INDIAN BOAT DESIGNS. 221 



back to the second and third centuries A.D., whereon are depicted two-masted 

 ships with straight masts showing no trace of being either double or tripod in form. 

 On the other hand, neither do these representations of ships show any suggestion 

 of an outrigger or even of a balance board. They are ordinary round ships, two- 

 masted, carrying yards triced to the mast-heads in such a way that it is clear they 

 carried a large square-sail on each mast. Bow and stern were both raked and they 

 were steered by means of two quarter-paddles, though in some only the paddle on one 

 side is shown.' 



I am inclined to think that the Andhra sea-going ships and those fitted out from 

 the Kalinga and Orissa coasts in the early centuries A.D. were square-rigged, two mas- 

 ted vessels, with raked stem, and stern, both sharp, without bowsprit and rudder, and 

 steered by two quarter paddles. It was in vessels of this description I believe, that 

 the first Indian colonists set sail for the Malay Archipelago. Subsequently when the 

 upper west coast of India began to send out swarms of colonists (if it ever did) and. 

 when trade with Ceylon and the south-east coast assumed importance some of the 

 vessels used may have had outriggers as in the Boro Budur ships, the Ceylon yatra 

 dhonis and the Konkan fishing boats of the present day. The combination of com- 

 pound masts with a powerful outrigger (the latter now very seldom seen in Java- 

 nese cargo craft), and with the rudders set in trunkways, which we see in the larger 

 ships of the Boro Budur friezes, must have been of local evolution, perfected by the 

 Javanese in later years, as Boro Budur though began presumably in the 7th or 8th 

 century was not completed probably till the loth, some hundreds of years after the 

 active period of Indian colonization. This peculiar design combined three essen- 

 tially present-day Malaysian features — the double outrigger, the compound mast and 

 the system of double rudders. Compound masts are essentially Mongoloid in origin, 

 being seen to-day only among the Burmese, the Indonesians and the Southern Chinese. 



On the west coast of India it is probable that the employment of the outrigger 

 for coasting vessels was discarded at a comparatively early period, due, I believe, to the 

 influence exerted upon this coast by foreign seamen from the Persian Gulf and the 

 Red Sea ; on the less accessible south-eastern coast, foreign influence did not become 

 strong till some short time prior to the coming of the Portuguese, hence the outrigger 

 type prevailed there as the common design till long after the conversion of Java to 

 Buddhism. With the coming of the Arabs and still more quickly after the arrival of 

 the Portuguese, the outrigger cargo-carrier began to decline, till now we find a mere 

 handful of boats of this design engaged in trade. These few are rapidly disappearing 

 and it is probable that none will exist twenty years from now. Twelve years ago the 

 Ceylon outrigger cargo boats were familiar to me as they passed up and down the 

 coast near the Ceylon pearl-banks ; to-day few seem to know of their existence. 



As the single outrigger and balance-board designs are both Polynesian in affinity, 

 from the general diffusion of one or the other on both our Indian coasts, the only 

 sane conclusion we can come to is either that some of the coast folk of India are 



1 Rea, A., " South Indian Buddhist Antiquities," Archceol. Surv. India, New Imp. Ser., Vol XV, p. 29. 



