39°2 
except that the women cover the bosom. The Christians I usually 
met with were of the lowest class; the Roman catholic missionaries 
made but few converts of superior rank, although many of them 
were seltled in the Travencore dominions, and permitted to build 
churches for public worship. 
'The poorer Malabars live on rice, salt-fish, and jagree; which 
is a coarse sugar produced from the cocoa-nut tree, wholesome 
and nourishing; those who cannot afford rice, content themselves 
with natchnee, a grain of inferior quality. The despotism of the 
government frequently occasions an artificial famine, and the in- 
habitants fly the country: a real famine is sometimes attended 
with dreadful consequences. Rice is sown at the commencement 
of the rains; which do not always fall as expected, and in some 
instances they have been entirely withheld for a whole season. 
Should the ground be only partially inundated, the ear droops, 
and yields but half a crop. On such occasions the poor wretches 
are driven by hunger to Anjengo, and other sea-ports, where you 
see a youth selling himself for sustenance, a mother offering her 
infant son for a bag of rice, and a desponding father parting with 
his wife and children for forty or fifty rupees. 
Malabar children are generally a cheap commodity at Anjengo; 
at the end of the rainy season, when there was no particular scar- 
city in the interior country, I purchased a boy and girl about eight 
or nine years of age, as a present to a lady at Bombay, for less 
money than a couple of pigs in England: I bought the young 
couple, laid in two months provision of rice and salt-fish for their 
voyage, and gave each of them four changes of cotton garments, 
all for the sum of twenty rupees, or fifty shillings. English hum a- 
