The boats which are in use at the present day, and which differ materially in build at different parts of the island, appear to have been all copied from models supplied by other countries.  In the south the curious canoes, which attract the eye of the stranger arriving at Point de Galle by their balance-log and outrigger, were borrowed from the islanders of the Eastern Archipelago; the more substantial canoe called a ballam, which is found in the estuaries and shallow lakes around the northern shore, is imitated from one of similar form on the Malabar coast; and the catamaran is common to Ceylon and Coromandel.  The awkward dhoneys, built at Jaffna, and manned by Tamils, are imitated from those at Madras; while the Singhalese dhoney, south of Colombo, is but an enlargement of the Galle canoe with its outrigger, so clumsily constructed that the gunwale is frequently topped by a line of wicker-work smeared with clay, to protect the deck front the wash of the sea.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The gunwale of the boat of Ulysses was raised by hurdles of osiers to keep off the waves.

[Greek:  Phraxe de min rhipessi diamperes oisuinesi Kumatos eilar emen pollen d’ epecheuato hulen.] Od. v. 256.]

One peculiarity in the mode of constructing the native shipping of Ceylon existed in the remotest times, and is retained to the present day.  The practice is closely connected with one of the most imaginative incidents in the medieval romances of the East Their boats and canoes, like those of the Arabs and other early navigators who crept along the shores of India, are put together without the use of iron nails[1], the planks being secured by wooden bolts, and stitched together with cords spun from the fibre of the coconut.[2]

PALLADIUS, a Greek of the lower empire, to whom is ascribed an account of the nations of India, written in the fifth century[3], adverts to this peculiarity of construction, and connects it with the phenomenon which forms so striking an incident in one of the tales in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.  In the story of the “Three Royal Mendicants,” the “Third Calender,” as he is called in the old translation, relates to the ladies of Bagdad, in whose house he is entertained, how he and his companions lost their course, when sailing in the Indian Ocean, and found themselves in the vicinity of “the mountain of loadstone towards which the current carried them with violence, and when the ships approached it they fell asunder, and the nails and everything that was of iron flew from them towards the loadstone.”

[Footnote 1:  DELAURIER, Etudes sur la “Relation des voyages faits par les Arabes et les Persans dans l’Inde.”  Journ.  Asiat. tom. xlix. p. 137.  See also MALTE BRUN, Hist. de Geogr. tom. i. p. 409, with the references to the Periplus Mar.  Erythr., Strabo, Procopius, &c.  GIBBON, Decl. and Fall, vol. v. ch. xl.]

[Footnote 2:  Boats thus sewn together existed at an early period on the coast of Arabia as well as of Ceylon.  Odoric of Friuli saw them at Ormus in the fourteenth century (Hakluyt, vol. ii. p. 35); and the construction of ships without iron was not peculiar to the Indian seas, as Homer mentions that the boat built by Ulysses was put together with woolen pegs, [Greek:  gomphoisin], instead of bolts. Odys. v. 249.]