by Somasiri Devendra

(continued from last week)

Underwater archaeology also took us inland into rivers. I well remember the first expedition we undertook, which was a modest one carried out by a band of enthusiasts. A newspaper report filed by a local correspondent was headlined ‘Gemmers unearth ancient canoe’. It said that `Gem-diggers in the river Kuru had come up with a Teppama or a boat, about 300 years old, at Gamage-Tota at Teppanawa, in the Ratnapura electorate, while searching for gem veins, deep down in the river.’ We hastily boarded a pick-up truck with our gear and went in search of the place.

It was off Kuruwita and by judicious questioning we were able to find the site. What we found was interesting. The gem-miners were there. They had been digging their pit on the bed of Kuru Ganga, the water level being low during this dry season. About 15 feet below the riverbed, they had come across this ‘log’. Such logs were prized as very good firewood. This was about thirty feet long but they could not see it properly in the pit on account of the muddy water. Because of its size, they had obtained a jack to lever it out of the water, but they failed. Then they lowered a large saw and cut it in two, and that is when they found out that it was a log boat.

As was usual in such instances, the event was a three-day wonder and everybody around had come to see it. Among them was the village schoolmaster who had got the local newspaper correspondent to report it. He had made a linguistic connection between the village name (Teppanawa) and a type of watercraft (teppama) without knowing that the latter was no log boat. The gem-miners had wisely kept the two pieces in the water, and that is where we came in.

The river was sluggish, with a sandbank having formed on one side and the water flowing along a channel on the other bank. We were thus able, with minimum effort, to float the two pieces onto the sandbank and set about photographing, measuring and examining it. It was a log boat all right, with no signs of having had an outrigger. The wood was spongy, but surprisingly the heartwood had not separated itself from the sapwood on one end, as it generally does. It was a pity they had to saw it in two, but even this had its advantages. The clean crosscut gave us a perfect cross-section of the boat and showed that the hollowing-out process had not been done with sophisticated instruments. Perhaps this might help us to learn from it.

The village-folk were very helpful to us, working alongside us and bringing tea in a kettle. My daughter, an artist, soon got into a sarong from the closest house and sketched the two pieces in detail, such drawings being more valuable than photographs. We made our report to the Department of National Museums, which retrieved the two pieces. Now conserved, they are being exhibited at the museum in Ratnapura.

Paruva craft

Another day, a group of us went in search of the vanished paruva craft to the Kelani Ganga. How big a part these craft had played in our history and culture, and how soon they have been forgotten! There was no genuine one to be seen, but we did not return empty-handed. Our first stop was at a timber shed where, the owner said, he had been commissioned to build one decades ago, but the man had run short of money. He showed us the two log-boat chine strakes (iri kaduwa), which he had hollowed and were still stored in his loft, along with the broad planks he had bought for the craft.

Most interestingly he showed us the metal (copper) fittings of a sunken paruva they had tried to salvage, but failed. It was still there, he said, half out and half in the water. We managed to trace it and it was a really magnificent wreck, lying there like a stranded whale. It was massive, well constructed of good wood but no one could have pulled it out of the river. We went through the familiar routine of photographing, measuring and interviewing people, while small boys played around us, taking us as a good excuse not to do their homework! We saw the last, but poor, remaining craft in the shape of the waeli paruva used for sand mining. But most importantly, we were told how to get to the house of “Bomba Sira”, the last builder of these craft in that area.

With some difficulty we found him in his house. Too old to work maybe, but he was not too old to talk. It took some time to get his mind to run on the same groove as ours. He had built both the madel paruva of the coast and the very different paruva of the rivers. The river paruva, according to him was 50 feet long. The reason for keeping to this length was not clear to me till I found the reason years later.

Apparently in the 19th. century, there were toll gates along the river at which boatmen had to pay customs duty depending on the size of the craft. The lowest rate for a paruva was payable only if it was less than fifty feet long, and therefore the size became standard. Sira was able, with no reference to any notes, to give us the exact quantities of different materials needed to build one, such as the number of coils of rope, cadjans, bamboos and nails, and the type of wood used. He introduced us to the jargon of the boat-builder, giving us the names of every part of a paruva. Once again I was thankful that I had tapped a reservoir of oral history before it was lost forever. My mind went back to Hiriwadunna and the idea of the flow of water from one tank to another in a cascade. I felt privileged to have had this good fortune.

More sobering was my encounter with the younger generation at another boat site. I was in the Archaeological Department, when word came that a “big ship, with walls and rooms” had been found at Attanagalu Oya. It was apparent to me that it could be no more than a iri kaduwa of a paruva, with its vertical strengtheners carved. The rest of the description was the usual mixture of ignorance and fantasy.

When I visited the site, it wore a carnival atmosphere, with people from everywhere clambering to see this “ship”. People were walking all over the remains of the craft with shoes on, damaging whatever had been saved by time. The sheer irresponsibility and disrespect for one’s heritage was irritating, grating on one’s sensitivity. We shooed all of them away and got down to the business of measuring, sketching and photographing. It was really large, being 60 feet long. I reckoned it would have been a near 100 feet long in its day.

It was subsequently raised by crane, upon a purpose-built cradle, and transferred to the Colombo Museum where, unfortunately, it is being allowed to rot away. It was radio-carbon dated to the 9th century AD. More than a thousand years ago, such craft would have been plying the then-gushing rivers of the Maya Rata, bringing cargoes of forest produce from the thick rain forests to the river mouth ports, particularly along the Kelani Ganga where communities of foreign traders resided.

It is to this century that the first Arabic inscription found in this country can also be attributed. It speaks of the death of an Islamic cleric who had been brought down to teach the correct tenets of his religion to the Arab traders in Colombo.

Further up the river, at Kelanimulla ferry in 1952, another very large log boat, which had an outrigger attached, was found and placed in the Colombo Museum. It too had been dated to the second century BC, about the time of King Kelani Tissa. Maya Rata, long written-off as a forested and uninhabited land, is providing us with new clues and waiting for its history to be rewritten.

Maritime history

Did the people of Sri Lanka venture out to sea and, if so, in what type of ship? It was this question that drove me to the study of boats, ships and maritime history. I have found the answers to my satisfaction. Perhaps the most satisfying was the discovery of the yathra dhoni and its study.

I discovered that Sri Lanka had absorbed the maritime traditions from all over the Indian Ocean, and maybe even from beyond. I found that even into almost the middle of the twentieth century, we have had functioning sailing ships of several types. In the south was the yathra dhoni with its characteristic outrigger. In the east, in Muttur, I found the Arab-Indian battal, large, undecked, sailing craft that brought the harvest from the Mahaveli delta to Trincomalee harbour. It was characterized by the single large Arab-Indian lateen sail hoisted from a pulley atop the for’ ard raking mast.

I would see them sailing daily past the balcony of my house and did not ever think of them disappearing so soon. But a scant 10 years later, there was none to be seen and there were many who did not even remember them. I was left with only one memento, a photograph taken by a fellow naval officer.

However, the ships of the north, the thoni of Jaffna, were to prove more rewarding. Though the last of its kind, the Annapurani, had been built and sailed to England around 1930 (there is a photograph of her in the Suez canal), there is none remaining to be seen. James Hornell, world authority on traditional watercraft, had seen and photographed them, when he had been working for the Fisheries Department in Sri Lanka in the 1930s. He had also studied the customs and traditions connected with their construction.

The thoni was a strange craft, in appearance very much like a 19th century English man-of-war. False gun-ports were painted along the sides. Masts were fitted with square sails and there was a towering bowsprit with a multitude of sprit sails. On board, the picture was very different and the scene was much the same as on a yathra dhoni of Dodanduwa, with cargo hatches with split bamboo thatching covering most of the deck space, and cooking facilities and water casks in the after deck.

Up in the, bows again was quite different, dominated by the bowsprit and with the stem coiling backward in the spiral called the surul. On this was painted the three horizontal white stripes that one sees worn by Hindu Saivites on their foreheads, marked in ash. Below the surul was a little shrine room, containing the image of the deity sacred to the ship’s owner, a little stone quern or grinding stone for smashing of coconuts as in a temple, and other paraphernalia that adorn a shrine. Unlike the ships of the Sinhala people, who offered prayers to all the gods, the thoni neither launched nor would undertake a journey without a religious service performed by a member of the crew who officiated as the poosari.

It was off Ambalangoda that we were told of a mysterious shipwreck that appeared and disappeared under the seabed from time to time. Again we were pursuing a newspaper story. We found no wreck, for it had disappeared under the sands again, but we were able to study the artifacts that had been collected (some sold to dealers) by the fishing community nearby. There was a small cannon (sold), cannon balls, a bronze deity (sold), metal cooking vessels and Chinese porcelain, grinding stones, small coconuts (some broken), astrolabe (a mediaeval European navigation instrument) much repaired, several antique hand tools, weights and quantities of cowries and other shells. The likelihood, given all the above and Hornell’s description, is that she was a Jaffna thoni coasting southward before changing course westward to the Maldives. It was a post-colonial wreck, to judge from the cannon, cannon balls and astrolabe. So here we may have the first Sri Lankan shipwreck.

The Amugoda Oruwa, Hercules, Avondster, and the Ambalangoda shipwreck are all victims of the unforgiving sea. And now, the “Mansions of the sea”.

(Concluded)

(Excerpted from Jungle Journeys in Sri Lanka edited by CG Uragoda)