The Pearl of India - Maturin Murray Ballou (readict .txt) 📗

Food of the People.—Rice Cultivation.—Vast Artificial Lakes.—The Stone Tanks of Aden.—Parched Australia.—Coffee Culture.—Severe Reverses among Planters.—Tea Culture.—Cinchona Plantations.—Heavy Exportation of Tea.—Cacao Culture.—A Coffee Plantation described.—Domesticated Snakes.—The Cinnamon-Tree.—Cinnamon Gardens a Disappointment.—Picturesque Dwelling's.—Forest Lands.—The Ceylon Jungle.—Native Cabinet Woods.—Night in a Tropical Forest.—Rhododendrons.

The principal food of a nation is a most important factor, not only in judging of its means of support, but also as regards the mental and physical character of the people themselves. Rice has been the staple product and support of Ceylon, as it has been of the population of India and China, from time immemorial. There are to-day some eight hundred thousand acres of land devoted to the raising of this cereal upon the island; there should be twice that area devoted to the purpose, to meet the imperative wants of the present population. The unsuitability of the climate for ripening wheat is more than compensated for by its prodigal yield of rice, producing two crops annually, where water can be freely obtained. This grain is proven by scientific experiment to contain more of the several essential elements for support of the human body than any other which is grown. As is well known, in cultivating rice, it requires to be flooded, started in fact under water, after being first planted, and also to be more than once submerged during its growth and ripening. To facilitate the production of this nutritious grain, the great tanks already referred to were originally built, in which to preserve, for periodical use, the water which flows freely enough from the mountain region during the rainy season, but when the dry period sets in, the rivers become thread-like streams, fed only by a few inconsiderable springs which exist in the hills. The oldest of these immense reservoirs is believed to date back some centuries before Christ's appearance upon earth, evincing by their construction a degree of organized thrift and effective energy hardly equaled in our time.

The tanks not only saved the precious water from running to waste, but, being tapped at suitable intervals, conducted it by sluiceways and canals, distributing it to those localities where it was needed, and at the exact time when it was wanted.

The chief article of native consumption should also be one of export from a country so admirably adapted to its production. This is not now the case; indeed, it is and has long been one of the principal imports from India and elsewhere. It is estimated that every native adult who can get it consumes a bushel of rice each month in the year. To the Singhalese rice is what wheat is to the average American, namely, the staff of life. To promote its cultivation, the English government should repair the neglected tanks, great and small. There is evidence sufficient to prove that Ceylon raised all she required of this staple for home consumption when her agricultural masses could get the necessary water. In some localities where the rain is plentiful, the rice planter is dependent upon the natural supply; but in most parts of the island its cultivation is not even attempted unless a certain artificial supply of water is first secured by means of canals and reservoirs, it being quite as necessary as the very seed itself. There is one great advantage which the planters enjoy in Ceylon over most other regions; that is, the abundance and cheapness of free labor obtainable at any season of the year. Coolies by the thousand are always ready to come hither from southern India at the harvest time. As many come regularly as can get employment.

When the island was at the height of its prosperity, there were in its various parts at least thirty tanks of enormous proportions, and about seven hundred of all sizes. In the nineteenth century, we attain the object of water preserves by building structures of granite, like the Croton and Cochituate reservoirs of New York and Boston, not nearly so large nor any more efficient than these of the time referred to. But to do this we have all the appliances of powerful machinery and labor-saving methods, while these Herculean results in Ceylon were achieved by human hands alone. One system is the consummation of a high state of civilization, and of well-paid skillful industry; the other, like the enduring pyramids, was the outcome of a barbaric period, and of forced manual labor. While examining one of the vast embankments, built, like all others, partly of stone but mainly of earth, to securely hold the artificial lake, the author was accompanied by an intelligent native, who was a local official of the government. It was natural to remark upon the achievement of so great a work by primitive means. "Yes," said he, "every bushel of earth which forms this broad embankment, extending for miles, was brought by the single basketful from yonder mountain upon the heads of men and women."

The remains of one of these capacious tanks which stimulated industry and insured abundant crops in Ceylon so long ago is to be seen at Kalawewa, near Dambula, already spoken of, and is known to have been built fourteen centuries since. It was originally some forty miles in circumference, covering seven square miles, with a depth of twenty feet of water, and having an embankment of stone twelve miles long laid in solid tiers, with the large blocks ingeniously secured together. These tanks are found in a more or less ruinous condition all over the island, but especially at the north, where they were more required than in the southern portion. The conserving of water in large quantities for agricultural and other necessary purposes was naturally one of the earliest developed ideas of civilized people. Aden, the important peninsula commanding the entrance of the Red Sea, now held and fortified by England, is situated in a rainless zone, so that the inhabitants see no fall of that invaluable element sometimes for two years together, though when it does visit them it comes in floods. The dependence here for the needed supply in the dry season is upon enormous tanks hewn out of the solid rocks with infinite labor, and connected with each other by a well-devised system. These tanks, being cut in the solid rock, as we have said, are virtually indestructible, and form the means of supply for the inhabitants to-day, as they did thousands of years ago. The great antiquity of the Aden water reservoirs renders them intensely interesting, since they are believed to be as old as the most ancient monuments in existence raised by the hand of man,—not excepting those of Egypt.

In entering the harbor of Aden, one passes through the dangerous Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, so called by the Arabs, and signifying the "Gate of Tears," because it has proved so fatal to human life and to commerce. The author well remembers, when passing this famous point, seeing the tall masts of a big European steamship still standing above the water of the strait. A few days previously, the vessel had been swept by the treacherous currents upon some of the many sunken rocks, and had instantly gone to the bottom with all her crew on board.

The water preserves of Ceylon are of all sizes, from widespread lakes to mere ponds, designed to irrigate circumscribed districts. There was a time when each town and village, at least all that lay to the north of the mountain range which divides the island, had its reservoir. The first one spoken of in this chapter was built by King Penduwasa, and was restored by the English so late as 1867. It covers an area of over three thousand acres, and is of inestimable value to the agricultural interests of the district. It seems that as Egyptian monarchs were wont to build pyramids to mark the glory of their several dynasties, so the Kandian kings and earlier rulers of Ceylon each sought to excel his predecessor by constructing larger tanks, thus elaborating the means of irrigation and increasing the productiveness of the island. Sixteen of these useful reservoirs are credited to one of the latest kings of Kandy.

Could this grand and effective principle of irrigation be applied to the plains of Australia, what a blessing it might prove. The oft-recurring periods of drought, extending from Brisbane in the north to Adelaide in the south, are now a fatal blight to agricultural enterprise. The Murray River, which at certain seasons of the year is navigable for nearly or quite one thousand miles, now runs to waste, becoming a mere brook half the year; and sheep and cattle sometimes die of thirst by thousands, so that many wealthy Englishmen engaged in sheep-raising have been made paupers in a single season. It only needs the construction of a series of water-saving tanks upon the course of the Murray to successfully water millions of acres of naturally fertile soil, and to insure the country against anything like a water famine when the dry season sets in. Why the people who are in authority ignore such simple facts is a standing marvel.

We have said that rice was the staple product of the island, and it is still so; but it was not long ago that Ceylon was also famous for the amount of excellent coffee which it produced and exported. For a while, it seemed destined to rival all the rest of the world in this important article. Its cultivation was begun here upon a large scale in 1825, in the vicinity of Peradenia, where the soil and climate proved to be so favorable that speculators came hither in large numbers from great distances, but especially from England, to establish plantations, though the coffee-tree is not indigenous to Ceylon. Thousands of acres of forest and dense jungle were cleared and burned over in the neighborhood of Kandy alone, at great expense and labor, to prepare the ground for coffee planting. There was at one time so much speculative energy evinced in this direction that nearly every local government official was more or less engaged in it, embarking