«\ MONTHLY. t>* # 
Vol. XIII.] 
COLOiMBO, APRIL 2ND, 1894. 
No. 10. 
PIONEERS OF THE PLANTING ENTERPRISE IN CEYLON." 
JOHN OAVIN, 
PLANTER AND MERCHANT. 
INTRODUCTORY. 
OR one who did his full 
share of work as a Pioneer 
Planter in " the forties," 
and who rose to be the 
head of the most imyjortant 
Planting Agency House in 
Ceylon, .John Gavin left 
singularly few references .to himself in our local 
annals. He was reserved and retiring in disposi- 
tion ; averse to taking any part in public life, 
although keenly alive to all that concerned the 
development of the Planting Enterprise in road 
and railway construction. During his later 
years in Kandy, when, as the leading man of 
business and perhaps the wealthiest citizen, 
he might have been expected to share 
largely in the responsibilities of the Planters' 
Association and Legislative Council, his deaf- 
ness operated against his moving out of his own 
immediate sphere of business. He gave his influ- 
ence, liowever, to the resuscitation of the Planters' 
Association in 18G2, and even occupied the 
chair for a few months in that year before his 
retirement from the Colony. But it was as a 
practical planter and a strictly lionoral)le 
merchant and estate agent that Mr. 
Gavin was best known and will be longest 
remembered in Ceylon. He rose to be the 
head of the leading Agency House of Messrs. 
Keir, Dundas & Co., Kandy, who, at the time 
he handed the business over to Messrs. G. D. 
B. Harrison and W. M. Leake, were known 
to have on their books over a hundred of 
the most prosperous plantations in the island, 
for which as agents and business managers — 
generally for absentee proprietors - they received 
in fees and commissions at the rate of £100 each 
plantation per annum, making an income from this 
source alone of £10,000 a year. In few men has so 
much confidence been shown by his brother 
colonists as in the subject of our notice, and 
the sobriquet of " Honest John," by which 
he was most widely known, sliews that to him 
might be applied the description wJiich John 
Kuskin placed on the grave of his father, — 
"an entirely honest merchant." We must now 
proceed, however, to give an account in consecu- 
tive form of the life and career of Mr. Gavin, 
although the writer having only met him once, 
soon after his own arrival in the Colony in 
1861, finds himself rather in the position of 
one who has to make "bricks without straw."' 
To one or two relatives ami friends of yiv. 
Gavin he is indebted for the memoranda wliich 
have enabled him to present the following 
brief and imperfect memoii'. 
