PART IV.— THE CivASSES OF VESSEI.S EMPLOYED BY INDIANS IN 

 ANCIENT DAYS PRIOR TO PORTUGUESE MARITIME DOMINANCE. 



Until we come to the days of Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta I know of no technical 

 descriptions of the boats and ships used on the Indian coasts, except one by Pliny and 

 the involved and difficult passage in the Periplus already quoted, where two Indian 

 trading vessels called respectively sangara and kolandiophonta are mentioned, the 

 former being large ' monoxyla,' which means literally that each vessel was formed 

 from complete logs and not constructed of planks. I agree with Schoff ' in correlating 

 the nam.e with the Tamil sangadam, a double-canoe made from two great hollowed 

 out tree trunks lashed together, in spite of the fact that this type of craft is never 

 used nowada3^s for sea-going purposes, being restricted to rivers, estuaries and back- 

 waters. The word, as well as the use of this form of canoe, is found throughout 

 Dravidia ; on the Malabar coast the term appears as changadani, in Kanara as jangala. 

 The Polynesians when first seen by European voyagers employed sea-going double 

 canoes of large size ; to-day few exist and these of small dimensions only, the large 

 ones being replaced by schooners of European design. If, as I believe, there is an 

 infUvSion of Polynesian blood in the coastal population of South India, we can the 

 more readily agree with the view that large double-canoes were employed in trade on 

 the Coromandel coast at the time of the Periplus. The only alternative to this view 

 is to consider the monoxlya making up a sangara, as the constituent logs of a cata- 

 maran. But catamarans are never used as cargo carriers ; they are exclusively 

 fishing boats and this fact excludes them from identification with the description of 

 them in the Periplus as "large vessels." 



Kolandiophonta or kolandia as rendered probably more correctly by Schoff, des- 

 cribed as vessels of great bulk employed for overseas voyages to Bengal and Malaysia 

 (Chryse), must almost certainly have been two- masted vessels with pointed ends and 

 probably equipped with a stout outrigger, counterparts of the present-day Sinhalese 

 yatra-oruwa (yatra-dhoni in Tamil), but, unlike them, steered by quarter oars, the 

 rudder not being then invented. I come to this conclusion partly because kolandia 

 appears to be a Greek sailor's rendering of the word kullan or kulla, the Tamil 

 term both for a large outrigger fishing canoe and for the outrigger frame alone 

 {kullan, the more correct and older form becomes shortened to kiilla in the corrupt 

 speech of Tamil fishermen), and partly from Pliny's account of the ships used in the 

 seas between India and Ceylon. 



It is indeed a strange coincidence that this view of kolandia being outrigger 

 vessels should receive valuable support from Pliny, who says, " the sea between the 



1 Loc. cit. , p. 243. 



