PEARL FISHERY.

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and boys armed with rods wade into the lagoon, and may
often be seen hauling forth several fish a minute, even 2
couple at a time, without the superfluity of using a bait.
A line armed with a naked hook is all-sufficient when
flicked among a shoal with that skill which comes of
practice.
Although wicker traps are not used for catching erabs, such
are in common use for taking the smaller fishes, both in the
sea and in rivers. Three forms of fish traps are exhibited,
together with two patterns of bottomless wicker baskets
employed to capture fish upon flooded land—often in paddy
fields—when the waters begin to subside.
Pearl Fishing.
The pearl fishery is an historic industry in Ceylon, and
around it centre legendary stories innumerable. A source of
treasure, of tribute, and of trouble, historians have occasion
to refer to it continually ; poets, Tamil aswell as Sinhalese,
employ it in their imagery. Ceylon, in the exuberant
phraseology of the Orient, is “the pearl drop on India’s
brow”; the Gulf of Mannar is “the sea abounding in pearls”
and “the sea of gain.”
Pearls and gems brought the Pheenicians coasting hither
at regular seasons; the Romans and Levantine Greeks
succeeding them as traders, continued the commerce, to be
ousted in turn by the Arabs. These, a race of born traders
and intrepid adventurers, long held the command of the
Rastern seas, down indeed to the beginning of the gixteenth
 century, when the superior energy and audacity of
the Portuguese, brought on the scene by Vasco de Gama’s great
achievement, put an end to Arab maritime supremacy, and
brought the influence of European civilization to bear intimately
 upon Ceylon. Thus the control of the pearl fishery
passed into European hands, and therein has remained—the
Dutch succeeding the Portuguese, the English in turn taking
over the management in 1796.
The earliest historical reference to the Ceylon pearl
fisheries is probably that contained in the great Sinhalese
national record, the Mahawansa, wherein it is recorded that
King Wijayo, who reigned about 550 B.C., sent his father-inlaw
 gifts of chanks and pearls to the value of two lacs of
rupees (over $60,000).
Coming to the middle ages, we find the Arab traveller
[bn Batuta—whom I shrewdly suspect to have been a
prototype of our old friend Sindbad the Sailor-—in 1344
interviewing the Tamil king of the northern part of the
Island at the close of a successful pearl fishery,