Nature Ramble

Discomedusae, by Ernst Haeckel

A Visit to Ceylon

by Ernst Haeckel
translated by Clara Bell

This is a delightful account of a visit to my native country by one of the greatest naturalists of the latter half of the nineteenth century, who was a fine writer and a brilliant artist to boot. His book concentrates mostly on the geography and natural history of the country, though he makes some observations about the people, too. Although his outlook and his ideas inevitably reflect his time, he brings a devotedly empirical attitude, as well as a refreshingly modern scepticism, to his observations. Haeckel was, of course, a great supporter of evolutionary theory and the man chiefly responsible for introducing Darwin’s work to the German-speaking world. Less admirably, he was also a proponent of racist and eugenicist views – which are, fortunately, present only in germinal form here.

I’d known about this book for many years and even repeated one oft-quoted passage from it in my own writings, but somehow never got round to reading the whole thing until a few weeks ago. What a treat it turned out to be. Haeckel’s breezy, confident, yet somehow unassuming style is a delight, and his descriptions of sights and scenes in Ceylon are lapidary. He gives us an island full of laughter, light and air, a far cry from the stygian forests, brooding ruins and shiftless devil-worshipping natives portrayed by Christian missionaries, who were embittered by their largely fruitless struggles to convert the Ceylonese from their native superstitions to those of Europe. Even these disappointed souls, however, never failed to testify to the natural beauty of the country – at which Haeckel never ceases, in his book, to marvel.

Ceylon: Jungle River by Ernst Haeckel. Lithograph by W. Koehler

His principal object in coming to Ceylon was to study and describe the marine life of the seas surrounding the island, as he had earlier done with that of the northern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Having been disappointed in his hopes of visiting the natural treasure-house of Trincomalee on the east coast, he had to content himself with studies in Galle Harbour and Weligama Bay. In Weligama he lived for three weeks entirely surrounded by the local people, exploring the bay and the nearby lagoons and wetlands and making no contact with any white person. Most of his descriptions of the Sinhalese people and of village life in Ceylon are drawn from this experience. He also visited Kandy, where he was overwhelmed by the riches of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, and made a tour of the up-country plantation districts (he was impressed by the British planters’ work ethic, but laughed at their insistence on dressing for dinner every night though living in the back of beyond). In the company of an ancestor of mine, Henry Trimen, he then made an expedition to World’s End, where the southern extremity of the central hill massif terminates in an abyss. From here, he and Trimen descended by the precipitous Nagrak trail to Nonpareil Estate, 4,000 feet below, and thence to Ratnapura, where they boarded a local riverboat that carried them down the Kalu Ganga to the coast. From here Haeckel returned to Colombo by rail and caught a steamer home to Europe, breaking journey in Egypt along the way.

His account of his excursions in Ceylon made me want to travel back in time and see my native land as it used to be before modernity, money and a growing population took their inevitable toll. The land he describes is Edenic, with only the faintest marks of human habitation and industry to mar it – except in the hill country, where he laments the loss of hundreds of thousands of acres of primaeval forest to the colonial plantation enterprise. Ceylon was then in truth the paradise of nature clumsily and mendaciously evoked in present-day tourist advertising. Accessible fragments of paradise still remained when I was a young man, but they are nearly all gone now. Books like these, old sketches, paintings and photographs are all that remain. Ceylon no longer exists; we are all Sri Lankans now, to our great loss.

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel