THE LACCADIVES AND THE WEST COAST. 44] 
Besides cocoanuts and fish, salt and fresh, for local consumption, 
the islands produce very little in way of food stuffs ; a very 
few vegetables, and a small number of Bread-fruits, Papaias, 
Plantains, Yams, and Areca-nuts are grown in the islands, 
chiefly at Amini Divi,* and there are a good number of Limes 
grown in most of the islands, but what the islanders have 
mainly to depend on, in the way of farinaceous food, is 
imported rice, which they bring back from the main-land in 
exchange for their exports. 
If, as has happened on several occasions, many of the vessels 
returning with the rice are lost in any unseasonable storm 
(for they only communicate with the main-land during the fair 
Season), the mass of the inhabitants are soon on the verge of 
semi-starvation, and Government aid becomes indispensable. 
In former days, a certain amount of millets used to be grown 
in all the islands, now, even in Amini, little or none appears to 
be cultivated, and the people are wholly dependant for their 
supplies on the main-land, whence they bring not only rice 
but tobacco and salt, which curiously enough never seems to 
have been manufactured on the islands, the people being 
allowed to get duty-free salt from Goa. 
The people, as far as we could judge of them, seemed a peace- 
ful order-respecting population. They have been accused of 
plundering wrecks, but, 1 believe, the worst that ean be said of 
them is that, when they have found abandoned wrecks on the 
reefs and useful articles lying about handy, they have very 
sensibly helped themselves. Considering that no salvage had ever 
been offered to them or any inducement held out to them to act 
otherwise, I think, that no great blame attaches to them. They 
have never been inhospitable or unfriendly to ship-wrecked marin- 
ers, and now that salvage has been duly offered to them, and the 
Jaw on this subject explained to them, I do not believe that any- 
thing more than petty pilfering, such as goes on to this day on 
our own English coasts, will be heard of. 
One point in the islanders favour deserves prominent record. 
All who have ever visited eastern climes, have had painful ex- 
perience of the unpleasant sights and smells that greet one in the 
neighbourhood of every inhabited site. Now even in the densely 
populated island of Amini the visitor has nothing of the kind to 
encounter. The most perfect sanitation exists ; the whole place 1s 
kept as clean as a private garden. There is no filth, no pigs, 
and except a little fishy odour here and there on the shore 
where fish is being salted and dried (and the people do little of 
this) the whole place is sweet and wholesome. 
* Divi. which the natives commonly add to all the names of the islands, seems 
only to mean islands, while * par” signifies a reef or bank, 
