INDIAN BOAT DESIGNS. 251 



pumpkin used is of a particular grey-coloured variety, well known in Tamil as 

 Kalyana pushinl kai as it is intimately associated with certain marriage ceremonies. 

 Its preparation is significant ; a piece is gouged out and through the opening thus 

 made a quantity of powdered saffron and of vermilion powder ( r^'^O'^o/i) ) is dropped 

 inside, the opening being reclosed with the plug of rind first cut out. The exterior 

 is also sometimes daubed with the same two pigments. Now it is well known that a 

 common practice in many countries in a primitive stage of civilization has been to 

 offer up a human victim at the launching of vessels ; the Vikings and the South vSea 

 Islanders amongst others followed this custom. It may either mean the propitiation 

 of a protecting spirit resident either in the boat herself or in the sea or it may be de- 

 signed, as Grant Allen contends, to liberate a guardian spirit from the human victim, 

 so intimately incorporated with the very planks and timbers of the boat as to become 

 part and parcel of its fabric. 



With milder manners and the influence of higher religious conceptions, domesti- 

 cated animals were substituted for the human sacrifice ; the gradation in India appears 

 to have been first the ox or the buffalo, then the sheep, next the fowl and eventually, 

 as we see in the instance now treated of, the refinement is reached of the employment 

 of a vegetable. But even here, old custom exerts its influence, and the pumpkin has 

 to be so treated that when smashed, some appearance of blood spilling may be shown. 

 The fact that the bow of the boat during the puja ceremonies is also daubed with 

 red spots as well as the pumpkin itself, corroborates this idea that the present-day 

 ceremony is an emasculated simulacrum of the immolation of a human victim ; they 

 appear to represent the blood splashes spurted from the sacrifice as the boat lum- 

 bered over the body. 



Still further and very conclusive evidence is furnished in the fact that the word 

 used for this pumpkin-smashing ceremony is that for sacrifice in Tamil, hali {uS). 

 A similar use of a pumpkin filled with red and yellow powder is also employed 

 in certain other sacrificial Tamil ceremonies unconnected with boats, but invari- 

 ably associated with some deity who dislikes animal sacrifices. I should mention 

 that Kanniamma, the sea-goddess, is one of these benevolent deities ; the fishermen 

 at Madras say that she would be displeased if sheep or fowls were offered as sacrifices 

 to her. The pumpkin possibly represents the head of the victim. In the Moluccas 

 a common fype of boat of gondola-like lines has great upstanding ends, terminating 

 in a ribbed sub-globular ornament which so reminded me of a pumpkin when I first 

 saw it, that for want of a better name I termed these craft "pumpkin boats"; the 

 idea occurred to me at the time that these ornaments were originally the heads of 

 enemies — all the people of these parts were head-hunters till comparatively recent 

 times. A well-known parallel to this boat-launching sacrifice is the belief current 

 and persistent among Indian villagers that the Department of Public Works pro- 

 vides a human victim for the protection of any great undertaking it has in hand, 

 particularly in the case of important river viaducts. 



Of equal interest is the persistence of an eye upon either bow in the case of the 

 archaic-looking kalla dhoni of the Tanjore coast (S. India). Until the comparatively 



