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Ceylon - an account of the island

Compiling exclusively to LankaWeb by Tilak S. Fernando, London. [1997]

Introduction

There is no island in the world, Great Britain itself not excepted, that has attracted the attention of authors in so many distant ages and so many different countries as Ceylon. There is no nation in ancient or modern times possessed of a language and a literature , the writers of which have not at some time made it their theme.

Its aspect, its religion, its antiquities, and productions, have been described as well by the classic Greeks, as by those of the Lower Empire ; by the Romans; by the writers of China, Burmah, India, and Kashmir ; by the geographers of Arabia and Persia; by the mediaeval voyagers of Italy and France ; by the analysts of Portugal and Spain ; by the merchant adventurers of Holland, and by the travellers and topographers of Great Britain.

But amidst this wealth of materials as to its vicissitudes in early times, there is an absolute dearth of information regarding the state and progress of the island during more recent periods, and its actual condition at the present day.

I was made sensible of this want, on the occasion of my nomination, in 1845, to an office in connection with the government of Ceylon. I found abundant details as to the capture of' the maritime provinces from the Dutch in 1795, in the narrative of Captain PERCIVAL[1], an officer who had served in the expedition ; and the efforts to organise the first system of administration are amply described by CORDINER[2] , Chaplain to the Forces; by Lord VALENTIA [8], who was then travelling in the East; and by ANTHONY BERTOLACCI [4], who acted as auditor-general to the first governor, Mr. North, after Earl of Guildford. The story of the capture of Kandy in 1815 has been related by an anonymous eye-witness under the pseudonym of PHILALETHES 5, and by MARSHALL in his Historical Sketch of the conquest.[6] An admirable description of the interior, as it presented itself some forty years ago, was furnished by Dr. DAVY [7], a brother of the eminent philosopher, who was employed on the medical staff in Ceylon, from 1816 till 1820.

Here the 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[8], 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 construction of the grandest mountain road to India; and in the north of the Island, the ruins of ancient cities, and the stupendous monuments of an early civilisation, were discovered and explored in the soIitudes 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.

But on searching for books such as I expected to find, recording the phenomena consequent on these domestic and political changes, I was disappointed to discover that they were few in number and generally meagre in information. 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, I experienced frequent inconvenience from this dearth of local knowledge. 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 for 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, I was met by 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 absence 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 the want 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 Portuguese and Dutch, had been since disappeared from the archives of the Colonial Secretariat.

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. ( Valentin, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien,&c. ch.xiii p 174).

The British, on the capture of Colombo in 17 96, were equally solicitous to obtain possession of the records of the Dutch Government . By Art. XIV. of the capitulation they were required to be '' faithfully delivered over;" and, by Art. XI., all surveys of the island and its coasts " were required to be surrendered to the captors. But strange to say, almost the whole of these interesting and important papers appear to have been lost; not a trace of the Portuguese records so far as I could discover, remains at Colombo; and if any vestige of those of the Dutch be still extant, they have probably become illegible from decay and the ravages of the white ants.

But the loss is not utterly irreparable ; duplicates of the Dutch correspondence during their possession of Ceylon are carefully preserved at Amsterdam ; and within the last few years the Trustees of the British Museum purchased from library of the late Lord Stuart de Rothesay the Diplomatic Correspondence and Papers of SEBASTIAO JOZE CARVALHO E MELLO ( Portuguese Ambassador at London and Vienna, and subsequently known as the Marquis de Pombal), from 1738 to 1747, including sixty volumes relating to the history of the Portuguese possessions in India and Brazil during the 16th 17th, and 18th centuries. Amongst the latter are forty volumes of despatches relative to India entitled Colleccam Authentica de todas as Leys, Regimentos Aleards e mais ordens que se expediram para a India, desde o estableeimento destas conquistas; Ordenada por previram de 28 de Marco de 1754. These contain the despatches to and from the successive Captains -General and Governors of Ceylon, so that, in part at least, the replacement of the records lost in the colony may be effected by transcription.

Meanwhile in their absence no other resource was left me than the original narratives of the Dutch and Portuguese historians, chiefly VALENTYN, DE BARROS and DE COUTO, who have preserved in two languages the least familiar in Europe, chronicles of their respective governments, which , so far as I am aware, have not been republished in any translation.

Continue

[1]An Account of the Island of Ceylon by Capt. R. PERC1VAL. 4to. London, 1805.

[2]A Description of Ceylon, by the Rev. James Cordiner A.M. 2 vols. 4to London 18907.C,. Biset,

[3]Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, and the Red Sea, by Lord Vicount Valentia. 3 vols. 4to London, 1809.

[4]A View of the Agricultural, Commercial and Financial Interests of Ceylon , by A. Bertolacci Esq. London 1817.

[5]A History of Ceylon from the earliest period to the Year MDCCXV, by Philalethes, A.M. 4 to Lond. 1817. The author is believed to have been the Rev. G. Bissett.

[6]Henry Marshall, F.R.S.E went to Ceylon as assistant surgeon of the 89th regiment, in 1806, and from 1816 till 1821 was the senior medical officer of the Kandyan provinces.

[7]An Account of the Interior of Ceylon by John Davy, M.D. 4to.London 1821

[8]VALENTYN, in his great work on the Dutch possessions in India.

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