120 MADRAS FISHERIES BULLETIN VOL. XI, 



and captured the Kiny.^ With traffic maintained by means of the 

 annual trade fleet it may be presumed with tolerable certainty that 

 beche-de-mer as well as pearls figured among the Indian products 

 received at the Pandyan port of Kayal in exchange for the porce- 

 lain, silks, and sweetmeats of the Middle Kingdom. Coming to 

 British days the earliest definite reference to the trade which I have 

 found is an offer to Government made in i8i6 by a certain 

 Mr. Wilkins for the whole of the beche-de-mer fished off Mannar in 

 Ceylon.- Doubtless the Dutch records in India and Ceylon contain 

 more definite information, but these are not readily available to me. 

 Tradition affirms that formerly the trade was much greater than 

 at present and the statistics supplied by the Customs Department 

 bear this out generally as will be seen from the table given 

 opposite. 



' The Sinhalese chronicle Ra/awaliya, gives the date as 1958 of the Buddhist era, 

 equivalent to I415 A.D. 



' Boake, W.J.S., " Mannar, a monograph," p. 52, Colombo, 1888. 



