The Sea Road to the East, Gibraltar to Wei-hai-wei / Six Lectures Prepared for the Visual Instruction Committee of the Colonial Office

by A. J. Sargent

Then we come on a group of dark-brown men wearing loincloths and turbans and repairing the 13 roadway with pick and shovel; these are Tamil coolies from Southern India, doing the heavy work of the 14 town. Another trots in the shafts of a ricksha, the carriage of the East, which we shall meet again. As we go further into the town, we meet natives from the country districts on their way to market in two-wheeled 15 carts, thatched with leaves of the coconut palm and drawn by little humped bullocks. They wear the comboy and little else, as they are less influenced by foreign ideas than the people of the town. Let us follow 16 them into the Pettah, or native quarter, with its trams and rickshas and busy shops. Here we see the carts 17 collected in the open market place, and in the streets we notice a new type of men; these are Moormen or Mohammedans, who carry on much of the business of the town. Some of them wear the fez, which we see at times even in our own country; others, more old-fashioned, wear strange-looking hats shaped like a beehive. On 18 our way back we pass a Hindu temple, which reminds us again that India, its people and its creeds are close at hand.

The Europeans are almost as varied as the natives. Some are English, officials or planters; others are Dutch by race; while there are also a great number of half-caste descendants of the original Portuguese settlers. Many of the half-castes bear Portuguese names and imitate European dress and manners.

We can easily see something of the habits of the poorer classes since they live largely in the public view. Their houses are wattled huts of mud and bamboo, thatched with leaves or roofed with red tiles, and open to the street except at night when they are boarded up carefully, as the Sinhalese are not fond of the night air. We may perhaps see a family occupied with the morning toilet, in front of the house; and here in a corner of the lake 19 are the dhobies or native washermen at work. The lake is one of the most beautiful sights of the town; it is really one of the lagoons which we find all round the coast, where the mouth of a stream has silted up. The Dutch, following their home customs, utilized these lagoons and developed a system of canals along the low coastline. Part of the system is still in use, and we can travel by small steamer from Colombo northward to 20 Negombo. Here is a scene on the canal. The Dutch have also left traces of their rule in scattered fortifications and in the Roman-Dutch law which is still the basis of the legal administration in the island. Many of the lawyers in the local courts are of Dutch descent.

The Dutch had ample time to leave their mark on Ceylon, as they held it from the middle of the seventeenth century, when they wrested it from the Portuguese, until the end of the eighteenth, when it was handed over to Great Britain at the time when Holland was subject to France. The Dutch traders were attracted to Colombo and the southwest coast by the cinnamon which grew there; the bark of the cinnamon was the most valuable product of Ceylon and almost the only export, apart from elephants, until well into the nineteenth century. The cinnamon trade was a strict government monopoly, enforced by harsh penal laws, and the monopoly remained, even under English rule, until 1832. One other interesting trace of Dutch rule survives in the many miles of palm groves, planted by forced native labour, which we have already noticed along the coast from Colombo to Galle.

For a century and a half before the Dutch occupation the island was under the power of Portugal. The wars of the Dutch were undertaken to advance their trade; but the Portuguese fought for the idea of Empire, and one of their chief aims was the conversion of the conquered races to Christianity. The effect of Portuguese rule still survives in the coast districts where Portuguese names are common, in the mixed race and the local corrupt Portuguese dialect, and above all in the thousands of natives professing the Roman Catholic religion. The word Don, formerly a Portuguese title, is still in use among the natives as a personal name, and many even of the pure Sinhalese have adopted high-sounding Portuguese names.

Neither the Dutch nor the Portuguese succeeded in subduing the highlands of the interior; their occupation and interests were limited to the coast strip. It was left to England, in the nineteenth century, to penetrate inland and build roads and bring the whole of the island under a single control. We now leave Colombo, and travel by train to visit the highlands and the old capital at Kandy, where we shall learn something of the up-country Sinhalese, who differ considerably from those of the sea-coast. The line is built on a broad gauge and the train has a comfortable restaurant car attached as in England. At the start, we run through mile after mile of padi fields. The native agriculture is simple: first the muddy earth is scratched with a primitive 21 plough, drawn by water buffaloes, which are used in the fields as the wet mud does them no harm; the crop is sown with many strange ceremonies, and a little later the water impounded from the streams is allowed to flow over the young plants; later still the land is again drained dry and the ripened grain is reaped by hand. The Sinhalese are agriculturalists and nothing else; working on their own land is among them the most honourable pursuit, though they are not as ready to work for others. They brought with them from their original home in Bengal their national taste for rice, and kept to their former habits, although much of Ceylon is not well fitted for its cultivation, and great irrigation works were necessary to provide the water. Even on the hillsides we still see the padi grown by means of terraces. On the ridges between the padi fields are groves of coconut palms; and here and there we come 22 on a native village or house, like the one in front of us, always with its little group of palms and other trees, growing without attention and providing for most of the simple wants of the villager. The leaves provide thatch for his hut, unless he is wealthy enough to use red tiles, and are woven into mats or baskets; the stalks make fences, while the trunks give beams and troughs and furniture. From the sap he makes sugar and spirits: the husk of the nut gives fibre for rope: the shell makes drinking bowls and spoons; while the kernel can be eaten, or dried as copra and then pressed for the oil, which is exported to Europe. We have already seen this in the Seychelles. It is hardly surprising that where Nature supplies so much without effort on his part, the Sinhalese is not according to our ideas industrious. To him the coconut palm is a necessary part of his existence, and he well expresses this in the saying that the tree will not grow out of sound of the human voice. But the coconut palm has another aspect in Ceylon. The Sinhalese gentry have discovered its commercial value, and in various parts of the island, especially round Negombo and Batticaloa, there are large estates where the nut is grown on the plantation system for export. There is already a larger area under the coconut palm in this form than under tea, and the coconut as a commercial product increases steadily in importance. It is interesting to note that it is the wealthier natives and not the foreign planters who are mainly responsible for the development of this profitable business. In the northern part of the island we find another species of palm 23 tree, the palmyra. This palm is almost as important to the Tamils who inhabit the district as the coconut is to the Sinhalese further south.

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[See [page 65].