CiiAP. IV.] COTTIAE. — OYSTEES. 479 



deserted the harbour ; the town fell to ruin, and the 

 Governor of TrincomaHe, writnig in 1786 (the Dutch 

 having resumed possession of the district about twenty 

 years before), described the region as an uncultivated 

 sohtude, and the people as savages, " with hardly any- 

 thing of human nature, but its outward form ; " — and 

 strongly recommended that an effort should be made to 

 colonise Cottiar with labourers from China or Java.^ 

 To the present day, the district remains thinly popu- 

 lated ; the village itself is chiefly inhabited by fishers, 

 and the only tolerable building is the old rest-house, 

 apparently of the time of the Dutch. 



At Cottiar I was struck with the prodigious size of 

 the edible oysters, which were brought to us at the rest- 

 house. The shell of one of these measured a little more 

 than eleven inches in length, by half as many in breadth : 

 thus unexpectedly attesting the correctness of one of the 

 stories related by the historians of Alexander's expedi- 

 tion, that in India they had found oysters a foot long.^ 



We found the government barge awaiting us at the 

 mouth of the river, and after a sail of an horn' and a half 

 across the magnificent bay of Trincomahe, we passed the 

 batteries of Fort Ostenburg, and landed in the inner har- 

 bour on the seventeenth day from leaving Kandy. 



1 Journal o/FABEicirs Van Sen- 

 DEN, A.D. 1786. 



^ " In Indico mari Alexandri 

 rerum auctores pcdalia inveniri pro- 



didere." — Plin.; i\a<. //(*■/., lib. x.xxii. ' ch. viii. 



cb. 31. Dakavin says, that amongst 

 tbe fossils of Patagonia, be found '' a 

 massive gigantic oyster, sometimes 

 even a foot in diameter." — Nut. Voy., 



