182 J. HORN ELL ON 



covers^ efficiently protecting the cargo. These boats dispense with the fore and aft 

 gaff sail used by the Minicoy bonito boats, but often add a small topsail in fine wea- 

 ther. They have speed and power and form a fine class of sea-boat. Formerly the 

 smaller Maldivian boats of this description running to Ceylon employed an outrigger 

 to give additional stability. The present build is more beamy and deeper and the crew 

 find they can now safely dispense with this clumsy contrivance. 



For many years the Maldivians have maintained regular trade with Chittagong 

 and other far-off ports, by means of large traders running to one hundred tons or 

 more in size. These vessels are very remarkable as they perpetuate, in their main 

 features, the characteristics of the Portuguese and Spanish caravels employed by 

 Columbus and Vasco da Gama and the conquistadores who followed in their footsteps 

 at the beginning of the sixteenth century. These Maldivian traders are fully decked 

 with considerable deck houses aft and amidships and a big overhanging forecastle 

 carrying a short foremast raking forwards, hoisting a square foresail well over the 

 bows. The rest of the rig consists of a tall mainmast and fair-sized mizzen ; the 

 former carries a big main square sail set high up with topsail and occasional 

 small topgallant sail, while the latter is rigged with a fore and aft gaff sail. In the 

 last detail we have a departure from the lateen mizzen of the fifteenth century ship. 

 The Maldivian design has also dispensed with the lofty poop and transom stern so 

 characteristic of mediaeval ships. 



LACCADIVE ISI.ANDS. 



The sailing craft of the lyaccadives lack the diversity of form seen in the 

 sister isles to the south. The islanders are of a different race and are home-keeping 

 people with a narrower outlook in life, to whom a voyage to the adjacent mainland, 

 to Calicut or Mangalore, to carry their simple island produce of tiny coconuts and 

 amber-coloured coir fibre, with sometimes a little sun-dried fish, is the limit of 

 their world travel. They have no elegant bonito boats, and no three-masted traders, 

 notably no outrigger boats. They have one type alone, but that a most handsome 

 one. It is a little lateen-rigged modification of the type of Indian pattamar, com- 

 bining the simple bow of the southern type with the lofty highly ornamented 

 poop of the northern or kotia design. The lines are particularly sweet, sweeping 

 forw^ards in graceful curves to the overhanging bow, ending in a curious upright 

 stem piece carried in the same way as the more elaborate ornament on the prow of 

 a Venetian gondola. 



The poop cabin is large and roomy with a curious stern gallery built out aft and 

 on the quarters exa.ctly as in many of our present-day naval vessels. The hull is 

 painted or rather tarred black, relieved by two fore and aft white bands, the upper 

 wide, the lower narrow. The sides of the lofty poop and of the stern gallery are 

 decorated with elegant arabesques in white, usually in panels with ornamental borders. 

 No two pattamars are decorated alike ; the designs vary greatly and bespeak a strong 

 innate artistic sense in the islanders. The hulls of these boats are put together 

 entirely without nails, the planks being sewn together along the edges with coir twine, 



