrific thunderstorms the value of these tall palms as lightning-conductors is inestimable, and many a home has been saved by their superior attraction.
The Singhalese say that you can build a house and furnish it, or build a ship and freight it, solely from the products of this palm. It would puzzle a European to build a seaworthy vessel without a single nail, but here square-rigged vessels, called dhonies, and large canoes, which resist the heaviest surf, are stitched together with coir yarn, which in salt water is almost imperishable. Small canoes are made from a single trunk hollowed out, and balanced by a smaller stem floating alongside; the cordage, mat-sail, and fishing-net are made of coir; the torch or chule which lights our night-march through the forest, or which the fisherman burns to attract fish, is made of dried palm-leaves.
As to the house, the palm trunk supplies all its woodwork, while its thatch is supplied by the leaves plaited so as to form a sort of long narrow mat called cadjan. Garden fences and even small huts are made entirely of these cadjans. From the leaf-stalk is formed the pingo or yoke which a man balances on his shoulder, with his fish or vegetables hanging from either end, or else it can be used as the handle for a cocoa-nut fibre broom. Its thick end answers as the paddle of a canoe, or if soaked like coir it furnishes a strong black fibre like horse-hair, from which ropes and fishing lines are manufactured. I must not forget to mention that cocoa-nut water mixed with lime produces a strong cement.
In short, as good George Herbert long ago pithily put it—
... The Indian nut alone Is clothing, meat, and trencher, drink and can, Boat, cable, sail, mast, needle, all in one.
Well may this grateful Isle adopt the cocoa-palm as the emblem on her coinage!
A very elegant use of the young leaves is in the decoration of pandals and churches, one tall leaf on each side of a window forming a very effective decoration. Of course, a cocoa-nut blossom is always an exquisite object, but besides the cruel wastefulness of sacrificing a whole cluster of embryo nuts, there is the disadvantage that to the native mind it suggests a charm against evil spirits, for which purpose it is placed over the cradle of the new-born babe, and over the grave of the newly buried.
XXI. SOUTHERN COAST
Mātara—The leper king—Leper Hospital—Dondra Head—Tangalle—Mulgirigalla— Hambantota—Salt lakes—Magama—Happy hunting-grounds—Kataragama.
Before turning northward to Colombo I wished to see something of the southern coast of the Isle, and gladly accepted an invitation from the same kind friends who had made our stay in Negombo so pleasant, to visit them in a new home at Mātara, a most lovely place at the mouth of the Nilwalla Ganga (i.e. the river of blue sand), and only four miles from Dondra Head, which is the southernmost point of the island.[185]
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Footnote 185:
During my two years in the Isle this family was subjected to all the trouble and expense of moving three times, that is to say, of selling off their furniture (of course at considerable loss), renting and furnishing a new home, and finding new servants.
This system of continually, and on the shortest notice, moving Civil servants from one corner of the Isle to another, either as a ‘permanent’ appointment or as locum tenens for some one temporarily transferred to other work, is a very grave drawback. No sooner has a man begun to understand his duties in one district, and to know something of the people around him, than he is liable to be uprooted and ordered off to take up an entirely different line of work, perhaps among people of another race and language.
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Leaving Galle before daybreak by the royal mail coach, I had an exquisite drive of about twenty-five miles, all close by the sea, with its magnificent green waves booming as they broke in dazzling surf on the white sands, only hidden now and again by the wealth of luxuriant vegetation, the whole glorified by the golden light and purple clouds and shadows of early morning, soon replaced by clear sunlight and the vivid blue of sea and sky.
Certainly one great charm of the tropical habit of always being out before sunrise and again at sunset is that we do profit by all Nature’s gorgeous but too fleeting displays of colour, which so many people in Britain never see except in winter, simply because they are asleep in the mornings, or tied and bound by the evening solemnities of dinner. Happily the latter offers no hindrance in Ceylon, where the sun sets all the year round at six o’clock.
Much as is written of tropical sunrises, I have seen just as many in Britain, the gorgeousness of which has been quite indescribable. This very morning, in September, looking due east from my window in Scotland at 4.30 A.M., I looked out on a horizon of intense orange verging into sea-green, while the whole upper sky was covered with the loveliest rose-coloured clouds on a pearly-grey ground, and against all this the trees and wooded hills stood out almost black. But when the sun rose at 5 A.M., though the sky was lovely, it was not at all exciting, and by the time the household awoke, all was quite dull and commonplace. So that of these ever-new glories, as of many other things, I can only say people do not see them because they do not look for them.
Sixteen miles from Galle the coach halted at the pretty village of Belligama, now called Welligama, i.e. the Sand Village, at the head of a beautiful bay, wherein lay a crowd of picturesque fishing boats. There too lies an island known as Crow Island, on account of the multitude of crows[186] which come every night, to roost in the tall cocoa-palms, returning to the mainland at early dawn to forage for themselves wherever human homes suggest a prospect of obtaining food by fair means or foul.
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Footnote 186:
Corvus splendens.
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The small red-tiled, white-pillared rest-house is pleasantly situated so as to command a good view of the sea, and stands in a shady garden, where large bread-fruit and other trees are matted with graceful climbing plants, hanging in festoons from the boughs. Unfortunately, there are, it is said, rather a numerous supply of black scorpions to be found about the place; but then in Ceylon one has always to keep instinctive watch against noxious creatures of various sorts, with the result that one very rarely comes in contact with any.
The chief interest of the place centres in a statue about twelve feet in height, sculptured in a niche cut into a huge rock boulder, and shaded by kitool and cocoa-palms and flowering shrubs. The statue is that of the Kushta Rajah or Leper King, supposed from his dress to have been a Singhalese king of the twelfth century—some say 589. Tradition is somewhat uncertain concerning his merits, for according to one version, it was he who first imported the cocoa-palm to Ceylon, and here planted a large tract of the coast; whereas another legend tells how it was revealed to the afflicted king, that if he visited the coast of Ceylon and worshipped the relic in the Buddhist shrine at Belligama, and further ate of the fruit of a tree then unknown to him, which proved to be the cocoa-palm, he would be healed of his sore disease. And he was healed, and as his thank-offering he richly endowed the temple at Welligama.
Sad to say, the ‘tree of blessing’ has lost its magic power, and the poor lepers of Ceylon are deemed as incurable as those of other lands. Happily they are not very numerous, only about 1,800 in a population of 3,000,000, but it is sad to learn that their number is steadily increasing.
In Ceylon there is no law of compulsory segregation, though all sufferers are encouraged to seek an asylum in the leper hospital at Hendala, about four miles from Colombo, where 208 are well cared for, and are fed and clothed at the expense of the colony. Within the last few years two small chapels have been erected for their benefit, one for the Roman Catholic patients, the other (the gift of Mrs. Copleston, wife of the present Bishop of Colombo) for the use of all Christians, of whatever denomination, whose pastors may be willing to hold services in that sad asylum. About 200 more are at large in Colombo.
In this rock-hewn statue the attitude of the hands is peculiar. Both are uplifted from the elbow; but whereas the left hand is closed, the right is open except that the first finger meets the thumb, as if his Majesty were about to indulge in a pinch of snuff. This is noteworthy, because in Buddhist statues the first and second fingers alone are generally upraised, in the conventional attitude of benediction.
On my return journey, driving leisurely, I was able to secure a picture of the Leper King, and also to note (for the thousandth time) the efficacy of one simple palm-leaf, which you must remember is about fourteen feet in length, knotted round the stem of the parent tree for the protection of the tempting clusters of cocoa-nuts, which but for that leaf would surely prove irresistible to thirsty wayfarers. But the tree so marked is placed under special protection of some guardian spirit, and superstition prevails where honesty might fail, as it is firmly believed that anyone eating of the fruit would suffer severely. Sometimes the knotted leaf denotes that the tree is dedicated to some shrine, Roman Catholic, Buddhist, or Hindoo, in which case a selection of the finest nuts is sent as an offering, or sometimes oil is made from the nuts to burn before the altar.
Cordial was the welcome that awaited me in a delightfully situated two-storied bungalow on the very brink of the beautiful Nilwalla River. From its cool upper verandah, where we daily met for very early breakfast, we looked down on a wilderness of glossy large-leafed plants to the reaches of the river, all embowered in grassy groves of most luxuriant palms of all ages, leaning far over the water, with here and there beds of flowering reeds and tall water-grasses and shrubs.
I found most fascinating sketching ground at every turn, both far and near, and only wish it were in the power of words to convey any idea of those charming scenes, in all their lovely changes of colours, at the ‘outgoing of morning and evening,’ and also in the calm beauty of full moonlight. I think the most attractive of all was the meeting of the ‘broad, and deep, and still’ waters of the river with those of the heaving ocean, the faithful palms enfolding the stream to the very last, as if loth to let it glide away. Doubtless such rivers as these carry many a floating nut far out to sea, perhaps to be washed ashore and take root on some distant isle.
So great was the charm of quietly boating in such surroundings, that it needed some effort to turn elsewhere, although we found beauty on every side. At Mātara, as indeed in all the chief towns or villages along this coast, the hand of the Dutch is still visible in houses and fortifications, and the ramparts of a small fort built of coral-rock were a pleasant point from which to watch the breaking waves bathing the roots of the cocoa-palms overhanging one of the many lovely bays which form so attractive a feature of these shores.[187]
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Footnote 187:
On May 29, 1891, a very singular phenomenon occurred at Mātara, namely, a shower of red rain which fell on the town, extending over a radius of about two miles. Some of this strange rain-water was preserved by the wondering natives.
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Within the fort is the old Dutch church, originally built for the garrison, but now used by civilians of different denominations, Presbyterian and Episcopal, at different hours.
A very romantic tradition attaches to Mātara respecting a certain King Kutara Daas, who, thirteen hundred years ago, delighted in composing verses. This royal poet having written a very graceful couplet, added beneath his lines a promise of great reward to whoever should complete the stanza. The poet Kalidas saw the couplet, and added another, which he committed to the care of a lady of evil reputation, who resolved to secure the reward for herself, and so she murdered the poet and vowed that the lines were her own.
The king, however, recognised the master-hand, and having detected the murder and discovered the body of the poet, he had it unearthed and gave him a noble funeral pyre. When it was ablaze, he himself rushed into the flames, that he might thus be reunited to his friend. Thereupon his five queens likewise immolated themselves, and thus followed their lord. This happened in the year A.D. 522, when seven sacred Bo-trees were planted over their seven tombs, which continued to be held in honour till 1783, when a ruthless Dutchman cut these venerable trees and used the tombs as building material! But though now only a plantation of cocoa-palms, the place still retains its old name of Hat-bodin, ‘the seven Bo-trees.’
One of our most interesting expeditions was an early morning drive to Dondra Head, by a coast road all of the same character, along a shore of wave-kissed palms. Two thousand years ago this southernmost point of the Isle was a place of exceeding sanctity, known as Devi-nuwara, ‘the city of the gods,’ also called Tanaveram. A magnificent temple to Vishnu, as incarnate in Rama Chandra, is known to have existed here in the seventh century—a temple so vast that passing ships mistook it for a city. The great central pagoda and towers were roofed with plates of gilded copper, and the temple, wherein were stone and bronze images of a thousand idols, was surrounded by cloisters and colonnades and terraced gardens, where flowering shrubs were cultivated to supply fragrant blossoms for the daily offerings.
Ibn Batuta, a celebrated Moorish traveller, who, starting from Tangiers in 1344, devoted twenty-eight years to travel, came to Dondra and saw this wonderful building. As a good Mahommedan, he could not himself enter an idolatrous temple, but was told that one of the idols, the size of a man, was made of pure gold, and had for eyes two rubies so large and so lustrous that at night they shone like lanterns. There were then a thousand Brahmans attached to the temple, and five hundred dancing and singing girls. The town, which he calls Dinewar, was then a large place inhabited by merchants, and was all temple property.
Pilgrims crowded to worship at a shrine second in renown only to that of the holy footprint on Adam’s Peak, and the consequent wealth of the temple in gold and gems, ivory and sandal-wood, was such as to awaken the covetousness of the Portuguese, who, in 1587, under De Souza d’Arronches, devastated this coast, committing indescribable cruelties. Having plundered all treasures, destroyed the idols, and burnt their gorgeous cars, and whatever else could be so consumed, the soldiers proceeded to demolish the temple and level with the ground its arches, gates, and towers; finally, as a crowning indignity, they slaughtered cows in the sacred courts, thereby defiling the very ground for ever, and thus the famous temple was reduced to a shapeless mass of ruins.
There still remain about 200 granite columns which formed part of the colonnades, and also a finely-sculptured gateway, the lintel of which, when struck, gives a ringing sound like a bell. Other stone carvings lie scattered about over a considerable space, but, sad to say, regardless of all antiquarian interest, these ruins have been regarded as a convenient quarry, and while some sculptured pillars have been carried off to act as milestones, others have been taken by the native fishermen to construct a pier.
Of course the Brahmans were not allowed to monopolise a place so holy, consequently the Buddhists here erected one of their earliest dagobas, the renovation of which by successive sovereigns was recorded in historic annals. Now this ancient relic-shrine is likewise a ruin, and the modern worshippers of Buddha, Vishnu, and Siva make common cause, the shrines of the Hindoo deities flanking those of Buddha and his disciples in the Buddhist temple.
Once a year, at the time of the midsummer full moon, this quiet village is the scene of a great religious festival and fair, combined attractions which draw thousands of pilgrims and other folk to Dondra Head for a week’s holiday; and very picturesque these crowds must be, all in their gayest attire, camped beneath the palms and along the shore.
Rows of temporary sheds are erected and rapidly transformed into hundreds of small shops for the sale of all manner of food, fruit, cakes, curry-stuffs, confectionery, native books, Tangalia brass-ware, tortoise-shell combs, tobacco-leaves, betel-leaves and areca-nuts, cloth, cheap jewellery, and toys.
The religious ceremony is a Perahara, when the shrine containing some precious relic is carried round the village in solemn procession, followed by lay and ecclesiastical officials in their Kandyan state dress, and escorted by a troop of trumpeters, shell-blowers, and tom-tom beaters, making their usual deafening noise.
In 1889 the Queen’s birthday was celebrated by a very different event, namely, laying the last stone to complete the finest lighthouse on the coast, one of a series extending from Colombo right round the southern coast of Ceylon as far as the ‘Great’ and ‘Little Basses,’ within such moderate distances of one another as to afford all possible security in navigation. The foundations of this latest addition to the lights of Ceylon were hewn in the solid rock at the close of 1887, the Jubilee year, and when this finishing touch was given, the summit of the tower stood 176 feet above the sea-level—a lonely beacon-star for the guiding and warning of many a vessel in years to come.
On the day of our visit, however, all was very quiet. We invested in some curious very coarse red pottery, peculiar to this place, some specimens representing hideous animals. Having inspected the fort built by the Dutch when they had succeeded in driving out the Portuguese, we next strolled to the shore, a succession of lovely bays clothed to the water’s edge with luxuriant palms and strange screw-pines. I selected as my sketching-ground a very striking pile of shapeless ruins, literally rising from the waves. They are apparently those of a smaller temple, but now are merely a heap of tumbled stones and pillars sculptured in alternate square and octagonal sections.
The scene gained additional interest from the fact that this headland is the southernmost land of which we know anything—not even a little coral islet is known to lie between this and the South Pole.
Presently my companions summoned me to breakfast in a cosy bungalow which had been decorated in our honour with palm-leaves and cocoa-nuts. We were glad to rest in its cool shade till the noonday heat was over, and then returned to the lonely ruins on the shore, where we lingered till they and the feathery palms alike showed ‘dark against day’s golden death,’ when we started on our beautiful homeward drive in the mellow moonlight.
Those now wave-washed ruins of the ancient temple are suggestive of the ceaseless battles between land and water, in which Ocean has won so many victories.
There seems little doubt that in early days this beautiful island was of far larger extent than it now is, and that by a series of encroachments of the sea it has been gradually reduced. Native traditions tell how it was originally 5,120 miles in circumference, and how, by a terrible judgment of Heaven, it was reduced to less than 3,000. According to the legendary records of the Ramayana, this calamity occurred soon after the death of Ravana, B.C. 2387, a date which curiously approximates to that generally received as the year of the Deluge. It is also singular that this measurement should so nearly coincide with that recorded by Pliny as having been taken B.C. 200. The sea, however, not content with having swallowed up half the island, still crept onward, and the native annals tell how, year by year, fresh lands were submerged, till there remained only the comparatively small extent we now see, measuring about 800 miles in circumference.
A multitude of lesser islands are also said to have disappeared. Probably they lay between Ceylon and the Maldive and Lakadive islands, and, forming one great kingdom, may have given to Ceylon the name, by which it was anciently known, of Lanka or Laka-diva, ‘the ten thousand islands.’ Certain it is that, at the longitude assigned by old records to the great city of Sri-Lanka-poora, the capital of the island, there is now only a wide expanse of blue waters.
It was in this city that Ravana, the mighty king of the Isle, was besieged by Rama, a warrior prince of Oude, whose beautiful wife, Sita, had been carried off by Ravana, in revenge for insults offered to his sister. This city of palaces had seven fortified walls, and many towers with battlements of brass. Moreover, it was surrounded by a great ditch, wherein flowed the salt waters of the ocean. Hence we may infer that the sea had not much ado to encroach on so confiding a city. The native legends both of Ceylon and India tell how, ‘’twixt the gloamin’ and the mirk,’ the glittering light from these brazen battlements still gleams from the ocean depths, and being reflected on the dark sky overhead, causes the afterglow.
The Brahmans declare that this terrible overflow of the mighty waters was sent to punish the impious Ravana, who had dared to fight against Rama, the peerless king and warrior.
Further calamities befel the Isle about the year B.C. 306, when much of the west coast was submerged. This was in the reign of King Devenipiatissa, who held his court at Kelany, a town which stood seven leagues inland from the point where the River Kelany then entered the sea. According to tradition, King Tissa had good cause to suspect his beautiful queen of an intrigue with his own brother,[188] who accordingly fled to Gampola, whence he endeavoured to send a message to the queen written on a neatly rolled-up palm leaf.
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Footnote 188:
In view of the custom of polyandry, formerly prevalent throughout the Isle, Tissa’s jealousy was unjustifiable, as every woman was entitled to half-a-dozen husbands, who, as a matter of preference, ought all to be of the same family—brothers if possible. King Wijayo Bahu VII., who was the reigning monarch at Cotta, near the Kelany River, at the time when the Portuguese built their first fort at Colombo, had a wife in common with his brother.
Polyandry and the murder of superfluous female infants were the recognised means of checking the increase of population among a race too indolent to cultivate more land than was necessary for their own support. Thanks to Portuguese and Dutch influence, these obnoxious customs were soon abandoned in the maritime provinces, but in the mountainous Central Province the ancient Kandyan custom prevailed till quite recently, when British marriage-laws were framed with a view to bringing it into discredit.
On the similar custom of certain mountain tribes in Hindostan, see ‘In the Himalayas,’ p. 406, published by Chatto & Windus.
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This was conveyed by a messenger disguised as a priest, who was to gain access to the palace on a day when a multitude of priests were to receive the royal alms. Having attracted the queen’s notice, the messenger dropped the letter, but ere she could raise it the king seized and read it. In his fury he declared that the intrigue thus proven was sanctioned by the high-priest himself, who accordingly was seized and thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil, while the queen was pinioned and thrown into the river.
Ere long the innocence of the priest was established, but it was too late to avert the wrath of the gods, who caused the sea to encroach on the west coast of the isle so rapidly, that the unhappy king strove to avert the terrible punishment from his people by the sacrifice of his own beautiful virgin daughter, Sudhá-Déwi, whom he secured in a covered canoe overlaid with pure gold, and having inscribed this ark with the title ‘A Royal Maiden,’ he launched it on the raging waters.
The spirits of air and water protected the maiden thus committed to their care, and landed her safely on a distant shore at Totalu Ferry, where the ark was found by some fishermen. The prince of the land, Ka-wan-tissa Rajah, was so fascinated by the beauty of the damsel, that he married her, and changed her name to Wihari-Dewi. It was her son, Dootoogaimoonoo, who afterwards expelled the Malabars and restored the supremacy of the Singhalese.
But King Tissa’s sacrifice proved of no avail, for the encroaching waters never stayed their advance till they had swallowed up 640 flourishing villages and permanently submerged a strip of country extending twenty miles inland, and including some of the richest arable land. According to the Rajavali, no less than 100,000 large towns and 1,370 fishers’ villages were then destroyed.
That this calamity was due to volcanic agency seems evident, for the tradition further records, that when the king himself went on his elephant to watch the progress of the raging waters, the earth opened and vomited flames which swallowed him up, and he was no more seen.
Of the encroachments of the sea on the Coast of Coromandel and other parts of Southern India, we have visible proof in the fact of its having stayed half-way in the act of washing away at least one old city which now lies half beneath the waves.[189] These have encroached to the very doors of the great temples, but sculptures and pillars still jutting up from the waters suggest how much of the old city has been altogether submerged. Some of the aged natives of the last generation remembered how in their youth, while sailing far out at sea, they could distinguish the forms of temples and other buildings lying deep beneath the waves. Some of these had cupolas of copper-gilt, which glittered in the early sunlight, but had gradually ceased to do so, and now the fishes vainly peer into those clear depths—the city is no longer visible. They suppose that the copper has corroded or that the foundations have given way.
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Footnote 189:
Maha-bali-poor, or Mavalipuram.
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To return to our peaceful modern life at Mātara on the brink of the broad beautiful river. In such surroundings, rendered yet more attractive by the kindness of many friends, a fortnight slipped quickly by, when we started in force, a whole family party, great and small, to visit a hospitable Scotsman, the District Judge at Tangalle, a pretty little seaside town about twenty miles farther east. Once more we followed the ‘palm o’ershadowed way’ along the shore, and facing the sun as it rose in glory from the clear calm ocean, which shone like a dazzling mirror, so that we were glad to rest our eyes by gazing into the shady groves to catch pretty glimpses of home-life in the native huts.
We met many native vehicles, always driven by picturesque people, and drawn by handsome oxen, white or brown, drawing their heavy loads simply by the pressure of the yoke on their much-enduring hump.
Presently (happily when we were near a rest-house) the tyre came off one of our wheels, so we had to halt some hours for necessary repairs, and amused ourselves by watching the fishermen drawing their large seine-nets, several canoes uniting their forces to draw one net on shore. They work all through the burning midday hours to an accompaniment of melancholy song, sometimes indeed pathetic, at others wild, but never very musical. As we rested beneath the cool shade of a great banyan-tree, kind natives brought us a gift of ripe plantains and a great bowl of delicious creamy buffalo-, a dainty generally shunned by Europeans, on the ground that buffaloes are not strict vegetarians.
When the glare and heat drove us to seek shelter in the rest-house, we consoled ourselves by watching the antics of many small squirrels who scampered fearlessly about the verandah—pretty little creatures, dark-grey, with three white stripes down the back.
Indoors, the spiders and darling little lizards, ‘Geckoes,’[190] reigned unmolested—the former splendid specimens of a large dark-coloured hairy spider, with ten thick hairy legs. To the unaccustomed eye they are hideous and alarming, but they really are very useful, as they wage war on cockroaches and such-like unwelcome intruders. They have the oddest way of periodically shedding their whole skin. As the creature grows, its skin fails to expand, so it splits down the back, and then the spider shakes off this outgrown overcoat and steps out in all the glory of a new skin, leaving the old one perfect (but for the one long split), and for the moment the spider and the empty case look like twins.
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Footnote 190:
Platydactylus.
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One enormous spider, the Mygale fasciata, sometimes miscalled a tarantula, is not content with such small game as cockroaches, but occasionally devotes its energies to ensnaring lizards. It has even been accused of capturing tiny birds, but this charge is not proven. It is a very unpleasant-looking creature, its body and legs being covered with long dark-brown hair, and it is so large, that when its legs are extended a full-grown specimen will cover a circle of about eight inches in diameter.
Instead of weaving a web after the manner of spiders in general, this curious creature builds for itself a sort of tubular nest, generally in the crevice of some old wall or gravelly bank, and for this it spins a waterproof lining of the very finest silk, and furthermore constructs a most ingenious door, which opens and shuts on hinges, and which it can close from within and successfully exclude unwelcome intruders.[191]
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Footnote 191:
See nest of the Californian tarantula, in ‘Granite Crags of California,’ p. 320, by C. F. Gordon-Cumming.
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But of all the spiders (and they are very numerous and varied), none struck me as more curious than a family with tiny bodies and ridiculously long black legs, so slender as literally to resemble coarse hairs. I have seen these in some very neglected rest-houses, and sometimes on gravelly banks in the hills, in such multitudes that the wall or bank seemed to quiver with the tremulous movement of these little bunches of black hair. One long-legged house-spider always reminded me of the old woman who lived in a shoe, because of its innumerable family of the tiniest perfect little spiders, which it carries about with it in a cocoon supported under its legs. When frightened, it drops this little silky cradle, and out scamper a regiment of most active little creatures. I used always to wonder whether the family was ever reassembled, especially as destructive human beings so often with one rough touch rend the dainty nest woven with such skill.
The lizards, of which there are several varieties, green, grey, or chocolate-coloured, spotted or streaked, and ranging from four to seven inches in length, are very abundant on the sea-coast, and every house has its own colony of these pretty little harmless creatures, which suddenly peep out from some unexpected corner, chirping their little note like ‘Cheeka! cheeka!’ On their feet are small suckers, which enable them to walk inverted like flies as they scamper about on the canvas ceilings in pursuit of insects. Occasionally they get on to a loose rag of canvas or a flake of whitewash, and fall violently to the ground or on to the table, and, like Bo-peep’s sheep, leave their tails behind them, wriggling independently, while the proprietor takes himself off as fast as he can.
In the crevices of the walls they lay fascinating little white eggs like sugar-plums, and from these, when hatched by the sun, come forth most minute perfect lizards, who at once scamper off in search of food.
Some of these seaside places are occasionally haunted by muskrats (alias shrews), which utter shrill little cries while diligently hunting for insects, especially for crickets, which are their special weakness; but they are an intolerable nuisance, as they taint everything they touch.
By the time a blacksmith had been found and our repairs complete, a furious rain-storm had set in, which never abated all the afternoon; so there was nothing for it but to face it; but right glad we were when we reached our journey’s end, and were hospitably received and dried. Then followed a wild wet night, and the rickety venetians rattled and shook with every gust of rushing wind; but loud above all minor voices of the storm resounded the roar of the mighty waves as they thundered on the shore; for at Tangalle, unlike most of the harbours of Ceylon, there is no bar to check their landward rush.
As if to atone for this night of passion, the days that followed were each enchanting. I awoke to find myself in a comfortable old bungalow, with wide-pillared verandah and red-tiled roof, delightfully situated beneath the cool shade of large trees on the very brink of the sea, from which the glorious sun was just rising
In one unclouded blaze of living light.
The charms of that shore, with the quaintly-built canoes, with great outriggers and nets hung up to dry, and the picturesque groups of brown figures (fisher-folk, and women carrying red water-jars on their heads and children astride on one hip), to say nothing of the always irresistible attraction of shell-strewn sands, held me captive for some days. There was such a sense of peace in finding a cosy resting-place at the foot of some dark tree, whose great boughs extended right over the sands, and almost dipped into the now gently rippling wavelets.
About fifteen miles inland from Tangalle lies the celebrated old Buddhist monastery and rock-temple of Mulgirigalla, where, to my great delight, I found that our kind host had made all arrangements for our reception. A beautiful drive brought us to the Goagalla or Iguana Rock, whence we obtained a splendid view of the sacred crag, a huge square red rock, towering to a height of 350 feet from the brink of a dark-blue lakelet, which gleamed like a sapphire in its setting of luxuriant tropical foliage. The flat summit is crowned by a great white dagoba of the usual dome-shape, containing a precious relic of some early Buddhist saint or hero. Somewhat lower, conspicuously placed on the face of the crag, are the red-tiled monastic buildings, nestling among fragrant flowering shrubs.
The mighty crag is perpendicular on three sides, but on the fourth the ascent is easy, flights of steps being hewn at the steepest parts. Where the carriage-drive ended we found chairs with bearers waiting to carry us up to the monastery, where we were most courteously received by the high-priest and sundry monks, who escorted us to the famous temples. These are simply a series of overhanging rock-ledges, partially built up so as to form artificial caves, decorated in colour in the same style as those at Dambulla, but on a much smaller scale. Within these are colossal images of Buddha, one of which, a huge recumbent figure, resting beneath the shadow of the dark maroon-coloured rock, and shaded by the light foliage of a sacred peepul-tree, formed a very impressive foreground to a blue distance of endless forests extending to the far-away ocean.
Mulgirigalla has been held in veneration from the earliest ages of Buddhism. In Singhalese chronicles of B.C. 137 it was referred to as being already a very sacred shrine, and throughout the twenty centuries that have glided away since then, with all their manifold changes, the praises of Buddha have been ceaselessly sung by the yellow-robed brethren of this rock-monastery.
Comfortable quarters having been assigned to us for the night, we were able to wander about at leisure, enjoying each picturesque combination of dark rocks, red-tiled buildings, brown priests robed in yellow, and wonderfully varied foliage, all in vivid light and shadow. One quiet corner especially attracted me, where, among the great rock-boulders and overshadowed by fragrant temple-trees, daturas, plantains, kitool, areca, and other palms, are the fine old tombs containing the ashes of cremated high-priests who have lived and died in this peaceful spot—
The world forgetting, By the world forgot.
Overhead a troop of merry monkeys were at play in a dark jak-tree, laden with enormous fruit hanging from the branches and trunk. In short, there was much to tempt the pencil at every turn. The view from the summit is magnificent, either looking southward over the Hambantota district to the blue ocean, or inland to the mountain ranges of Kataragama and Uva, while in the far distance beyond the high table-land of the Horton Plains towers Adam’s Peak, the holy of holies. We rejoiced in all this beauty as seen in the changing lights of sunset, followed by the quiet starlight, and then again in the stillness of the dawn, and realised how calmly life might glide on in such an eyrie. Nevertheless certain broken palm-trees snapped in two suggested how fiercely the winds must often rave around this lofty crag.
Following the seaboard eastward from Tangalla to Hambantota, a distance of about twenty-five miles, the whole character of the scenery changes. Luxuriant vegetation is replaced by a mere sprinkling of parched scrub and scanty grass on a dead flat expanse of white sand, which seems to dance in the quivering mirage produced by the intense heat of the glaring sun.
Here and there, on rocky islands or on the shore, a few isolated palms seem as if they had been banished from the company of their fellows, to dwell among thorny wild date palms, fantastic screw pines, with their strange stilt like roots, their forked cylindrical trunks, and quaint whorls of drooping spiral leaves, for ever rustling and swaying with every breath of air, and grotesque euphorbias like gigantic candelabra, the ghostliest of all plants when seen in the moonlight, or dark against a red sunset sky.
The most characteristic feature of the district is the chain of shallow lagoons, which furnish about one-fifth of the salt supply of the island. There are about half-a-dozen of these lakes, separated from the sea by a high sandbank clothed with thorny impenetrable jungle. Some are several miles in circumference. Their waters are a solution of the saltest brine, which precipitates and crystallises at the bottom and round the edges, so that when seen from any height, these blue lakes seem to be edged with dazzling white surf.
Beneath the blazing summer sun evaporation is so rapid that the lakes partially dry up, leaving a beach of the purest white salt six or eight inches in depth, the bed of the lake being equally coated. Salt being (as I mentioned when describing the artificial saltpans at Puttalam) a Government monopoly and a considerable source of revenue, the lakes are guarded by watchers, so that no man may help himself to this necessary of life.
So for the greater part of the year these shallow lagoons are utterly undisturbed, and afford sanctuary to innumerable birds and other shy creatures. Great mobs of snowy pelicans and groups of delicately rosy flamingoes stand reflected in the still waters, the latter changing to crimson as they rise and display their brilliant under-wings. Many crocodiles bask on the shores. These are of a peculiarly harmless kind, and, strange to say, they are never known to have attacked any of the salt-collectors who so audaciously invade their quiet retreat.
Whether the stagnation of life in such still waters has a soothing effect on their inhabitants, I cannot say, but it is a well-authenticated fact that the crocodiles which live in the lakes and tanks of Ceylon are by no means so dangerous as those which haunt the rivers, the latter being a source of constant dread to the natives, as are also the sharks, which occasionally venture some way up the broad mouth of the rivers in pursuit of fish, and render bathing exceedingly dangerous. The Singhalese, however, assert that sharks only attack human beings at certain times, so that when man is not in season, they bathe with confidence. When possible, however, they hire a charmer to recite incantations, which are supposed to render the brutes harmless; such services are specially sought by the divers, whose work leads them right into Shark-land.
The salt harvest is generally gathered in the month of August, but the exact time depends on the weather, for it is a precarious crop; and whereas in a very dry season the amount collected and safely stored may be very large, unseasonable rains may melt it all away and leave a very poor return—in some cases even none. Thus in the North Province, in 1876, the salt harvest yielded 151,718 cwts. In the following year there was absolutely none, and in the year after only 11,772 cwts. So in this Southern Province, in 1878, the salt crop proved a total failure, whereas two years later 136,757 cwts. were safely gathered.
The method of collecting is first to gather the deposit on the shore, and then, by wading into the lakes, collect that which has formed under water—a method grievous to those employed, as, after a few days’ work, the intense salt of the water excoriates the feet and legs, causing severe pain. Much of this work is done by the convicts from the Hambantota gaol. The salt thus obtained is brought ashore in baskets, and built up into great piles, which are protected from rain by a thick thatch of cocoa-palm leaves till the salt can be carted away to the Government storehouses, whence, after the lapse of three or four months, it is sold to merchants, who supply the retail dealers, the Government profit on the transaction being about 900 per cent. on the outlay.
So rigidly has the price of salt been maintained, that for such purposes as manuring the land, preserving hides, and fish-curing it was for long altogether prohibitive, and it is only quite recently that fish-curing grounds have been established at Hambantota, where, under strict Government supervision, salt is supplied at a nominal price to encourage a native trade in dried salted fish, which hitherto has been imported from the Maldive Islands or the coast of India to an annual value of about 900,000 rupees.
The scenery around Hambantota, though not without interest, is certainly not attractive. The Government Agent’s house and court stand on a hot bare hill, looking on the one hand to a long ridge of red drifting sandhills and scrubby jungle, on the other to the heavy breakers thundering on the white beach. On a rocky promontory stands a fortified tower, which overlooks the anchorage where lie the small vessels which come to ship the salt from the salt-water lakes. From this tower you can overlook the sandy world around, in strong contrast with the vivid blues of sea, sky, distant mountains, and salt lakes, the latter edged with a glittering crust of white, and all set in a dark framework of sombre jungle. But except in the early morning, or late afternoon, the heat is grilling.
About fifteen miles farther along the sea-coast is the site of the ancient city of Mahagam, or, as it is now called, Magama, at the mouth of a river of the same name. Twenty-two centuries ago it was a flourishing and important centre of busy life, of which all trace has disappeared, and the ruins which alone remain to mark its vanished glory are in the same style as those of Anuradhapura and Pollanarua, namely, cyclopean dagobas, masses of fallen and crumbling brickwork, lines of erect monoliths, once the supports of temple and palaces, sculptured pillars, blocks of granite, and great flights of steps, once the thronged approach to stately portals, now all overgrown with prickly cactus and thorny jungle.
For the great tanks (or rather artificial lakes) constructed by the builders of Magama for the irrigation of the land have for centuries been left to go to ruin, the whole district, once so densely peopled and so carefully cultivated, has long lain desolate, and the arid jungle, extending from the sea to the foot of the Madulsima and Haputale ranges, is the sportsman’s and naturalist’s happiest hunting-ground—a vast unbroken forest some sixty miles in width, where the wild creatures, scared from their former haunts by the advance of ever-encroaching planters, still find a comparatively undisturbed sanctuary.
This is especially true of elephants, against whom the necessary war was for many years waged so vigorously, both by European sportsmen and by Moormen, that at length there seemed a danger of their extermination. But though bad masters, they are far too good as servants to be given over to destruction. A close season was therefore instituted, and it was declared illegal to shoot an elephant without a Government licence, costing ten rupees for each animal slain—a proviso which has proved sorely trying to sportsmen who have had exceptional luck in falling in unexpectedly with elephants, and whose licence perhaps allowed them to shoot one only.
Thus protected, these giants of the forest soon increased, and are now said to be as numerous as ever, though they have retired to the most unfrequented regions, seeking concealment in the dense and frequently malarious jungles which clothe the eastern side of the Isle. They now abound in the South-Eastern Province from Hambantota as far eastward as the Kombookgam River (now called Kumukkan Aru), and range inland to the forests at the base of the Uva hills near Badulla, whence they wander at will over all the low country extending to Batticaloa.
The largest elephants, however, are said to haunt the forests of Tamankaduwa around Lake Minery and the ruins of Pollanarua, and also those to the north of Trincomalee. Great herds also find covert in the desolate region to the north of Manaar, in the extreme north of the Isle, and in the vast fever-haunted jungles of the Wannie—a term which describes an area of about 14,000 square miles.
The Southern Province is, however, the most popular with sportsmen, and the country about the Nipple Hills to the north of Tissamaharama and between the Kumukkan Aru and the Kataragama-Ganga is now considered to be the finest district in Ceylon for sport, so numerous are all manner of large game, including buffalo, which, like the elephant, are now protected, and may not be shot without a licence. In many districts, however, they have been so decimated by disease as to be now comparatively scarce. The wild buffalo of Ceylon has small horns as compared with that of India, but he is a very dangerous and resolute antagonist. Even the domestic buffalo of the Isle is generally vicious; very different from the meek animal which in China is generally ridden by the smallest child.
Deer of various sorts are here abundant—red deer, axis or spotted deer, and sambur (commonly miscalled elk), hog-deer, barking-deer, and the pretty little mouse-deer, which sometimes starts from the grass almost under one’s feet. Chetahs and leopards, porcupines, wild pigs, monkeys, and sloths find their paradise in that region, where jungle, open plains, and lagoons supply all their need. Bears also are numerous in the rocky jungle and in the dense forest, wherever white ants, wild honey, or fruits are to be found, and very dangerous antagonists they often prove, especially from their horrid habit of trying to tear the face of their assailant.
Here, too, birds of radiant plumage still abound; large flocks of gorgeous pea-fowl, jungle-fowl, and many varieties of pigeons, yellow-headed hoopoes, crimson-breasted barbet, and many another shy creature here dwell in peace, while cormorants, spoonbills, ibises, herons, and toucans congregate around the lonely forest tanks, their wild cries alone breaking the utter stillness.
Soon after my return to Britain, I received from Mr. G. W. R. Campbell, Inspector-General of Police, a description of a night journey across this district, which gives some idea of the risks which may be incurred by lonely travellers, and made me realise that there may be cases when it is a matter of congratulation that so few Ceylon elephants own tusks. He says:—
‘After inspecting the gaol, I left Hambantota for Koslanda, in Haputale. I was to travel the first twenty-eight miles during the night in a bullock-cart, and next morning drive my own horses to the foot of the mountains. The road lay almost all the way through dense forest scrub infested with elephants and other wild animals. I was informed that the elephants, not content with pulling up the milestones, sometimes attacked carts, so I deemed it prudent to desire that an armed constable should escort my cart, which was a high heavy covered spring-cart on two wheels. It was about 7 feet 3 inches in length, and when my cushions were laid along it, made a fair bed. It was drawn by a pair of bullocks, and three other pairs were stationed along the road in advance.
‘About midnight I fell asleep, and being thoroughly tired, I was quite unconscious when we halted to change the bullocks and escort.
‘Between two and three in the morning the cart was running merrily along the white road in the bright moonlight, the constable following, when a large elephant rushed out from the jungle to the right, and with his trunk struck the cart a heavy blow on the top, trumpeting furiously.
‘On his approach the terrified constable took to his heels and fled back along the road by which we had come, but the driver, uttering loud cries, partly of fear and partly in the hope of driving the beast off, ran by the pole, urging his bullocks to their best speed, the elephant following.
‘Just then I awoke, and for a moment imagined that the darkness and the screaming and swaying of the cart were caused by the bullocks having gone off the road and down some embankment into the jungle, but in another moment I saw that the darkness was caused by the head of an elephant blocking up the back of the cart, and that he was bumping the hood upwards with his forehead.
‘Fearing that the whole thing would go over, or that he would seize me, I instantly twisted myself round, and got out beside the driver, intending to run as he was doing by the side of the pole; but I missed my footing, and came to the ground so awkwardly that the cart, which was going very fast, knocked me down, and the off-wheel immediately passed over me.
‘Instantly, fearing lest the elephant should also pass over and crush me, I scrambled into the grass, though with difficulty, owing to pain in my legs. The cart had disappeared, and there, about fifteen paces off, facing me, stood the elephant in the moonlight, in the middle of the white road, with a halo of dust round him.
‘I stood quite still in the shade of the tall thorny scrub, which formed a high and almost impenetrable wall on either side of the road. I do not know whether he saw me or not, but in less than half a minute he turned, and standing across the road, put up his trunk as high as he could and repeated the horrible screaming which is called trumpeting. Then turning round quickly, he marched back along the road by which we had come.
‘I at once went off at a run in the other direction, feeling very stiff and sore, and about 200 yards farther on overtook the cart, which the driver, rather bravely, I think, had managed to pull up within that distance. He hurried me into the cart, and we pushed along as quickly as we could, he shouting every half minute at the top of his voice to scare other wild animals.
‘Soon afterwards we came upon a herd of seven or eight huge wild buffaloes, which would scarcely let us pass, and about a mile farther passed another herd, which absolutely blocked the road. I tried to frighten them by lighting matches and throwing them at them; one lighted match actually fell on a buffalo’s back.
‘About the twenty-second mile-post we found our next bullocks, and two men with guns, who told us they had been visited by a bear while waiting for us.
‘When, just at daybreak, we reached my carriage, my knees were so bruised and swollen that I could not walk, nor even stand for a moment without great pain. Nevertheless I had to drive myself twenty-three miles farther to Wellawaya before I could rest. Arrived there, a touch of jungle-fever came on, so that night’s sleep was not much better than the previous one; but at daybreak I started to drive myself the remaining twenty-six miles to Haldummulla, halting for some hours at Koslanda for an inspection, though in such pain that I was unable to stand for more than a few seconds at a time.’[192]
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Footnote 192:
The Inspector-General of Police and of all the Prisons in Ceylon had little time to let grass grow under his feet. I remember Mr. Campbell’s driving one morning, quite as a matter of course, from Colombo to Negombo, thence starting on an extensive round of inspection, returning the same evening, having driven upwards or seventy-five miles, besides all his official work at each station. And next morning, long before dawn, he was at work in his office, ready as usual for another long round. Few men in Britain would even attempt to undertake such work as here falls on a few willing shoulders; yet any breakdown in health is invariably attributed, not to overwork, but to the climate!
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No wonder that the tappal-runners, the rural postmen of the Isle, dread these lonely forest roads, their sole protection being a bunch of small bells at the end of a long stick, which they jingle as they go. A flaming torch is generally effectual in scaring elephants, but in the North-Eastern Provinces, in the days of palanquin-travelling, the bearers used to insist on being escorted by a professional elephant-charmer, who, whenever they approached a herd, warned them off by the mystic sentence, ‘Om am ari nari saringham saravaye,’ at the sound of which the boldest elephants turned tail and fled!
This South-Eastern Maritime Province, though only separated from the western coast by a mountain range not 5,000 feet in height, is in every respect strangely different; for whereas from April till July the west coast has a heavy rainfall, this too sheltered region can only hope for rain in November and December; so, instead of rich luxuriant groves and large timber, the prevailing feature is dry thorny scrub, with here and there tracts of thirsty sand, only partially clothed with stunted grass and huge cactus-like euphorbias, with their odd four-sided stems and fleshy branches, growing to a height of over thirty feet.
These scorched plains are subject to excessive drought, when rivers are reduced to meagre streams meandering through an expanse of burning sand, and their tributaries wholly disappear, leaving only dry watercourses, tantalising to thirsty men and beasts. Then, when the rains do set in, they are apt to fall in such good earnest that the country is flooded, and when half dry, form deep unhealthy marshes, sending up a steaming miasma productive of fever, dysentery, the scourge of the country, and parangi, that dreadful and loathsome complaint said to be peculiar to Ceylon, and greatly due to lack of good food and good water.
An immediate improvement in the condition of the district was looked for when, in 1876, the restoration of the great tank Tissamaharama, six or eight miles to the north of Magama, was completed; but from various causes, chiefly from the scantiness of the population, who were to profit by its water-supply, it for a while proved so unremunerative (in return for the enormous outlay on its restoration) as to have been deemed well-nigh a failure. That, however, is an impression which is fading away before the steadily increasing area of well-watered cultivated land which is now yielding abundant food in the districts where famine so long reigned.
By the beginning of 1890 no less than 1,500 acres were yielding two rice crops yearly in return for the precious water supplied by Lake Tissa, and now Moormen as well as Singhalese are coming from other districts to compete for these well-irrigated lands, and it is found necessary to provide fresh storage for the ever-increasing demand for water. In short, there seems reason to believe that in process of time the whole country between Tissa and the sea will become one vast cultivated expanse.
The tank, which is about six miles in circumference, and covers an area of about 3,000 acres, was made by King Devenipiatissa, B.C. 307. It lies on a slightly raised table-land 73 feet above the sea-level, where once stood a great city, of which there remain only ruins all overgrown by dense forest. Now its rock-temples and ruined palaces afford shelter only to wild beasts except at midsummer, when the pilgrims halt here on their way to Kataragama to worship at these ruined shrines, and for a few days Tissa is once again thronged, perhaps by thousands, intent on trade or devotion, as the case may be.
A detail of some geological interest is that in the neighbourhood both of Tissa and of Hambantota there are beds of great extent, and many feet in thickness, composed entirely of shells. These are dug out and used instead of gravel in repairing roads. In view of all the traditions of the encroachments of the ocean, we can scarcely suppose the sea to have receded from this particular coast, so the theory of upheaval seems the more probable.
This theory is confirmed by the fact that at Miripenna, just south of Galle, large blocks of coral rock are excavated from the soil fully a quarter of a mile inland; also in the extreme north of the Isle, the Jaffna peninsula is found to rest entirely on a foundation of coral, which is supposed to have been upheaved in geologically recent times.
Fain would I have extended my travels twenty miles inland to those blue hill-ranges around the famous shrine of Kataragama (alias Maha Sen), one of the demons worshipped by the aborigines, afterwards identified with a mighty Singhalese king, and finally adopted by the Brahmans, who identify him with Siva. Contrary, however, to the custom of the Sivites, this temple contains no image, only a mysterious curtain, before which kneel crowds of pilgrims from every part of India, sometimes even high-caste Brahmans from remote Hurdwar (the holy city near the source of the Ganges, distant well-nigh 2,000 miles), who visit this shrine, seeking cures for divers diseases, and who present silver models of their various limbs as votive offerings to Maha Sen.[193]
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Footnote 193:
It is curious to observe how widespread is this custom of hanging up models of the limb restored or for which healing is craved. In the long-isolated temples of Japan I have seen thousands of such models. We know that they were offered in ancient Greece, for the British Museum possesses two votive hands made of bronze. They were also common in Egypt, generally entwined with figures of serpents, emblematic of recovered health. Hands, arms, ears, eyes, and other members, modelled in terracotta or carved in ivory, have been found at Thebes and elsewhere, with a thanksgiving dedication to whichever deity received credit for the cure effected.
Most remarkable of all is the fact that in many of these heathen offerings the hand is modelled with the third and fourth fingers closed, while the first and second (the fingers of benediction, as a Ritualist would call them) are upraised in the orthodox attitude of ecclesiastical benediction. Hence we may infer that not only the presentation of such ex votos at Roman Catholic shrines, but also this peculiar priestly attitude, are directly borrowed from Paganism, probably introduced into the Alexandrian Church by some Egyptian convert. Those who have travelled in Roman Catholic countries can scarcely fail to recall various churches (such as those of San Publio in Malta or of Notre Dame de la Garde at Marseilles, where votive offerings of every sort, but chiefly of miniature arms, legs, eyes, and ears, modelled in wax or silver, as the case may be, are hung up round the altars of divers saints, as thank-offerings for cures attributed to their intercessions.)
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The great annual festival occurs at the hottest season of the year, between June and August, its precise date being regulated by some combination of the full moon with other details. So vast are the crowds which sometimes flock to this shrine, and so great the consequent risk of outbreaks of cholera, that in 1874 it was found necessary to enact a law that in seasons when sickness is prevalent only 400 pilgrims in all were to be permitted to attend, i.e. 100 each from the Western, Central, Eastern, or Southern Provinces, each person being provided with a ticket signed by the Government Agent of the Province, and being further bound to travel by specified routes, and to conform strictly to police regulations, arranging their journey so as not to arrive at Kataragama earlier than August 3 or to remain there for more than two clear days, to include the period of the full moon. Any infringement of these rules renders the offender liable to a year’s imprisonment or to a fine not exceeding 1,000 rupees.
Stringent as are these regulations, it has sometimes been found necessary to render them still more so. Thus in June 1883 upwards of 10,000 pilgrims assembled at Kataragama, but in the following year, when there was fear of cholera, the number was officially restricted to a total of 150 persons, namely, thirty to represent Colombo, thirty for Kandy, and as many for Galle, Kurunegalla, and Batticaloa.
Before this regulation of the pilgrimages commenced they were simply seed-beds for the fostering and spread of disease. Thus in the cholera outbreak in 1858, no less than seventy-six dead bodies were counted on the highroad between Hambantota and Tangalla, and it is certain that very many more must have perished in the jungle-paths and roadside villages.
The following table, though not up to date, shows how the number of pilgrims varies from year to year: —
1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1883 4,000 7,000 1,200 60 107 44 15 10,000
For a lover of the picturesque this pilgrimage is specially attractive, the favourite camping-ground being the dry bed of the broad Kataragama River, which in the summer-time is totally dried up, but is overshadowed by magnificent forest trees. In Oriental lands such a scene, with all the groups of very varied nationality clustering round their camp-fires, is always full of incident and colour.
That river is more commonly known as the Manick-Ganga, or ‘River of Gems,’ from the fact that its sandy bed is composed of glittering atoms of quartz and mica, mingled with infinitesimal fragments of rubies, sapphires, garnets, and jacinth. As the sunlight plays on the clear shallow water flowing over this radiant bed of sparkling gems, it seems like the enchanted river of some fairy tale, but so tiny are the precious morsels that it is exceedingly rare to find one worth keeping. The people use this sand to facilitate the labour of sawing through elephants’ teeth. Near Hambantota there are tracts of sand which literally are composed of ruby dust.
Certainly it is strange that a gem-loving people should for so many centuries have recognised that these precious fragments were washed down from some of the higher rocks, and yet should never have attempted any systematic search for these hid treasures. Doubtless now that gem-mining is being taken up in good earnest, those hitherto inaccessible crags will be made to yield many a priceless jewel.
XXII. RETURN TO COLOMBO
Bentota—Lilies—Mangroves—Kalutara—Fisher castes—Ordeal by boiling oil— Colombo.
On my return journey from Mātara to Colombo I proved how comfortable it can be to travel ‘in charge of the police;’ always provided such charge be that of a great Inspector-General who takes special pride not only in every detail of his official work, but also in the excellence of the grey horses which await him at every halting-place.
Not that we had to hurry over the beautiful drive. Happily for my sketching mania, there was so much police inspection to be done on the way, that we were detained a whole day at Galle and another at Bentota, a very pretty fishing-village, with a really luxurious rest-house charmingly situated beneath the cool shade of feathery tamarind-trees and cocoa-palms, on a little rocky headland washed by the waves, and at the mouth of the Alutgama River.
Thence, looking along the shore, there is a fine view of Cape Barberyn, which is the westernmost point of Ceylon. Grand waves breaking round rocky palm-covered islands, glimpses of calm freshwater pools and green turf, coast villages, and many fishing boats, successive headlands all clothed with cocoa-palms, pandanus, and other tropical vegetation, and yellow sands carpeted with marine convolvulus, make up as pleasant a picture as can be desired.
Equally fascinating is the view from the bridge looking up the beautiful river flowing so calmly between continuous walls of lovely foliage, to where, beyond many ranges of palm and forest in varied tints of green and blue, rises the clear delicate range of far-away blue mountains, of which the crowning peak is the ever-attractive ‘Sri Pada’ (the Holy Footprint).
Most beautiful of all was a row up the silent river in the clear moonlight, doubly attractive after the great heat of the day. Yet even that heat was tempered by a delicious sea-breeze and an invigorating scent of iodine, and the too dazzling light on sea and sky served to intensify enjoyment of the blessed shade.
Truly exquisite and delightful to eyes wearied with the sun’s glare is the endless variety of cool refreshing greens which surround them on every side in this verdant paradise; large golden-green silky leaves, which seem to have embodied the sunlight that plays on their upper surface; sombre dark-green foliage, so thick and heavy as effectually to bar all light, casting a cool deep shadow on the grassy carpet below. There are olive-greens and emerald-greens, indigo and chrome, every tint that can be produced by blending every known yellow with every known blue. Loveliest of all, perhaps, is the exquisitely fresh green of the rice-fields, brighter even than our own wheat-fields in early spring.
As if to harmonise with these all pervading hues, a large proportion of living creatures—the fairies of the forest—are clad in green, the better to escape the notice of their foes. Brilliant green birds, butterflies, and dragonflies flit from tree to tree, tasting each honeyed blossom, while green lizards and green beetles find secure homes in crevices of the mossy stems, and green whipsnakes too often glide about among the boughs, perhaps in pursuit of the pretty little green tree-frogs, which try to hide themselves beneath the green leaves.
As to the small green parroquets (which are the only Singhalese representatives of the parrot family), their name is legion, and they are as gregarious as our own rooks, vast flocks assembling towards evening in such trees as they fancy, uttering shrill screams, chattering and fluttering, while apparently fighting for the best places, and dispersing again in the early morning amid a babel of the same ear-splitting screams.
Though all these parroquets are practically green, several varieties have distinguishing marks; thus one peculiar to the mountains in the Central Province has a purple head; another, which is also peculiar to Ceylon, has a deep red plume on the crown of the head; a third has a grey head, and a fourth has a rose-coloured ring round the neck. Occasionally, but very rarely, a pure yellow parroquet is hatched, and is valued on the same principle as the many-headed palm, on account of its rarity.
Attractive to the eye as are these pretty birds, their unmusical voices make them anything but desirable neighbours, whereas some of the pigeons, whose plumage, though less brilliant, is quite as lovely, have most soothing melodious notes. Such is the Kurulu-goya, whose euphonious Singhalese name well expresses its note. These birds fly in flocks, and their colouring is most delicate green flushed with rose-colour. A small pretty pigeon with dark-green metallic plumage is the Batta-goya, while the Mahavilla-goya is also a small green dove The Kobaiya is a small grey turtle-dove, and the Baila-goya is a grey bird very like our own wood-pigeon.
A very common green and brown bird is the barbet, of which there are at least three varieties in Ceylon, one of which, with red head and green back, goes by the name of the ‘coppersmith,’ its strange metallic note being unpleasantly suggestive of hammering metal—a sound which, blending with the incessant creaking, sawing, and buzzing noises produced by various insects, to say nothing of the creaking of wooden cart-wheels and the working of the garden-well, sometimes become almost unendurably irritating.
Among the delicacies provided for us by a most attentive rest-house keeper were some of the oysters for which Bentota is famous, but they are poor little mis-shapen things, somewhat bitter in flavour, as well they may be, from a hereditary intuition of how successive generations of white men persist in tearing them from their homes, and yet never accord them one word of praise; for you never hear a Singhalese oyster named except in disparaging comparison with those of Europe or America. They are, however, allowed to be good when roasted on the shore, in the manner so familiar at Australian seaside picnics.
Alas! how poor words are to convey clear impressions of lovely scenes, with the countless characteristic details to which they owe so much of their charm! As I turn the pages of many sketch books and portfolios, and feel how vividly the slightest jottings recall places, and all their attractive Oriental inhabitants and interesting customs, I feel how impossible it is to make mere words convey any true idea of what is so fascinating to the eye.
To take one of the most insignificant examples, the ping-tallie or ping-chattie, i.e., ‘meritorious water-jar,’ placed at intervals along the roadside by some one anxious to acquire merit by keeping up a constant supply of cold water for thirsty wayfarers. Here is one sketched at Bentota on the brink of the sea. A large red chattie of porous earthenware on a stand to raise it some feet from the ground, and with a miniature roof of red tiles, the whole overshadowed by golden-green banana leaves; a little child carrying a large green leaf as a sunshade stands beside its mother while she refills the great jar, across which lies the wooden scoop with which each traveller takes out water and pours it into his hand, drinking thence, or else pouring it into his mouth from some height, so that men of all castes may drink without defilement.
Here is a very primitive ping-chattie poised on a tripod formed by three sticks, the upper end of which supports a thatch of palm-leaves. This is in a cocoa-palm tope, and a thirsty brown man with long silky black hair carries in his arms a kid, whose mother follows close, as does also a little child guiltless of any raiment.
Here is one equally primitive, sketched in a village near Kandy, where the red jar rests in the fork of a small dead tree, across the broken branches of which is poised the yellow fan-shaped leaf of a talipat-palm, to protect the water from the sun. Beside it grows a large aloe, and a datura literally white with large and very fragrant trumpet-shaped blossoms. Just beyond, overshadowed by a great ‘lettuce-tree,’ its beautiful lemon-yellow foliage gleaming in contrast with a bright blue sky, is an ambulam or rest-house for Tamil coolies, its solid white pillars supporting a red-tiled roof, on the summit of which is a curious red earthenware ornament, representing three times three cobras arranged in a pinnacle. Well for the merry squirrels who play hide-and-seek among the broken tiles that these are only images of the cobra, and not the genuine article! A troop of monkeys are also careering over the roofs and in the trees, while groups of turbaned men are cooking at small fires in the open air.
This rest-house is at the entrance of a village; all the roofs are red-tiled, and all are shaded either by large-leaved plantains, fragrant white daturas, potato-trees with lovely purple blossoms, or palm-trees loaded with nuts in all stages. On either side of the road flows a narrow stream, across which a separate arched bridge, with steps, leads to each house. In the open shops hang huge clusters of ripe bananas, and piles of huge jak fruit to be used in curries, fragrant pine-apples, bright green ripe oranges, and other fruit to tempt wayfarers, also large cages full of poultry. Among the innumerable, ever-changing groups which make up the kaleidoscope of colour, all in vivid light and shadow, comes a cart drawn by white bullocks, with the usual high-arched cover of dried palm-leaves, which throws such rich dark shadow on the figures crouching within. This one is literally covered, inside and out, with red earthenware jars of all sizes, hung on with cords.
I turn a page and find another village, which, described in words, would seem only a repetition of the last. But in this case the ‘meritorious water-chattie’ stands on a neat white pedestal, built upon one of the little bridges aforesaid, and it is protected by a large native umbrella supported by two sticks.
Just one more page! Here is a ping-tallie sketched at Dickwella. It is a most elaborately sculptured stone font, which (but that it represents grim heraldic lions) might take a place in any church. It certainly is out of keeping with the broken steps leading up to the rude well from which it is being filled by a bronze lad, clothed chiefly in his own long black hair, and who, by the help of a long rope, draws up his red jar from the deep cool waters far below. A Singhalese woman, barefooted of course, and showing a good deal of brown waist between her white jacket and orange-coloured comboy, is giving her brown little ones a drink from the wooden scoop, and oh! what pretty creatures are some of these, with their large lustrous black eyes. Similarly attractive scenes meet one at every turn, and give human interest to scenes of ever-changing loveliness.
The whole drive from Galle to Colombo, a distance of about seventy miles, is one long dream of beauty. The excellent carriage-road runs so close to the shore that we are constantly catching sight and sound of the vividly blue sea and grand surf, sometimes dashing on headlands of dark rock, sometimes breaking more gently on the yellow sands of peaceful bays, and revealing endless glimpses of fishing life—brown boats with ruddy sails, brown men, chiefly clothed in a yellow palm-leaf hat, drawing brown nets. The whole way is overshadowed by luxuriant vegetation in such varied combinations that the eye can never weary of such a succession of beauty.
Of course the tall slender palms, with their sunlit crowns, are the predominating feature, towering above all to a height of ninety to a hundred feet, bending in every direction, and often overgrown by graceful creepers, which hang in festoons and garlands. The most remarkable of these is the Gloriosa superba, there called ‘Neyangalla,’ a very peculiar climbing lily of a gorgeous scarlet and orange.
Sad to say, on the many thousand palms which clothe the shore from Bentota to Kalutara there is scarcely a nut to be seen, these trees being grown solely for the manufacture of arrack from the sap or toddy, which, as I have already described, is obtained by cruelly beating the flower spathe to prevent the formation of embryo nuts. One result of this unnatural culture is that the very bats are demoralised; and when the toddy begins to ferment, the great flying-foxes assemble in flocks and help themselves to the contents of the chatties so freely that they literally become drunk and riotous!
While many beautiful types of foliage combine to produce an endless variety overhead and on either side of the red road, the undergrowth is no less varied and lovely. There are an infinite variety of ferns, including several exquisite climbing species, which bear the most delicate little fronds, sometimes fringed with seed on stems like black horse-hair,[194] and which grow so rankly as to veil tall shrubs and hang in fairy-like wreaths from tree to tree. In some parts of the island I have seen these growing so abundantly that they are cut wholesale and used for thatch as ruthlessly as we cut common brackens, the large hair-like stems acting as excellent rain-conductors.
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Footnote 194:
Lygodium scandens.
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Then there are a great variety of aroids, with handsome arrow-headed leaves, from the cultivated yam and the calla-lily to the crimson veined and spotted caladium, familiar in our greenhouses, but of so much larger growth that a single leaf is often plucked as an effective and very pretty sunshade.
In the neighbourhood of Galle a beautiful white lily,[195] like our virgin-lily, grows freely along the shore on stems fully six feet in height, and generally with a luxuriant growth of goat’s-foot convolvulus, with shining green leaves and pink or delicate lilac blossoms, matting the shore to the brink of the sea, and invariably tenanted by innumerable tiny crabs, chiefly hermits—the ‘wise men’ of the sea, who live in houses built for themselves by other creatures.
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Footnote 195:
Pancratium zeylanicum.
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A charming feature of this drive, or indeed of any drive along the coast of Ceylon, is the great number of streams and rivers to be crossed by wooden bridges. Some are all fringed with feathery bamboos and palms; others, forming wide estuaries as they enter the sea, lose themselves in tidal swamps densely clothed with sombre mangroves, whose aerial roots form a labyrinth wherein myriads of crabs and shell-fish, watersnakes, crocodiles, and other unpleasant creatures, including swarms of mosquitoes, find a secure haven. A large proportion of these roots are thrown out from the stem at a considerable height above the mud, and bending downwards, act the part of buttresses to support the parent stem in the loose soil.
A very curious feature in the reproduction of the mangrove is that the seed does not fall from the seed-vessel when ripe, but therein remains and germinates, while the seed-vessel remains attached to the parent stem. The infant root grows out at the top, and continues growing till it reaches the mud, or till the seed-vessel drops off, in which case it equally lands in the mud, and there becomes established as a young mangrove to take its part in clothing the swamp, and by gradually extending the dense thicket of vegetation, reclaim more land from the neutral ground.
The bark of the mangrove is commercially valuable on account of the large amount of tannin it yields, and its timber is prized as firewood; but as population increases in the vicinity of mangrove-clad shores, it is a grave question whether the destruction of these maritime forests may not so disturb Nature’s equilibrium as to prove a source of danger, as the tannin, which ceaselessly drops from leaves, bark, and seeds, is said to be a powerful antidote against putrefaction, and in places where wholesale denudation has been permitted, as in the case of the Brazilian mangrove swamp off Rio, the enormous deposits of dead fish and shell-fish, which are left to decompose in the burning heat on the now bare banks of black mud, are so offensive as to be deemed in at least some measure accountable for the terrible visitations of yellow fever and other epidemics of comparatively recent introduction.
Another tree which flourishes on these shores is the Baringtonia, a large handsome tree with dark glossy foliage and clusters of delicate white blossom edged with crimson. It bears large fibrous fruits of pyramidal form, within which lie seeds which are used in medicine, and from which an oil is expressed for lamps, which is also occasionally used by fishers, who mix it with bait, and so contrive to stupefy the fish, which are then easily captured.
One of the loveliest of these many rivers is the Kalu-Ganga, or Black River, at the mouth of which is Kalutara, a large and pleasant village. We started from Bentota with the earliest glimmer of dawn, while fires were still gleaming in the fishers’ boats, and so had full benefit of the deliciously cool morning air, and of the lovely early lights reflected in the calm waters of a long beautiful lagoon. We halted close to Kalutara to secure a rapid sketch of a very fine banyan-tree which formed a magnificent archway right across the road, aerial roots having dropped from the main branches and taken root on the farther side. The whole was bearded with a fringe of long brown filaments and overgrown by luxuriant parasitic plants and ferns, producing a most beautiful effect. Alas! it is reported that this very remarkable tree has been blown over in a fierce gale.
Very fascinating is the view from the old fort at Kalutara, where we halted for breakfast, looking up the beautiful Kalu-Ganga to the distant mountain range, crowned as usual by the Mount of the Holy Foot, which is distant about sixty-five miles. The river is navigable for boats as far as Ratnapura, whence many of the pilgrims to the Peak avail themselves of this easy mode of returning to the sea-coast. Much of the estate produce is also brought by this easy waterway from the hills to Kalutara, and thence to Colombo either by rail or by further water-carriage through lagoons and canals, such as those by which we travelled to Kalpitya. The railway has the double advantage of speed and of security against dishonest boatmen, to whom the quiet of the lagoons offers almost irresistible temptations.
The river is here spanned by a wide bridge, below which lay moored many thatched boats, while seaward, fishers were drawing up their long seine nets and others were fishing from boats.
Strange to say, the laws of caste are as rigidly marked between the subdivisions of the fisher caste as between separate castes. There are five upper divisions, who are allowed to intermarry; each of these has a distinctive name, meaning ‘those who fish from the rocks,’ ‘those who fish from boats,’ ‘those who catch turtle,’ ‘those who cast nets,’ and ‘those who fish with a rod.’
Besides these there are a number of divisions of fishers of lower social position, who must on no account aspire to marry with their betters, though some are engaged in lucrative trades, such as boat and ship-building and cabinet-making. Some are carpenters and some are farmers—a curious blending of professions according to our British experience of the sharp line of demarcation which exists between our own fisher folk and all others inhabiting even the other end of the same village.
Kalutara is one of the few places in Ceylon where that most delicious of fruits the mangosteen ripens well—a great point in its favour. The industry by which the town is most widely known is that of weaving baskets from the fibre of a palm-leaf, which is split as narrow as fine grass, and dyed black, red, and yellow. The baskets are oblong, and are sold in nests of twelve, fitting inside of one another, very convenient to carry and very useful. They are wonderfully light and yet durable, and are made by women and children. Nearer to Colombo a good many Malays manufacture baskets and flower-stands from the rattan-cane, and at various villages in the interior we saw people weaving coarse rush-mats, but all finer ornamental mats used in Ceylon are imported from the Suvadiva group of the Maldive Isles, which are a dependency of Ceylon.
It is much to be feared that future travellers will miss much of the enjoyment of this lovely drive to Colombo, for the railway is now open as far as Bentota, with a station at the mouth of the Alutgama River—a beautiful line of railway, skirting still lagoons and generally running close along the shore, where the mighty waves break with a crash louder than the roar of the rushing train. But railway travel allows small leisure to realise all the beauties of the panorama so rapidly revealed, and in an Oriental land, where each moment we whirl past something of interest, it is the worst form of the aggravation of tableaux vivants, for at best we catch an unsatisfying glimpse of scenes which in the twinkling of an eye have vanished from our gaze.
Nothing is more remarkable in the history of all Oriental railways than the rapidity with which pilgrims of various faiths avail themselves of this mode of lightening the toil of their pilgrimage. The extension to Bentota proved no exception, for very soon after it was opened crowds of Mahommedans poured down from Colombo and elsewhere to worship at the Alutgama mosque.
Here, as elsewhere, the old life and the new flow side by side, sometimes in strange contrast. Thus while the railway from Kalutara to Bentota was in process of completion, three persons, including a native headman, were tried before the District Court for having subjected several persons to the torture known as the ‘ordeal by boiling oil,’ in order to extract a confession of the theft of some plumbago.
The accused, who did not attempt to deny the offence, were very much aggrieved that British law should interfere, and even punish them for an act sanctioned by ancient custom, and which, it appears, is still commonly practised in out-of-the-way parts of the Isle.
The ceremony is as follows. Oil from newly-gathered king cocoa-nuts is manufactured by a friend of the complainant, and is heated over the fire in a chattie. When boiling, each of the persons accused is required to dip his fingers thrice into the chattie, and, I believe, thrice also into a preparation of boiling cow-dung. If he can refrain from any exclamation of pain, he is held to be innocent, but any cry is equivalent to an admission of guilt. The only consolation of the victim is that he is at liberty to sprinkle over his adversary as much boiling oil as sticks to his fingers.
In the present case, though the five persons accused were all forcibly dragged up to the chattie and compelled to plunge their hands in the boiling oil, all managed to refrain from crying out except one young lad, though he was the least injured, consequently he was declared to be the thief and required to surrender the stolen property. All the five persons subjected to the ordeal were so shockingly scalded as to be unable to return to their work for three weeks.
Much to their indignation, the self-appointed torturers were each condemned to pay a fine of a hundred rupees, or undergo ten months’ imprisonment.
At Pantura (or, as it is now called, Panadura), about half-way from Kalutara to Colombo, we crossed a backwater of the sea, which, stretching inland, forms the beautiful lake Bolgoda, all dotted with charming islands. These are the homes of innumerable waterfowl, and also are the scene of a curious phase of bird life, quite à la Box and Cox, affording a roosting-ground by day to flocks of large flying-foxes, which, after a night of marauding among the fruit-trees, come here at dawn to hang themselves up on secure boughs, just as the crows, who have slept here peacefully all night, as beseems respectable workers, are starting on their day of useful toil as scavengers.
As we drove cheerily on our way from Kalutara to Colombo, the excellence of ‘the Queen’s highway’ could not but call forth the usual encomium, as we contrasted our pleasant drive from Galle with the toilsome journey of the Governor’s party when travelling over the same ground in the year 1800, when roads were non-existent. Just think of the heat and of the dust stirred up by 160 palanquin-bearers and 400 baggage-coolies trudging wearily through the hot sand, to say nothing of the troop of fifty lascars, six horses, and two elephants who were necessary for the transport and care of the tents!
Now the coast-road, 769 miles in length, extends right round the island, the greater part of it being available for wheel traffic, though here and there portions still leave room for improvement.
Since we parted at Galle, the Bishop had been ordered to Malta on sick-leave, and the Campbells had most kindly offered me headquarters at their pleasant temporary home in Captain’s Gardens, which is a promontory jutting into the Lake of Colombo, and clothed with most luxuriant vegetation—flowering trees gorgeous with fragrant blossom, kittool-palms seeming literally overladen with ropes of fruit, all reflected in the calm water, on which floated a wealth of lovely lilies.
At the entrance a fine banyan-tree formed an arch right across the road, somewhat in the style of the tree at Kalutara, but lacking its grace and its dainty tracery of ferns. Two fine india-rubber trees spread their wide arms and cool shade over the lawn in front of the comfortable bungalow, a one-storied house of the regular type, with a wide verandah and red-tiled roof, white pillars supporting the home of innumerable happy squirrels and little lizards.
A separate bungalow stood a little apart in the garden, and the large house was so full of little daughters that this separate ‘guest-house’ was assigned to me, greatly to my pleasure, as it was charmingly situated on the very brink of the lovely lake, and shaded with cocoa-palms of all ages (which implies the loveliest variety of form), growing amid cool green grass, and catching every breath of air, whenever there was the faintest breeze from sea or lake. And it certainly was hot; every one around was gasping and craving for the ‘Chota monsoon’[196] to bring cool rain, though personally I gloried in what seemed to me divine weather; and certainly I was always up to anything, from gunfire till starlight.
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Footnote 196:
Chota, small.
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It was fortunate that I was not troubled with nerves, for the house of which I was sole occupant had five outer doors and seventeen windows, not one of which could be securely closed, and so they all stood wide open day and night, for if they could not keep out thieves, there was no reason why they should keep out air! I confess to having experienced an occasional nocturnal qualm at the proximity of a large village of dhobies (laundry-men) not of the best repute, and sometimes awoke in the moonlight to make sure that there were no long poles coming in at the window to fish out my clothes in the approved fashion. However, no such evil befell; and, indeed, by reason of my host’s office, police orderlies were always somewhere about to scare marauders.
XXIII. NATIVE POLICE
Native police—Frequency of stabbing and of perjury—Intricate division of property—Too many legal advisers—Regulations concerning cart and servant registration—Pearl-fishery—Cruelty to animals—Volunteers.
The very fine body of native police, as at present constituted, is the creation of Mr. G. W. R. Campbell,[197] under whose command it continued till this year, 1891—a force of which he has good reason to be proud.
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Footnote 197:
Now Sir George W. R. Campbell, K.C.M.G.
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In September 1866, at the request of Sir Hercules Robinson, he resigned an excellent position in India to undertake the remodelling of the very unsatisfactory police force of that day.
He found it to consist of a nominal force of 560 men, but in reality there were only 470, quite untrained, and lacking in all esprit de corps. These were expected to keep order in a population of over two million people, by many of whom he found that crime was regarded with complete indifference, even in such horrible cases as that of a father lifting up his infant by the feet and dashing its brains out on the floor before its mother’s eyes, merely to gratify his almost causeless rage against her; or that of a man braining his own little girl on purpose to get his father-in-law hanged for murder. He found that even under the existing very imperfect system for detection of crime, no less than 81 cases of murder and 22 of manslaughter had been proven within the two previous years.
Where public opinion viewed such crimes with perfect apathy, it was no easy task for any body of police to work effectively. Nevertheless, in an amazingly short time Mr. Campbell had reorganised the whole force, and brought it into such excellent working order as to call forth the highest commendation from Sir Hercules, to whom Mr. Campbell then reported that his aim was to raise the police to such a point that the Ceylon Rifles (an expensive native regiment with European officers) might be altogether dispensed with.
However desirable, such a project then seemed quite beyond the range of possibilities. However, soon afterwards Mr. Campbell was sent to Penang as Lieutenant-Governor for eighteen months, and thence came to England on sick-leave. On his return to Ceylon, he found that during his absence the Ceylon Rifles had actually been disbanded as unnecessary, thereby effecting a very large saving for the colony.
A considerable number of the disbanded soldiers (mostly Malays) were drafted into the police, which incorporates men of very varied nationalities—British, Portuguese, Dutch, Singhalese, Tamils, and Burghers of mixed race, welding the whole into a remarkably fine and efficient force numbering about 1,470.
The men are smart and soldierly, and may be described as civil police with a semi-military training. The thick tight-fitting jacket and trousers and stiff leather stock were at once discarded in favour of a suitable and becoming uniform, consisting of tunic and trousers of dark blue serge, with waist-belt and boots of dark brown leather, and scarlet forage-cap with a black top-knot. They are armed with Snider rifles and swords, and are regularly drilled, but except when on gaol guard or guarding convicts or treasure, they only carry batons.
Their total cost to the general revenue is set down at 401,831 rupees per annum; that of the old force was about 150,000 rupees. The present outlay includes many such items as the feeding and transport of prisoners and of sick paupers, cost of working the elaborate and very efficient systems of registration of servants and carts, and many other matters; and well may Mr. Campbell say, when pleading for a greatly strengthened detective branch, ‘No country in the East has so small or nearly so cheap a force as Ceylon.’ ‘Can it be expected that 1,500 poorly paid police, more than half of whom are employed to guard convicts and treasuries and to keep order in the streets—can it be expected that this handful of men, scattered throughout a country nearly as large as Ireland, and with a population numbering nearly three millions, and criminal to an unusual extent, can bring a large majority of the worst criminals to justice?
‘Whereas Ireland, with a population a little more than double that of Ceylon, has about 13,000 police with 300 officers, Ceylon (with only seven officers in receipt of upwards of 1,500 rupees per annum, which, valuing the rupee at 1_s._ 6_d._, represents £112 16_s._ per annum) has under 1,500 police. Even this small force is employed on such duties as guarding convict gangs on public works, such as the saltpans at Hambantota, the Mahara quarries, the breakwater, &c. They are, further, the only relieving officers of the vagrant portion of the helpless poor; they must attend to vaccination, sanitation of places of pilgrimage, the weights and measures of dealers, storage of kerosine, gunpowder, &c., and they are now the gaolers of several of the minor gaols.’
Till within the last few years there were no harbour-police, so that all work of this sort likewise fell on the regular force. Now the development of Colombo harbour has necessitated the appointment of a harbour-inspector with a couple of whaleboats and about sixteen men specially for this work. The police are now scattered over the country in ninety-four different detachments, and considering that there are on an average only four of the regular police at each station in rural districts to look after about a hundred square miles of cultivated land, all liable to crop-thieving, and that they have to escort and guard prisoners, keep order in one or two large village bazaars, and by their presence deter crop-thieves and purchasers of such stolen goods, take care of sick wayfarers, and serve all the countless summonses and warrants that may be issued, it is evident that they cannot eat the bread of idleness. In the whole force there is not a single mounted constable, so all the work must be done on foot. In each province, however, the Government Agent has a body of untrained and unpaid village police, who in some measure lighten the toil of the regular police.
Some idea of the miscellaneous work which falls on the police department might be gathered from a single detail of its office-work, namely, that about 70,000 documents are annually received and despatched from the two chief offices alone, i.e., Kandy and Colombo.
At these two points the police barracks are a perfect triumph of ingenuity, so admirable is the result produced for the money expended, both as regards the construction of really handsome buildings at a very low cost, and also in the excellent taste displayed in the careful laying out of the grounds, with such profusion of flowering trees and shrubs, that the whole effect is that of luxuriant gardens.
This is especially striking at Kew, a peninsula on the Colombo Lake, formerly occupied by the Ceylon Rifles, whose barracks, with their dreary muddy surroundings, have been transformed by Mr. Campbell and his men into a scene of beauty. Here and at Bentota the gorgeous display of Gloriosa superba and other splendid climbing plants remains vividly impressed on my memory. The same care is shown wherever a police-station has been established in various parts of the Isle, and at elevations ranging up to 7,000 feet, so that these are in a measure experimental gardens for new products.
It is greatly to be desired that these should quickly multiply, for as yet very many police-stations are still without any Government buildings, consequently ordinary dwelling-houses are hired to act as offices and lock-ups, while the constables have to hire quarters for themselves, often widely scattered, and sometimes in very undesirable company. The married men, who constitute more than two-thirds of the force, have to pay about one-eighth of their whole slender salary for the use of very wretched huts.
This is doubly hard, as not only are the necessaries of life much dearer in Ceylon than on the mainland of India, but the rate of pay in all ranks is from a quarter to half that of the corresponding rank in the Indian police. Even the Inspector-General, after serving ten years in the Bombay police, and after twenty-four years of ceaseless toil in Ceylon, has received only 1,000 rupees a month, which is the average pay of a Superintendent of Police in India. But the generally low scale of pay is more apparent by comparing the weekly 31_s._ 6_d._ of a first-class London constable with the salary of the European constables in Ceylon, most of whom receive less than 10_s._ a week, minus several deductions!
Now, as regards our primary notions of the raison d’être of a police force, namely, the detection and suppression of crime, I confess it was to me almost incredible when I was first told of the deeply-rooted criminal tendencies of the Singhalese—these civil people, seemingly so mild and gentle, so courteous and sympathetic to strangers—to hear of many being savage and cruel to one another, cherishing anger, wrath, malice, jealousy, railing, and revenge, resulting in a terribly large proportion of robberies, violent quarrels, and murders, was certainly a grievous revelation. Yet alas! it is all too true, and the police reports present a dreadful catalogue of most callous murders, generally on account of the merest trifle, the victim being often some one to whom the murderer bears no ill-will, perhaps even his own near relation, and the sole cause is that a false charge of murder may be brought against some innocent person, against whom he has a spite! Imagine murdering a friend in order to throw blame on a foe!
But the larger number of murders are the result of momentary passion—it is a word and a stab, and these, alas! multiply only too surely with the ever-spreading curses of drink and gambling, ‘the prolific parents of Singhalese vice.’
No one can fail to be struck with the singularly small proportion of women who find their way to the prisons of Ceylon. The daily average of convicted persons in prison in the last twelve years ranges from 1,612 (of whom only 17 were women) to 3,627 (of whom only 32 were women). Mr. Campbell questioned a number of the most intelligent prisoners as to what cause they attributed this difference to. ‘Our women do not drink nor gamble,’ was the reply.
All agreed that these two evils lay at the root of all their trouble. Not only do illicit drinking-houses provide gambling facilities to attract customers, but the men frequent secluded gardens, and arrange lonely meeting-places in the forest, whither each carries his own supply of liquor, and then they settle down to gamble, betting (heads-and-tails fashion) on the throw of certain shells, flat on one side, round on the other.
Some men, whose whole year’s earning would barely exceed a hundred rupees, confessed to having lost or won two hundred at a sitting. Then, after this excitement, some are sulky, some desperate, and the majority more than half drunk. Then the beggared, reckless men begin quarrelling, and most cruel murders ensue, in which the victim is sometimes struck a score of times, the others probably going off to recruit their fortunes by robbery or cattle-lifting.
A large number of deaths are caused by blows from clubs or bludgeons, but a still larger proportion are due to stabbing with the sharp-pointed sheath-knife which a Singhalese habitually carries in his belt for pruning and other agricultural work, and which proves only too handy in every moment of passion. It is urged that a law forbidding the use of these implements, and enforcing that of clasp-knives, would be beneficial, as the moment required for opening a clasp-knife would give time for thought; especially if it happily closed on the fingers of the passionate man, it might tend to cool his ardour, the average Singhalese, like the brutal Briton, being very averse to pain. Hence the excellent deterrent influence of flogging—a tolerably liberal use of the lash or the rattan (cane) having been found highly efficacious in diminishing cattle-stealing in some of the worst districts.
That the ever-present, ever-open sheath-knife is largely responsible for Singhalese crime is shown by the fact that nearly all the murderers are of this race; whereas the Tamils, who do not habitually wear these knives, though continually being convicted of aggravated assault, almost invariably stop short of murder.
It is worthy of note that in almost all murder cases the victim and his assailant are of the same nationality—Tamil against Tamil, Singhalese against Singhalese, Malay against Malay—provoking the absence of any race animosity.
I think a few samples of cases quoted from the police reports will be of interest, and in any case, the native names are characteristic.
First, then, I find that Ponambalam, a Tamil man, having been locked up for drunkenness, made a desperate rush to escape. Noordeen Bawa, a police-constable, stopped him, when Ponambalam seized Noordeen’s thumb of the right hand in his teeth, and held it for half an hour. It could not be released till Ponambalam’s teeth were forced apart with a chisel. Poor Noordeen, whose thumb was nearly bitten through, died of tetanus.
Puchirale, a Singhalese cultivator, was on a tree in the jungle picking fruit, when Appuhamy, also a Singhalese cultivator, fired and killed him. He said he had mistaken him for a monkey, but as they had been on bad terms, Appuhamy was put on his trial, but was acquitted.
Urugala, a wealthy Singhalese cultivator, aged sixty-five, having signified his intention of distributing his property among his children to the exclusion of his son Ukkurala, the latter beat his father with a piece of sugar-cane, so that he died.
At Batticaloa a man quarrelled with his mother about a cow, and killed her with a stick. For this he received four months’ imprisonment.
Appuwa, a Singhalese cultivator, while drunk, stabbed with a knife and so killed his little daughter Kirihami, aged four years, owing to a quarrel with his wife for not having his food ready. He was acquitted.
Abaran, a Singhalese, was shot dead by Sirimalhami, whose mistress Abaran had carried off some months previously. Two young men helped Sirimalhami to remove the body to a jungle and there burn it. The two assistants were each sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment, but the murderer was acquitted.
Near Matara, eight Singhalese set upon one, and hacked him to death with choppers and sticks. Three were sentenced to ten years with hard labour, but the rest were acquitted.
Muttu Menika, a Singhalese girl of fifteen, was stabbed seventeen times by Dingirea, a Singhalese man twenty-four years of age, because she refused to marry him. He was sentenced to death.
Till recently all the inmates of a house were sometimes brutally murdered by robbers in order to get rid of inconvenient witnesses; but this was a characteristic of a form of gang-robberies now happily stamped out.
As examples of crime in 1889, Harmanis Soyza, a Singhalese fisher aged twenty-five, having deserted his mistress, Siku, a Singhalese girl aged twenty, and being taunted by her and her mother, became infuriated, and entering their house, stabbed and killed them both, also stabbing and grievously wounding Siku’s sister, Punchi Nona.
Balina, a Singhalese washerwoman, having quarrelled with Sunda, a neighbour, set fire to his house, and then stabbed him so that he died, for which she was sentenced to death.
That the amount of jewellery worn by children does not oftener lead them into peril is surprising. Here, however, is a case in point. Sinnasamy, a Tamil coolie, cut the throat of Ramer, a Tamil schoolboy aged eight, in order to steal his bangles, watch-chain, and two pairs of earrings. Sinnasamy was hanged, as he deserved to be.
Mataraye Samel, a Singhalese servant, struck Babie, an ayah, on the head with an areca-nut cutter, because she told her mistress of his intimacy with a girl in the house. Lock-jaw supervened and poor Babie died, whereupon Samel was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour.
Velen Sinnatambu, a Tamil, aged twenty-five, in a fit of rage hacked his wife, Sinnapillai, to pieces with a chopper. She was a girl under sixteen years of age. The murderer was hanged.
Even peaceful green pastures can be made the occasion of battle in Ceylon as well as in the Hebrides. Thus at Jaffna, Velan Kanapathi was killed, and Arumugan Kanapathi seriously injured, by being struck with stones in a quarrel about rights of pasturage. Ten men, all Tamils, were apprehended on this charge.
In the same district three Tamil men entered the house of a fourth, armed with clubs and a sharp-edged stone, and fractured his skull. Each was sentenced to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment. Another skull was fractured by a heavy stone at beautiful Matara, in an altercation over the produce of a kitool-palm tree.
Most extraordinary cases of murder are those which are done solely in order to bring a false accusation against someone else. At Galle, Nicholas de Silva Madanayeke took his own child, twelve months old, and dashed it to the ground; then accused three young men of good character of having killed it. Happily they were acquitted and the inhuman father was hanged within the walls of Galle gaol.
Another case is that of a man who shot his own brother in order to bring a charge of murder against three enemies, while another knocked out the brains of his own little daughter in order to get his father-in-law hanged for the murder.
Near Kurunegalla, a Singhalese boy, aged twelve, was strangled by Hatuhami, a Singhalese man, in order that the murder might be attributed to some Buddhist priests with whom he was at enmity. For this, Hatuhami was sentenced to five years’ hard labour.
Here is a more elaborate story of a case which occurred in 1879. A young Singhalese girl, possessed of some land, had just died. Two men induced another Singhalese girl to personate her, and to appear before a notary and make over the land to them. The fraud was discovered, and in order to prevent the whole story from being revealed, the men dragged the luckless girl night after night from one jungle to another, till she told them that life was a burden to her; whereupon they killed her, and cut off her head to prevent identification in case the body should be found. Found it was, and identified by the toes, which were partially webbed. The men were hanged.
One is struck by the pitifully small temptation which results in such cruel murders. For instance, Babiela, a Singhalese villager, had a trifling dispute with a neighbour, and knowing that he possessed jewels worth about 200 rupees (less than £20), he stole quietly into the house at midnight, and cut the throats of the man, his wife, and four children. This miscreant was hanged.
I will only quote two more cases, each full of dramatic interest, only premising that though all the names are Portuguese, all the dramatis personæ are pure Singhalese. The first is that of Miguel Perera, a wealthy and influential Singhalese, living within ten miles of Colombo, and a man popular with Europeans because of his pleasant manners, and on account of his great energy and influence among his people. When anything had to be done quickly, such as the repair of a road or the decoration of a town to welcome a distinguished visitor, he was the man to be depended on. For these good services he received from Government the title of Mudaliyar of Ragama.
But there was a dark side to this attractive person. In his private life he was unscrupulous and tyrannical, both to men and women, and when one day he was found at high noon lying on a road on his own estate with his throat cut, the investigation proved that the crime had been committed by some of his own retainers, goaded to madness by his ill-usage, one detail of which was that after cruelly beating a man, he would lock him up for the night in stocks, which he kept at his own house.
Four men were apprehended, and the evidence would almost undoubtedly have proved them to be murderers. But it seems as if the Singhalese could not leave justice to prove itself, so the two eldest sons of the dead man set to work to torture witnesses in order to fabricate further evidence, chiefly with a view to implicate an enemy of their father’s, Louis Mendis. Tampering with witnesses is an everyday occurrence, but torturing them is going a little too far; so when this conspiracy came to light, the tables were turned—the murderers were acquitted, and the two brothers were each sentenced to three years’ imprisonment with hard labour.
The Louis Mendis just mentioned was a cart-contractor, living at Nawalapitiya, in the Central Province, and the quarrel with Miguel Perera was due to the latter sending carters all the way from the coast to take away his custom. Mendis, not unnaturally, urged his own men to beat the intruders, and on one occasion, when he had primed his men with much arrack, a savage encounter occurred, in which a young carter from the coast, by name Juan Fernando, was said to have been killed. There was evidence of Fernando having been seen wounded, especially on the shoulder, but no corpse could be found, and Mendis and his party averred that the story of his death was a fabrication in order to damage Mendis, and that Perera was keeping Fernando out of sight.
Several months later the father came from his home on the coast to inform the police that he could point out the spot where his son’s body was buried. He accordingly led them to a spot in the jungle some miles from Nawalapitiya, and there they found the headless and decomposed corpse of a young man with a broken shoulder-blade, and on the body was found the waist-belt of the missing Juan Fernando, with his initials scratched on the plate. It was assumed that the body had been carried to the jungle, and there buried by a carter in the service of Mendis, who, however, was not available as a witness, having, in the interval, been hanged for stabbing a police-constable. Consequently, Mendis and his men were punished only for assault, being sentenced to terms of imprisonment with hard labour.
They maintain, however, that Juan Fernando is still alive, and concealed by Perera’s party, and that the body was one taken by Perera’s order from some graveyard, adorned with Fernando’s belt, and buried in the jungle in order to ruin Mendis, the head being removed in order to prevent its being proved that the body was not that of Fernando. (Of course Perera’s people say the head was removed to prevent identification; but if that had been the case, it would have been a strange oversight to leave the belt with the telltale initials.)
These instances may suffice to give some idea of the chief difficulty which attends all judicial inquiries in Ceylon, namely, that of dealing with a race who, so far from attaching any disgrace to perjury, consider it as a fine art, and that the courts of law are the field where it may be most effectually and brilliantly practised. Mr. Campbell says, ‘Perjury is rampant and destructive, flooding our courts with false cases, paralysing their action, and producing grave deterioration of character.’
In his recent report on the administration of police in Ceylon, Mr. Giles[198] observes: ‘The most dangerous form of crime in Ceylon, and that which perhaps involves the greatest moral turpitude, is the proneness of the people to prefer false accusations and to bear false testimony. No man can feel safe while this state of things continues; and the evils are by no means confined to the individuals falsely accused. The prevalence of perjury causes the judiciary to reject evidence which, in a purer atmosphere, would be unhesitatingly accepted, and criminals benefit by this reluctance. The courts are flooded with cases which should never come before them, their time dissipated in vainly endeavouring to arrive at truth where all is falsehood, and a virtual denial of justice often leads to the perpetration of fresh crime.’
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Footnote 198:
Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Bengal.
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A somewhat striking illustration of this all-round falsehood was revealed to an astonished European by a grateful client, who had recently won a case to the utter amazement of his adversary. The latter had brought an action against him for the recovery of a large sum of money, for which he held defendant’s bond. There were reliable witnesses to prove the debt, and the case was apparently quite clear, till the defendant produced the plaintiff’s receipt in full for the sum advanced and duly repaid, and a tribe of witnesses to prove the authenticity of the signature. Nothing could be clearer, and the case, after patient hearing, was dismissed.
Now came the surprising revelation, which was that there had been no money lent and none repaid; but from the moment the defendant had learnt the charge that was to be brought against him, he had been perfectly aware that a bond must have been forged, and witnesses bribed to attest it; therefore (on the principle of ‘diamond cut diamond’), he had at once secured the services of a skilful forger to prepare the receipt, and of witnesses to attest it, and had thus by foul means secured the justice which he could not have obtained by fair straightforward action.
This is a fair example of the manner in which the criminal law is employed as ‘an engine of oppression rather than of redress;’ and to such an incredible extent is this perversion of justice carried, that in his report for 1881 Mr. Campbell says that from 95,000 to 110,000 persons are each year apprehended or summoned before the courts and never brought to trial, showing either the utter frivolity of the cases, or that the complainants or witnesses, or both, have been bought over.
‘Even these figures,’ he says, ‘large as they are, give no idea of the extent to which the machinery of justice is misused by the people to oppress and harass each other, and actually to frustrate justice itself, until we take into account the cloud of witnesses who are also brought up by summons and warrants, and further take into account the multiplied postponements which characterise our courts, and unless we still further recollect the multitude of minor cases which are annually tried by the Gansabhawa or village tribunals. These, in the course of the year 1880, numbered no less than 26,748.
‘The results of this inordinate misuse of the courts are the impoverishment of the people both by a waste of time and by actual expenditure on worthless crowds of self-styled lawyers, the fostering of their innate love of litigation, the encouraging of false witnesses and perjury, the general demoralisation which follows the prostitution of courts of justice, and the obstruction of the thorough investigation and punishment of serious crime. Better that a man should at his own proper peril strike a blow with a stick, or even with a knife, than that, by making false and malicious charges, he should make a court of justice an instrument for inflicting a cowardly blow. The blow by the court is quite as severe as the other, and the demoralisation of every one concerned is infinitely greater.’ It has been tersely said that ‘perjury is made so complete a business that cases are as regularly rehearsed in all their various scenes by the professional perjurer as a dramatic piece is at a theatre.’
Of course, when it is so impossible for a judge to know who or what to believe, true evidence is constantly rejected, criminals escape, and innocent people suffer unmerited punishment, or at least retain a rankling sense of injustice which leads to retaliation, either in the form of false charges in court or of criminal violence.
This subject impressed itself strongly on Mr. Campbell on his first arrival in 1866, when, at the court at Panaduré, out of six hundred cases instituted there were only six convictions. Of course, such immunity from punishment tends to prevalence of crime, the chances of conviction being so small that heinous offences are committed with little risk; for nothing is easier than to bribe all the witnesses, and probably the headman, whose duty it should be to prosecute, and sometimes even the plaintiff himself is bribed!
As regards the headmen, it is only natural that they should be amenable to bribes, for instead of receiving remuneration for helping in the detection of crime and the capture of criminals, by doing so they often have to incur serious expense out of their own slender means; so naturally it conduces both to their ease and profit to screen offenders.
The number of convictions fluctuates greatly, not from increase or decrease of crime, but according to the varied interpretation of law by successive Chief-Justices. In some years the interpretation has been such that convictions have been almost impossible, and so the most glaring criminals have been acquitted, and all their fraternity, openly laughing at the police, become bold beyond measure. Then comes a Chief-Justice who interprets laws differently; criminals find their deserts, and a comparative lull ensues.
Mr. Campbell has for years striven to effect the introduction of various simple measures with a view to lessening some of the evils complained of. Such are the preliminary investigation of cases ere granting warrants and summonses wholesale. This was instituted in 1872, as was also the payment of a trifling stamp duty, amounting only to 15 cents on each criminal charge and 5 cents on each subpœna of an accused person, or of one summoned as a witness.
Incredible as it may seem, these petty and vexatious cases, which in 1871 had numbered 68,832, at once fell to 46,701 in 1872! That stamp fees amounting to a few pence should in one year have kept 22,131 cases out of court is good proof of how frivolous and false were the pretexts for litigation.
Unfortunately, in 1888 the process was in a measure reversed. The 25-cent duty was taken off of all charges of voluntarily causing hurt, consequently the list of one class of cases rose in one year from 6,820 to 20,052, mainly owing to utterly frivolous, and certainly in most cases false charges; the lesson to be learnt being that ‘the trifling tax suffices to deter a large number of vindictive, idle, litigious people from using the courts as engines to oppress their neighbours.’
In one very common class of accusation, against which no man can be safe, namely, that of grave immorality, the whole question turns on which man can bribe the largest number of false witnesses, and the innocent accused is very often obliged to purchase safety by paying his accuser to let the charge drop.
If the besetting sin of the Singhalese is their inordinate love of litigation, this certainly is fostered by their very troublesome law of inheritance, which results in such minute subdivisions of property that the 199th share of a field, or a 50th of a small garden containing perhaps a dozen palms and a few plantains, becomes a fruitful source of legal contention, quarrels, and crime. Emerson Tennant alludes to a case in which the claim was for the 2,520th share in the produce of ten cocoa-palms!
As a sample of this sort of litigation, the Rev. R. Spence Hardy quoted an instance of an intricate claim on disputed property, in which the case of the plaintiff was as follows: ‘By inheritance through my father I am entitled to one-fourth of one-third of one-eighth. Through my mother I am further entitled to one-fourth of one-third of one-eighth. By purchase from one set of co-heirs I am entitled to one-ninety-sixth, from another set also one-ninety-sixth, and from a third set one-ninety-sixth more. Finally, from a fourth set of co-heirs I have purchased the 144th of the whole.’ There is a nice question to solve ere a landowner can begin to till his field or reap its produce.
But though these difficult questions must always have proved a fruitful source of contention, it is only in recent years that the number of gentlemen of the legal profession has increased so enormously. Mr. Spence Hardy, writing in 1864, stated that sixty years previously there were in the Isle only two Dutchmen who did the whole work of advocates. Even in that time the number had increased to 16 advocates, 135 proctors, and 144 notaries.
Now, as we enter on the last decade of the century, there are about 300 advocates and proctors, and solicitors and notaries have increased in proportion, besides an incalculable brood of self-styled lawyers of the lowest species, who infest every village tribunal, ‘outdoor proctors,’ as they are called, who gain their own living by inciting the people to litigation, till the whole country is flooded with warrants and summonses, resulting in a large proportion of the population spending their time either in the courts or on the road between them and their houses, greatly to their own impoverishment.
It is, perhaps, not to be wondered at that so many favour a profession in which the highest honours are equally open to all without distinction of race—Singhalese or Tamil, Portuguese or Dutch, Eurasian or European, have equal chances in the race for distinction as barristers, magistrates, or judges.
In looking over the list of these legal names, I am much struck by observing how curiously certain names predominate in certain districts. Thus among the notaries in the Southern Province I find twenty-one De Silvas, distinguished by such high-sounding first names as Goonewardene, Sameresingha, Wickremanaike, Rajakuruna, &c. Turning to the Colombo district, I find in succession fourteen of the family of Perera with such Christian names as Andris, Juan, Paulus, Manual, &c. Of the multitude of De and Don there is no end, by no means necessarily implying Portuguese descent, but because so many of the families of purest Singhalese and Kandyan blood took these names from the godfather of their Christian baptism; thus we have Don Philip de Alvis, Don Charles Appuhamy, Don Carolis Senevaratna, Don Francisco Weresakara, Don Johanis Amarasakara, Domingo De Mendis.[199]
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Footnote 199:
I trust these gentlemen will pardon my quoting real names to illustrate an interesting subject.
As a sample of pleasant names for daily use, I cannot resist quoting a paragraph from a Ceylon paper which happens to be lying before me:—
‘A MURDERER WANTED.—Induruwabadahelage Jema of Talawala, charged with the murder, on July 20th last, of one Pepiliyanebadahelage Barlis Barbos, has fled from justice. A large reward is offered for such information as shall lead to his apprehension and conviction.’
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Some historical suggestion may perhaps be gathered from the geographical distribution of these names. Thus in the list of notaries for the district of Colombo, I observe nine with the prefix De, and upward of forty with that of Don. In Kalutara, out of fifty-one, twenty-three own these honorific prefixes. Ratnapura has sixteen notaries, not one prefix. In the Central Province a dozen in a hundred are thus distinguished. In the Eastern and Northern Provinces, including Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Jaffna, and Manaar, there is not one. In the Southern Province, out of a total of about fifty, twenty-four are De and only one Don. In the North-West Province, Chilaw owns one in fifteen, and Kurunegalla, out of a list of twenty-seven, furnishes one Don.
It would be interesting to know whether the names accepted in the last century as a passport to State employment retain any special traditionary interest for their present owners.
Where so many have elected to earn their own bread by fostering the natural love of litigation among their countrymen, it follows that the blessing of the peacemakers is the last thing to be desired, and the longer a case can be spun out, and the oftener it is postponed, the better for the lawyers. In this respect matters have not mended since, in 1849, Major Thomas Skinner wrote: ‘The prevailing system of our district courts admits of the proctors feeding upon their client for years.... I have seen instances wherein the judicial stamps have far exceeded the value of the case under adjudication, and which, by numberless vexatious postponements, have been protracted over a period of many years, to the ruin of both plaintiff and defendant—the proctors by their fees, and the Government by the sale of judicial stamps, being the only gainers.’
For one thing, criminal cases are constantly brought to court so ill-prepared as to necessitate being postponed again and again, thus wasting the time of magistrates, prosecutors, and witnesses.
Another thing by which the business of the courts is very unnecessarily delayed is by the invariable employment of magistrates’ interpreters. In India, where in each Presidency there are so many different languages, each magistrate is bound to master whatever is requisite for the conduct of his own court, interpreters being only employed in the supreme courts. In Ceylon, although there are only two native languages, in which every newcomer has to pass examinations, every word spoken in court, every question and every answer, must be repeated through an interpreter, just doubling the work and the time expended.
Among the cases which call for considerable detective skill are those of forging bank-notes and coins, the former being generally the joint work of professional engravers and surveyors, while the false rupees, though generally manufactured by Singhalese goldsmiths, are occasionally proved to be the handiwork of Buddhist priests, who have acquired the requisite skill by casting images of Buddha! The Buddhist priests are said to be the chief money-lenders and usurers, and it is whispered that they contribute rather a large proportion to the catalogue of felons, though, to avoid scandal, they are generally unrobed before trial. Some years ago, however, one was hanged in full canonicals, just to show that British law is no respecter of persons.
As regards deaths from violence or accident, the statistics for 1889 show that during that year inquests were held in the Isle on the bodies of 2,166 persons. But there must have been many more whose deaths were never heard of—men and women who from sickness or weakness perished by lonely roadsides, or were killed by wild beasts in jungles, or murdered and secretly buried, to say nothing of those drowned in the sea, the rivers, lakes, and tanks.
Among the details of these deaths are 125 suicides, of whom 21 drowned themselves and the rest hanged themselves, 121 died from snake-bites, 87 by accidentally drowning in rivers and tanks, 134 by falling into wells, 383 by falling from trees, and 33 from gunshot wounds. (The increasing misuse of firearms forms a notable feature in recent police reports.) Almost every year wild beasts are responsible for a certain proportion of deaths; bears, elephants, chetahs, boars, buffaloes, alligators, and even hornets and bees, each doing their part in thus thinning the population.
To glance at the pleasanter aspects of police-work in Ceylon, one of Mr. Campbell’s most successful schemes has been the Servants’ Registration Ordinance, by which every servant is bound to have a pocket-register, in which his antecedents are recorded, as are also the beginning and end of each new service, and the character he has acquired in each. The registrars are assistant-superintendents of police. The scheme has proved invaluable in the prevention of one of the commonest forms of burglary, made easy by the connivance of servants.
Alas! here as elsewhere familiarity with the white race does not always tend to raise them in the veneration of their brown brothers. Mr. Campbell says: ‘The days have gone by in which we could leave the house-door unbarred during the night. Much of the old contentedness and of the old respect for the European has gone, and new wants and excitements—amongst them drinking and gambling—must be satisfied.’
In a country whose wealth consists so largely in its crops, these of course, are a continual source of temptation to thieves, not only in the wide extent of growing crops, which it is scarcely possible for planters to guard, but still more when these are gathered and travelling from the store to the market. Take, for instance, the transport of coffee from a plantation in Uva to Colombo, a distance of perhaps two hundred miles, by road, river, and either lake or rail. Each cart-load is worth about 1,000 rupees, each boat-load about 10,000 rupees.
Under the old system each cart-load was intrusted to the sole care of a carter, and each boat-load to that of a crew, of whom, in either case, ‘the senders generally knew absolutely nothing, and in whose honesty they had every cause to disbelieve!’ The consequence was that whole cart-loads sometimes disappeared. In one case the police had the satisfaction of convicting a carter and a native agent who had thus appropriated 400 bushels of coffee, valued at 4,500 rupees! Less audacious thieves were content with freely helping themselves from the coffee-bags. These carts were lost sight of for weeks; and the coffee which travelled from Ratnapura to Colombo by river, canal, and lake was at the mercy of the boatmen, who could halt for as many days as they saw fit, and call the aid of their families to manipulate it as they pleased.
So that throughout its long journey the coffee was subject to pilfering at the hands of drivers, boatmen, and other depredators, who sometimes stole half the good beans and filled up the sacks with inferior ones, or else made up weight and bulk by swelling the remainder with water, so that it reached the London market deteriorated in colour and in value.
To counteract this mischief, Mr. Campbell devised a simple and very effectual system of cart registration. He established police-stations at regular intervals along the road and river from Ratnapura to Kalutara (whence the sea-coast railway conveys the freight to Colombo), and each loaded cart or boat is compelled to report itself at each of these stations, whence the exact date of its arrival and start is intimated day by day to the Chamber of Commerce at Colombo. Thus the precious produce is under strict care throughout its journey, and theft becomes well-nigh impossible.
The regulation of pilgrimages and the strict sanitation of pilgrim camps is another of the schemes devised and excellently enforced by Mr. Campbell, thereby preventing a very large amount of suffering and mortality, and the too probable development of cholera in the Isle.
The system of police registration of all dogs is so rigidly enforced in the principal towns, that Ceylon is in a great measure exempt from hydrophobia. Each registered dog must wear a stamped municipal collar, obtained by his owner on payment of a small fee, and any luckless dogs not provided with this safeguard are captured and carried in a large cage on wheels to a pond, where, unless claimed within forty-eight hours, they are either shot or drowned (by bodily immersing the cage in water).
A matter which has involved much care and thought has been how to check cruelty to animals in this land, where (by the teaching of Buddha being carried out in the letter and utterly neglected in the spirit) life must not be taken—at least not the life of lower animals, for that of human beings is by no means so secure! But suffering is of no consequence. The cruelty so common in Ceylon is not wanton, as in too many countries, but seems to arise from sheer callousness to the tortures which are carelessly inflicted on poor suffering creatures. Thus deer, hares, snipe, doves, &c., badly wounded and with broken bones, are kept alive for days and hawked about in hopes of obtaining a sale. Six or eight fowls are tightly tied together by the feet, and are then strung, head downwards, from the ends of a stick balanced on the shoulder, and are thus carried for miles, cackling in anguish, till they are too weak and suffering to do so any more. Even the lovely little green parroquets are not exempt from cruel treatment. Large numbers are captured in the neighbourhood of Chilaw, and crammed into mat bags, the mouth of which is tied up, and these are carried, slung from the ends of a stick, all the way to Colombo, where the survivors find a ready market.
Fat pigs are thus fastened to a stick, carried between two men, the cord by which their poor legs are tied cutting deep into the flesh, and causing such pain that the wretched pig sometimes dies ere reaching his destination. The system of branding cattle by burning elaborate patterns all over them (to the destruction of the hide) is justified by the plea that doing so prevents rheumatism. Whether it does so or not, it assuredly causes the poor beast excruciating agony.
Worst of all is the barbarity, formerly commonly practised in the open market, and not yet wholly put down, of selling large live turtles piecemeal, each purchaser pointing out the exact slice he desired, while the wretched fellow-creature lay writhing and gasping in agony for hours, till the last comer came to claim the heart and head, the latter being the only vital part; for, wonderful to tell, turtles continue to live and suffer after the heart has been cut out.
The commonest form in which cruelty is now apparent is in over-driving wretched worn-out horses, which are too often brutally beaten to make them drag weights far beyond their strength.
In 1862 a law was enacted for the protection of domestic animals, elephants, and turtles, but it does not appear to have been strictly enforced till about ten years ago. In 1881, however, the police were exhorted to greater diligence in this matter, with such excellent effect, that since that date there have been upwards of 3,000 convictions under this head. Moreover, a strong Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has now been formed, which it is hoped will prove a valuable auxiliary to the police. In the first six months of 1891 it secured convictions of cruelty against 229 persons in Colombo alone.
In addition to the regular duties of the police, a severe strain of work occasionally arises from external causes. Such was the famine in Southern India in 1877, from which time till 1880 thousands of poor starved creatures found their way to Ceylon, hoping to obtain employment on the estates, but who from weakness and illness were totally unable to work.
These helpless creatures, men, women, and children, reduced by starvation to mere apathy, were collected from the roadsides. Hundreds were found dead or dying, and received decent burial. The survivors were carried to temporary hospitals, where they were cared for and fed till they were able to work or travel, when they were helped on their journey, the naked being furnished with needful clothing, and free passages to India provided for such as longed to return to their own homes. So cheaply was this managed, that the average cost of the journey for each coolie was under two rupees. Food for the voyage was also provided, and a small sum to keep them from starvation on their journey from the coast to their own village.
A very onerous ‘occasional duty’ is the care of the pearl-fishery, as may well be imagined, were it only in guarding the sanitation of the huge camp of 10,000 persons on the arid sea-beach, to which are daily brought millions of oysters to putrefy in the burning sun. The presence of about sixty police is required for about eighty days, during which they have charge of everything. They must strictly guard the only available drinking-water; they are responsible for the orderly and punctual start of all the boats, numbering about two hundred, and for seeing that each is escorted by a member of the civil boatguard, who must never sail twice with the same tindal and crew. The boats start at midnight and return the following afternoon, when the oysters are carried ashore in baskets, and the European police have to keep close watch during the unloading, and then, in all weather, to wade out and search the boats to see that no oysters have been secreted. They must also ceaselessly guard the enclosure within which the precious shells are stored, for when an uncomfortable oyster gapes, and reveals a tempting pearl, there are plenty of eager coolies ready to snatch it up and swallow it, or, if it is small enough, they might conceal it under a long finger-nail. But so well do the police guard the treasure, that there is no reason to believe that either the pearls or the large sums of money brought for their purchase are ever stolen.
Having discoursed at such length on the police and their manifold duties, I may add that Ceylon has now also a very efficient volunteer regiment—the Ceylon Light Infantry Corps, which in 1885 numbered 930, including officers. Like the police, this force is composed of representatives of all the nationalities on the Isle, namely, 200 British-born, 454 Eurasians, 86 Malays, 53 Tamils, 107 Singhalese, and 33 others. The headquarters of the force are at Colombo, but companies are stationed at Kandy, Badulla, and Kurunegalla.[200]
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Footnote 200:
Since the retirement of Sir G. W. R. Campbell from public service, the police force in each province has been placed under the direction of the Government Agent, who is held responsible for the suppression of crime and for the maintenance of order. Under these circumstances, there is room for hope that there will henceforth be less zeal in promoting a more extensive sale of arrack.]
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Long may it be ere they are called out to defend the beautiful Isle against foreign foes!