62 OKHAMANDAL MARINE ZOOLOGY PART II 



In 1700, Father Martin, a Jesuit Missionary, wrote (Lettres Edifiantes, II, p. 278, 

 edition of 1843), " It is scarcely credible how jealous the Dutch are of this commerce. 

 It is death to a native to sell them to any one but the servants of the Company. The 

 shells are bought by the Dutch for a trifle, and then despatched to Bengal, where they 

 are sold at great profit. These shells, which are round and hollow, are sawn and 

 fashioned into bracelets equalling the most brilliant ivory in lustre. Those fished on 

 this coast (Tinnevelly) are extraordinarily abundant ; they have their spiral from right 

 to left, but if one be found twisted in the other direction, it is a treasure valued by 

 Hindus at an extravagant price, for they believe that it was in a chank of this 

 description that one of their gods hid himself in order to escape the fury of enemies 

 pursuing him in the sea." 



With the transfer to the British of all Dutch ports on the Coromandel coast and in 

 Ceylon together with the acquirement of the Tanjore and Carnatic territories about the 

 same time, the control of all the chank-fisheries in these localities passed to the 

 British. 



The evidence furnished by the Tamil classics of the existence of an extensive chank- 

 bangle industry in the extreme south of India during the height of ancient Tamil 

 civilisation 1,200 to 2,000 years ago has received unexpectedly conclusive corroboration 

 within the present year (1912) through discoveries which I have made on the sites of 

 the once famous Tamil cities of Korkai and Kayal (now Palayakayal). These cities 

 are now represented by mounds of rubbish adjacent to villages still bearing the 

 appellation of their celebrated predecessors. The greatest find was at Korkai, which as 

 already noted flourished from a date well antecedent to the Christian era down to some 

 indeterminate date prior to 1000 A.D. when the accretion of silt at the mouth of the 

 Tambraparni drove the inhabitants to build another city (Kayal) at the new mouth of 

 the river. Here, on the landward outskirts of the village, I unearthed a fine series of 

 chank workshop waste seventeen fragments in all. The whole number were found 

 lying on the surface of the ground in a place where old Pandyan coins have from time 

 to time been discovered according to information gathered in the village. The fragments 

 unearthed all bear distinct evidence of having been sawn by the same form of instrument, 

 a thin-bladed iron saw, and in the same manner as that employed in Bengal at the 

 present day. Eight fragments represent the obliquely cut " shoulder-piece," six consist 

 of the columella and part of the oral extremity of the shell and the remaining three 

 are fragments of the lips all show a sawn surface, the positive sign of treatment by 

 skilled artisans. 



At Kayal or Palayakayal (i.e., old Kayal) as it is now termed, the daughter city of 

 Korkai, which flourished in the days of Marco Polo and appears to have grown rich as 

 Korkai gradually passed away as a sea-port owing to physical changes in the delta of the 

 Tambraparni, I found an excellently preserved sawn shoulder-piece, with marks of 

 the apex having been hammered in after the present-day habit in Dacca workshops. 



