Part 3 (1/2)
The Greeks who, after the Indian conquests of Alexander, brought back the earliest accounts of the East, repeated them without material correction, and reported the island to be nearly twenty times its actual extent. Onesicritus, a pilot of the expedition, a.s.signed to it a magnitude of 5000 stadia, equal to 500 geographical miles.[1]
Eratosthenes attempted to fix its position, but went so widely astray that his first (that is his most southern) parallel pa.s.sed through it and the ”Cinnamon Land,” the _Regio Cinnamomifera_, on the east coast of Africa.[2] He placed Ceylon at the distance of seven days' sail from the south of India, and he too a.s.signed to its western coast an extent of 5000 stadia.[3] Both those authorities are quoted by Strabo, who says that the size of Taprobane was not less than that of Britain.[4]
[Footnote 1: STRABO, lib. v. Artemidorus (100 B.C.), quoted by Stepha.n.u.s of Byzantium, gives to Ceylon a length of 7000 stadia and a breadth of 500.]
[Footnote 2: STRABO, lib. ii. c. i. s. 14.]
[Footnote 3: The text of Strabo showing this measure makes it in some places 8000 (Strabo, lib. v.); and Pliny, quoting Eratosthenes, makes it 7000.]
[Footnote 4: STRABO, lib. ii. c. v. s. 32. Aristotle appears to have had more correct information, and says Ceylon was not so large as Britain.--_De Mundo_ ch. iii.]
The round numbers employed by those authors, and by the Greek geographers generally, who borrow from them, serve to show that their knowledge was merely collected from rumours; and that in all probability they were indebted for their information to the stories of Arabian or Hindu sailors returning from the Eastern seas.
Pliny learned from the Singhalese Amba.s.sador who visited Rome in the reign of Claudius, that the breadth of Ceylon was 10,000 stadia from west to east; and Ptolemy fully developed the idea of his predecessors, that it lay opposite to the ”Cinnamon Land,” and a.s.signed to it a length from north to south of nearly _fifteen degrees_, with a breadth of _eleven_, an exaggeration of the truth nearly twenty-fold.[1]
Agathemerus copies Ptolemy; and the plain and sensible author of the ”Periplus” (attributed to Arrian), still labouring with the delusion of the magnitude of Ceylon, makes it stretch almost to the opposite coast of Africa.[2]
[Footnote 1: PTOLEMY, lib. vii. c. 4.]
[Footnote 2: ARRIAN, _Periplus_, p. 35. Marcia.n.u.s Heracleota (whose Periplus has been reprinted by HUDSON, in the same collection from which I have made the reference to that of Arrian) gives to Ceylon a length of 9500 stadia with a breadth of 7500.--MAR. HER. p. 26.]
These extravagant ideas of the magnitude of Ceylon were not entirely removed till many centuries later. The Arabian geographers, Ma.s.soudi, Edrisi, and Aboulfeda, had no accurate data by which to correct the errors of their Greek predecessors. The maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries repeated their distortions[1]; and Marco Polo, in the fourteenth century, who gives the island the usual exaggerated dimensions, yet informs us that it is now but one half the size it had been at a former period, the rest having been engulfed by the sea.[2]
[Footnote 1: For an account of Ceylon as it is figured in the _Mappe-mondes_ of the Middle Ages, see the _Essai_ of the VICOMTE DE SANTAREM, _Sur la Cosmographie et Cartographie_, tom. iii. p. 335, &c.]
[Footnote 2: MARCO POLO, p. 2, c. 148. A later authority than Marco Polo, PORCACCHI, in his _Isolario_, or ”Description of the most celebrated Islands in the World,” which was published at Venice in A.D.
1576, laments his inability even at that time to obtain any authentic information as to the boundaries and dimensions of Ceylon; and, relying on the representations of the Moors, who then carried on an active trade around its coasts, he describes it as lying under the equinoctial line, and possessing a circuit of 2100 miles. ”Ella gira di circuito, secondo il calcole fatto da Mori, che modernamente l'hanno nauigato d'ogn'intorno due mila et cento miglia et corre maestro e sirocco; et per il mezo d'essa pa.s.sa la linea equinottiale et e el principio del primo clima al terzo paralello.”--_L'Isole piu Famose del Monde, descritte da_ THOMASO PORCACCHI, lib. iii. p. 30.]
Such was the uncertainty thrown over the geography of the island by erroneous and conflicting accounts, that grave doubts came to be entertained of its ident.i.ty, and from the fourteenth century, when the attention of Europe was re-directed to the nascent science of geography, down to the close of the seventeenth, it remained a question whether Ceylon or Sumatra was the Taprobane of the Greeks.[1]
[Footnote 1: GIBBON states, that ”Salmasius and most of the ancients confound the islands of Ceylon and Sumatra.”--_Decl. and Fall_ ch. xl.
This is a mistake. Saumaise was one of those who maintained a correct opinion; and, as regards the ”ancients,” they had very little knowledge of _Further India_ to which Sumatra belongs; but so long as Greek and Roman literature maintained their influence, no question was raised as to the ident.i.ty of Ceylon and Taprobane. Even in the sixth century Cosmas Indicopleustes declares unhesitatingly that the Sielediva of the Indians was the Taprobane of the Greeks.
It was only on emerging from the general ignorance of the Middle Ages that the doubt was first promulgated. In the Catalan Map of A.D. 1375, ent.i.tled _Image du Monde_, Ceylon is omitted, and Taprobane is represented by Sumatra (MALTE BRUN, _Hist. de Geogr._ vol. i, p. 318); in that of _Fra Mauro_, the Venetian monk, A.D. 1458, Seylan is given, but _Taprobane_ is added over _Sumatra_. A similar error appears in the _Mappe-monde,_ by RUYCH, in the Ptolemy of A.D. 1508, and in the writings of the geographers of the sixteenth century, GEMMA FRISIUS, SEBASTIAN MUNSTER, RAMUSIO, JUL. SCALIGER, ORTELIUS, and MERCATOR. The same view was adopted by the Venetian NICOLA DI CONTI, in the first half of the fifteenth century, by the Florentine ANDREA CORSALI, MAXIMILIa.n.u.s TRANSYLVa.n.u.s, VARTHEMA, and PIGAFETTA. The chief cause of this perplexity was, no doubt, the difficulty of reconciling the actual position and size of Ceylon with the dimensions and position a.s.signed to it by Strabo and Ptolemy, the latter of whom, by an error which is elsewhere explained, extended the boundary of the island far to the east of its actual site. But there was a large body of men who rejected the claim of Sumatra, and DE BARROS, SALMASIUS, BOCHART CLUVERIUS, CELLARIUS, ISAAC VOSSIUS and others, maintained the t.i.tle of Ceylon. A _Mappe-monde_ of A.D. 1417, preserved in the Pitti Palace at Florence compromises the dispute by designating Sumatra _Taprobane Major_. The controversy came to an end at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the overpowering authority of DELISLE resolved the doubt, and confirmed the modern Ceylon as the Taprobane of antiquity. WILFORD, in the _Asiatic Researches_ (vol. x. p. 140), still clung to the opposite opinion, and KANT undertook to prove that Taprobane was Madagascar.]
_Lat.i.tude and Longitude_.--There has. .h.i.therto been considerable uncertainty as to the position a.s.signed to Ceylon in the various maps and geographical notices of the island: these have been corrected by more recent observations, and its true place has been ascertained to be between 5 55' and 9 51' north lat.i.tude, and 79 41' 40” and 81 54'
50” east longitude. Its extreme length from north to south, from Point Palmyra to Dondera Head, is 271-1/2 miles; its greatest width 137-1/2 miles, from Colombo on the west coast to Sangemankande on the east; and its area, including its dependent islands, 25,742 miles, or about one-sixth smaller than Ireland.[1]
[Footnote 1: Down to a very recent period no British colony was more imperfectly surveyed and mapped than Ceylon; but since the recent publication by Arrowsmith of the great map by General Fraser, the reproach has been withdrawn, and no dependency of the Crown is more richly provided in this particular. In the map of Schneider, the Government engineer in 1813, two-thirds of the Kandyan Kingdom are a blank; and in that of the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, re-published so late as 1852, the rich districts of Neuera-kalawa and the Wanny, in which there are innumerable villages (and scarcely a hill), are marked as ”_unknown mountainous region_.” General Fraser, after the devotion of a lifetime to the labour, has produced a survey which, in extent and minuteness of detail, stands unrivalled. In this great work he had the co-operation of Major Skinner and of Captain Gallwey, and to these two gentlemen the public are indebted for the greater portion of the field-work and the trigonometrical operations. To judge of the difficulties which beset such an undertaking, it must be borne in mind that till very recently travelling in the interior of Ceylon was all but impracticable, in a country unopened even by bridle roads, across unbridged rivers, over mountains never trod by the foot of a European, and amidst precipices inaccessible to all but the most courageous and prudent. Add to this that the country is densely covered with forest and jungle, with trees a hundred feet high, from which here and there the branches had to be cleared to obtain a sight of the signal stations. The triangulation was carried on amidst privations, discomfort, and pestilence, which frequently prostrated the whole party, and forced their attendants to desert them rather than encounter such hards.h.i.+ps and peril. The materials collected by the colleagues of General Fraser under these discouragements have been worked up by him with consummate skill and perseverance. The base line, five and a quarter miles in length, was measured in 1845 in the cinnamon plantation at Kaderani, to the north of Colombo, and its extremities are still marked by two towers, which it was necessary to raise to the height of one hundred feet, to enable them to be discerned above the surrounding forests. These it is to be hoped will be carefully kept from decay, as they may again be called into requisition.
As regards the sea line of Ceylon, an admirable chart of the West coast, from Adam's Bridge to Dondera Head, has been published by the East India Company from a survey in 1845. But information is sadly wanted as to the East and North, of which no accurate charts exist, except of a few unconnected points, such as the harbour of Trincomalie.]
_General Form_.--In its general outline the island resembles a pear--and suggests to its admiring inhabitants the figure of those pearls which from their elongated form are suspended from the tapering end. When originally upheaved above the ocean its shape was in all probability nearly circular, with a prolongation in the direction of north-east. The mountain zone in the south, covering an area of about 4212 miles[1], may then have formed the largest proportion of its entire area--and the belt of low lands, known as the Maritime Provinces, consists to a great extent of soil from the disintegration of the gneiss, detritus from the hills, alluvium carried down the rivers, and marine deposits gradually collected on the sh.o.r.e. But in addition to these, the land has for ages been slowly rising from the sea, and terraces abounding in marine sh.e.l.ls imbedded in agglutinated sand occur in situations far above high-water mark. Immediately inland from Point de Galle, the surface soil rests on a stratum of decomposing coral; and sea sh.e.l.ls are found at a considerable distance from the sh.o.r.e. Further north at Madampe, between Chilaw and Negombo, the sh.e.l.ls of pearl oysters and other bivalves are turned up by the plough more than ten miles from the sea.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
[Footnote 1: This includes not only the lofty mountains suitable for the cultivation of coffee, but the lower ranges and spurs which connect them with the maritime plains.]
These recent formations present themselves in a still more striking form in the north of the island, the greater portion of which may be regarded as the conjoint production of the coral polypi, and the currents, which for the greater portion of the year set impetuously towards the south.
Coming laden with alluvial matter collected along the coast of Coromandel, and meeting with obstacles south of Point Calimere, they have deposited their burthens on the coral reefs round Point Pedro; and these gradually raised above the sea-level, and covered deeply by sand drifts, have formed the peninsula of Jaffna and the plains that trend westward till they unite with the narrow causeway of Adam's Bridge--itself raised by the same agencies, and annually added to by the influences of the tides and monsoons.[1]
[Footnote 1: The barrier known as Adam's Bridge, which obstructs the navigation of the channel between Ceylon and Ramnad, consists of several parallel ledges of conglomerate and sandstone, hard at the surface, and growing coa.r.s.e and soft as it descends till it rests on a bank of sand, apparently acc.u.mulated by the influence of the currents at the change of the monsoons. See an _Essay_ by Captain STEWART _on the Paumbem Pa.s.sage_. Colombo, 1837. See Vol. II. p. 554.]