INDIAN BOAT DESIGNS. 229 



The route by which the ancestors of the Australian aborigines reached Australia 

 is still unknown ; their origin and relationships remain among the most difficult 

 anthropological puzzles awaiting solution. Some connection with India has always 

 appeared probable. India lies in the direct pathway of race movements from 

 West to East, and various facts have been adduced in favour of proto- Australians 

 having once inhabited India ; among the chief of these has been the existence in 

 South India of a form of curved throwing-stick akin to the Australian boomerang. 

 Curved throwing-sticks were also used by the ancient Egyptians in the chase. A 

 somewhat similar case is that of one form of Australian sea-raft which may be of 

 common origin with the catamarans in use on the Coromandel coast of India. The 

 latter craft are highly specialized and removed entirely from the category of simple 

 rafts which are devices common to all races ; similarly some of the Australian 

 "sea- rafts" show enough specialization to make them worthy of inclusion in the 

 same class as the Indian catamaran. In considering this problem and bearing 

 in mind the Caucasian affinities of the Australian aborigines, the presence of sea- 

 going sailing rafts on the Formosan coast has some significance for there is evidence 

 of a Caucasian race having inhabited south-east Asia in pre-Mongol times ; traces 

 of these people are found in Cambodia and as there can be no question of the Ainus 

 of Japan being of Caucasian descent, we may well credit Formosa with having been 

 colonized by a branch of this same race. Hence it may well be that the shaped raft 

 or catamaran is due to the inventiveness of an ancient and far- wandered branch of 

 the Caucasian or so-called white race. 



The traces of Papuasian influence upon India are faint and in most cases are 

 due to cultural drift rather than to the settlement of any of the race in India. An 

 example of the former is probably the common use of the betel leaf in chewing, 

 this being accounted by Prain ' as of Papuasian origin. More direct seems to be 

 the connection evidenced by the close similarity in the form and decoration of canoes 

 and the method of outrigger attachment between the canoes of the Nicobar islanders 

 and those of many Papuasians. As already described, the Nicobar outrigger canoes 

 have peculiarly high and attenuated prows, and are of the single type, with two 

 booms, each attached to the float by means of a complex arrangement of three pairs 

 of oblique stanchions. A strong Malay element exists in the Nicobarese but strangely 

 enough the form of the hull, the single type of outrigger fiame, and the method of 

 float and boom attachment are all foreign to the Malaysian or Indonesian types. 

 Their nearest relationship is with the high-prowed single outriggers of New Guinea 

 and with Fijian outriggers. At Manokwari in Geelvink Bay (N. Guinea) I have 

 seen many canoes with high prows that suggest similarity in origin, while in 

 Humbolt's Bay all the local outriggers have a mode of outrigger attachment almost 

 identical with the Nicobar pattern, differing only in there being two pairs of oblique 

 stanchions instead of three pairs. 



Of interest here are the facts recorded by Boden Kloss^ that occasionally 



J Prain, Sir D., Man, igij, No. 77. 2 Loc. cit., pp. 227 and 215. 



