- ledge about the character of the early Indian vessels,
for, like the Egyptians, the Indians were not, and are not, as a nation, a seafaring people. Those Indians who followed seafaring pursuits, were then, as now, of the lowest caste; hence the inference is natural that their shipping would exhibit a corresponding inferiority in construction.
Pliny[1] says that their boats consisted chiefly of a large description of cane or bamboo, split down the middle, and capable of carrying three persons; and Arrian remarks that, in his time, the vessels employed on the Malabar coast were very inferior to those of most other nations. He says the small vessels, called madara, have their planks sewn together with coir—the inner fibre of the cocoa-nut—like some of the native vessels of Arabia. Others, he adds, were long vessels, trappaga and cotymba (in the native dialect),[2] used by fishermen and pilots of the port of Barygaza. But besides these, there were double canoes, which were lashed together, and were by his description not unlike, though much inferior to, those of the South Sea Islands, of which, from Captain Cook's description, the following is an illustration (Page 131).
The Chinese junk of the present day probably affords a tolerably accurate representation of the Chinese merchant vessel of two or perhaps three thousand years ago; for all that is known of China,
- ↑ Plin. xiv. 162. Cuvier (ap. Rawlinson's Herod. iii. 98) speaks of a bamboo (Bambus arundinacea) which grows to the height of sixty feet. Colonel Yule states that the largest bamboos are in the Malay Islands and Cambodia. He has seen them from eighty to one hundred feet high. "Early Travels to India," 1867, p. 93.
- ↑ Arrian, "Periplus," c. 44.
