7: An Account of the Interior of Ceylon, &c., by JOHN DAVY, M.D. 4to, London, 1821.
Here the long series of writers is broken, just at the commencement of a period the most important and interesting in the history of the island. The mountain zone, which for centuries had been mysteriously hidden from the Portuguese and Dutch[1] was suddenly opened to British enterprise in 1815. The lofty region, from behind whose barrier of hills the kings of Kandy had looked down and defied the arms of three successive European nations, was at last rendered accessible by the grandest mountain road in India; and in the north of the island, the ruins of ancient cities, and the stupendous monuments of an early civilisation, were discovered in the solitudes of the great central forests. English merchants embarked in the renowned trade in cinnamon, which we had wrested from the Dutch; and British capitalists introduced the cultivation of coffee into the previously inaccessible highlands. Changes of equal magnitude contributed to alter the social position of the natives; domestic slavery was extinguished; compulsory labour, previously exacted from the free races, was abolished; and new laws under a charter of justice superseded the arbitrary rule of the native chiefs. In the course of less than half a century, the aspect of the country became changed, the condition of the people was submitted to new influences; and the time arrived to note the effects of this civil revolution.
1: VALENTYN, In his great work on the Dutch possessions in India, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien, alludes more than once with regret to the ignorance in which his countrymen were kept as to the interior of Ceylon, concerning which their only information was obtained through fugitives and spies. (Vol. v. ch. ii. p. 35; ch. xv. p. 205.)
But on searching for books such as I expected to find, recording the phenomena consequent on these domestic and political events, I was disappointed to discover that they were few in number and generally meagre in information. Major FORBES, who in 1826 and for some years afterwards held a civil appointment in the Kandyan country, published an interesting account of his observations[1]; and his work derives value from the attention which the author had paid to the ancient records of the island, whose contents were then undergoing investigation by the erudite and indefatigable TURNOUR.[2]
1: Eleven Years in Ceylon, &c., by Major FORBES. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1840.
2: See [Vol. I. Part III. ch. iii. p. 312.]
In 1843 Mr. BENNETT, a retired civil servant of the colony, who had studied some branches of its natural history, and especially its ichthyology, embodied his experiences in a volume entitled "Ceylon and its Capabilities," containing a mass of information, somewhat defective in arrangement. These and a number of minor publications, chiefly descriptive of sporting tours in search of elephants and deer, with incidental notices of the sublime scenery and majestic ruins of the island, were the only modern works that treated of Ceylon; but no one of them sufficed to furnish a connected view of the colony at the present day, contrasting its former state with the condition to which it has attained under the government of Great Britain.
On arriving in Ceylon and entering on my official functions, this absence of local knowledge entailed frequent inconvenience. In my tours throughout the interior, I found ancient monuments, apparently defying decay, of which no one could tell the date or the founder; and temples and cities in ruins, whose destroyers were equally unknown. There were vast structures of public utility, on which the prosperity of the country had at one time been dependent; artificial lakes, with their conduits and canals for irrigation; the condition of which rendered it interesting to ascertain the period of their formation, and the causes of their abandonment; but to every inquiry of this nature, there was the same unvarying reply: that information regarding them might possibly be found in the Mahawanso or in some other of the native chronicles; but that few had ever read them, and none had succeeded in reproducing them for popular instruction.
A still more serious embarrassment arose from the want of authorities to throw light on questions that were sometimes the subject of administrative deliberation: there were native customs which no available materials sufficed to illustrate; and native claims, often serious in their importance, the consideration of which was obstructed by a similar dearth of authentic data. With a view to executive measures, I was frequently desirous of consulting the records of the two European governments, under which the island had been administered for 300 years before the arrival of the British; their experience might have served as a guide, and even their failures would have pointed out errors to be avoided; but here, again, I had to encounter disappointment: in answer to my inquiries, I was assured that the records, both of the Portuguese and Dutch, had long since disappeared from the archives of the colony.
Their loss, whilst in our custody, is the more remarkable, considering the value which was attached to them by our predecessors. The Dutch, on the conquest of Ceylon in the seventeenth century, seized the official accounts and papers of the Portuguese; and a memoir is preserved by VALENTYN, in which the Governor, Van Goens, on handing over the command to his successor in 1663, enjoins on him the study of these important documents, and expresses anxiety for their careful preservation.[1]