TRANQUIL ISLANDS

Manawatu Times, Volume 60, Issue 196, 21 August 1935, Page 16

TRANQUIL ISLANDS

TjWERI' GROUP OF ISLES in the Indian Ocean has its own story, its atmosphere of old adventure or present romance. Just north of the equator lies tiie string of atoll islands, hundreds of them, named the Maldives. Here dwell a seafaring native people who have inherited from their ancestors a remarkable skill in making and repairing nautical instruments. These sailormen of the Maldives were trading with Ceylon and the Malabar coast in the days when the ancient Britons were painting themselves blue. A civilised people indeed, though they live in the tropical heat of the equator with the warm sea washing their very doors. Life goes easily in the Maldives —coconut palms, banyans, breachruit trees, limes, pineapples and sugar cane provido abundant food. Bonito fishing is the chief occupation of tho islanders —one boat may take a thousand in a day. Many sailors have happy memories ot these friendly islands; lor centuries the islanders have taken shipwrecked men into their homes and cared for them. Serious crime in unknown in the Maldives, lliere has

not been a murder lor many years, duel even thefts are rare.

Some of the women are light-skinned and beautiful. Persians and lair Circassians settled there long ago; and here and there among the islanders you will find pure examples of the

types. ‘Ruled bv a, Sultan, a Prime Minister and a Council of Nobles, tho Maldivians would make a fascinating study for anthropologists interested in the survival, in lonely places, of old civilisations. Though they are under British protection, there is no interference with their own affairs. N"o cruisers steam to these peaceful isles to settle a revolution. Every year the Sultan sends his ambassadors to the Governor of Ceylon to present a tribute of cowrie shells, fish and cakes. The islanders are lightly taxed, the chief ot each atoll sending a iraetion of the produce to the Sultan every year. *

In their own vessels or a hundred tons or more tho Maidive islanders sail the Indian Ocean I'll Pit methods of navigation are, perhaps, the last relics ot the science which the oold Portuguese struggled to perfect when they sailed off the charts of tho known' world.