An Historical Relation of Ceylon
by Robert Knox
Robert Knox in the Kandyan Kingdom
by E.F.C. Ludowyk
Abroad, of course, he is largely forgotten. Though his unpolished seafarer’s prose remains easy enough to read despite the quaint seventeenth-century syntax, his story seems to have little appeal to modern-day readers. It was not always so: when the book was first published in London it caused a genuine, if modest, sensation. No doubt the human interest and pathos of Knox’s tale played their part in this, as did the exotic and perilous setting – white men who saw the Kingdom of Kandy from the inside seldom returned home to tell the tale – but the earliest readers and champions of the Relation were more impressed by the wealth of geographical, commercial and political information the author had folded into its pages. The East Indies were a part of the world in which England, at the end of the seventeenth century, was beginning to take a serious interest, and Knox’s encyclopaedic survey of Ceylon was a godsend to aspiring imperialists and merchant princes.
The book had, in fact, begun its existence as a report Knox had written for the directors of the British East India Company, which had sponsored the ill-starred trading voyage that ended with his capture along with his father (the ship’s captain) and fourteen other sailors. Among the directors of the Company was the architect and scientist Sir Christopher Wren, who read Knox’s report with interest and, ‘conceiv[ing] that it may give great Satisfaction to the Curious’, recommended it to the secretary of the Royal Society, his friend and collaborator Robert Hooke, as well as to a printer by the name of Chiswell who duly published the first English edition of the Relation in 1681. Hooke contributed a preface.
Interest in the book was by no means confined to Britain. Ceilaõ, or Ceylon, was familiar enough to the Portuguese, whose dominion over the coastal provinces of the island had begun in the sixteenth century. To other Europeans, however, it was terra incognita. Even the Dutch, who by Knox’s day had largely supplanted the Portuguese in the East Indies – and whose opportunistic alliance with Rajasinha, made decades earlier, had enabled them to do the same in Lanka not long before – still knew so little about the interior of the country that the Dutch governor in Colombo, Rijkloff van Goens, personally subjected the escaped Englishman to a courteous but intense grilling before shipping him off to Batavia. Unsurprisingly, the Relation also aroused considerable interest on the Continent, with editions in Dutch, French and German all in print before the end of the century.
In England it grew to be part of the common property of the age. Philosophers made reference to it in their works; popular authors were inspired by it (at least one American historian insists that Knox, not Alexander Selkirk, was Defoe’s model for Robinson Crusoe). All in all, the Relation did so well that its author was encouraged to prepare a greatly-expanded second edition, to be printed together with a brief autobiography and various other addenda. But he took too long to complete the work and died before it could be published; and with that, the Historical Relation and its author faded slowly into obscurity. No more comprehensive – nor more accurate – description of Lanka and her peoples would appear in print for nearly two hundred years. When it did, that book – James Emerson Tennent’s Ceylon – would owe much to Knox, not least in its first volume, which bears a clear structural resemblance to An Historical Relation.
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The original edition of Knox’s book begins with an introductory essay in which the author explains how and why it came to be written. This seems to have eluded the editorial hand of ‘my Cousin John Strype a Minister,’ who had sorted the rest of the manuscript ‘into heads & Chapters for my papers ware promiscuous & out of forme.’ Unlike the main body of his text, in which point follows point with great clarity and discipline, this introduction exhibits a discursiveness worthy of Montaigne himself. Knox meanders through his childhood, his education under his mother, ‘a woman of extraordinary Piety’, the accident in which his younger brother lost an eye, his keen sense of God’s special favour towards him – a subject to which he devotes several paragraphs – his schooldays and his first voyages abroad, closing at last with an account of how he came to be captured by the Sinhalese.
Then comes Hooke’s preface, written in a concise, urbane style a world apart from Knox’s own. It places great stress on the book’s most remarkable feature, its encyclopaedic detail and diversity. ‘The Statesman, Divine, Physitian, Lawyer, Merchant, Mechanick, Husbandman, may [each] select something for their Entertainment,’ Hooke wrote, ‘the Philosopher and Historian much more.’
After a general view of the Sea Coasts, he will lead you into the Country by the Watches, through the Thorney Gates, then Conduct you round the Mountains that Encompass and Fortifie the whole Kingdom… He will shew you their chief Cities and Towns, and pass through them into the Countrey, and there acquaint you with their Husbandry, then Entertain you with the Fruits, Flowers, Herbs, Roots, Plants and Trees… Then shew you their Beasts, Birds, Fish, Serpents, Insects; and last of all their Commodities. From hence he will carry you to Court, and shew you the King in the several Estates of his Life; and acquaint you with his way of Governing, Revenues, Treasures, Officers, Governors, Military Strength, Wars… He will bring you acquainted with the Inhabitants themselves, whence you may know their different Honours, Ranks and Qualities. Then you may visit their Temples…and see…their Priests, Religious Opinions and Practices both in their worship and Festivals, and afterwards go home to their Houses and be acquainted with their Conversation and Entertainment, see their Houswifery, Furniture, Finery, and understand how they Breed and Dispose of their Children in Marriage; and in what Employments and Recreations they pass their time. Then you may acquaint yourself with their Language, Learning, Laws, and if you please with their Magick & Jugling. And last of all with their Diseases, Sickness, Death and manner of Burial…
This impressive catalogue, further elaborated in a table of contents running to twelve close-printed pages, represents both the virtue and the weakness of the book. Knox set out to tell all he knew about Ceylon and the Kingdom of Kandy, hoping to make his account as useful as possible to his corporate sponsors. But the encyclopaedic approach seldom makes for easy reading; the editors of the Britannica do not, after all, expect you to devour their work at a sitting. Yet the Relation is more than a reference work; it is also, by turns, autobiography, traveller’s tale, adventure-story, ethnological (and moral) treatise and a polemic against the tyranny of kings. Any halfway competent hack could have worked up several books out of the material Knox poured into the Relation. As it is, the reader is left to tease them apart by herself. Lankans – particularly Kandyans, to whom the abundant descriptive content is of special relevance since it chiefly concerns their ancestors and their homeland – may be fascinated by all of it, but others, chiefly interested in the story of the author and his adventures, may find the surfeit of material indigestible and conclude, as one critic did in the Guardian, that Knox’s great work is nothing but ‘a drearily prolix ramble.’
In fact, readers looking for a good yarn would probably do well to skip the bulk of the Relation, reading only Knox’s introduction (which provides a necessary frame for the rest) and Part IV of the main text, which contains the account of his capture, his years as a prisoner and, finally, his exciting escape into Dutch-held territory north of Arippu. Such readers will, perforce, miss some of the most interesting features of the book, such as the chapters on King Rajasinha and his extraordinary style of government, Knox’s shocked account of Kandyan sexual mores and several other bonnes bouches which those having a ‘gust’ (as Hooke put it) for more exotic nourishment may well relish. But they will be spared a great weight of tedium.
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For those wishing to have their cake and eat it, a happy compromise does exist – if they can find it. Robert Knox in the Kandyan Kingdom is a book of selections from the Historical Relation edited by E.F.C. Ludowyk, an author, critic and academic who became, in 1942, the first occupant of the Chair of English at the then-brand-new University of Ceylon. This work contains the whole (as far as I can tell) of Knox’s Part IV, together with some heavily expurgated chapters from other sections of the book. For someone who only wants to know who Knox was and enjoy the most fascinating parts of his tale, this, rather than the Relation itself, is the book to read. But it was published in the first year of Lankan independence, has never been reprinted, and is now almost vanishingly rare.
I read it many years ago; it was, in fact, my own introduction to Robert Knox. I thought it excellent, an instructive and absorbing yarn with more than enough pace in it to keep me reading to the end. And, as I found when I finally came to read the Relation in full, Ludowyk’s sensitive editing has done an excellent job of preserving the tone of the original, accurately conveying the character of Knox himself. If you can find a copy, I heartily recommend that you read it first, and decide afterwards whether you really want – or need, any longer – to take on the whole of the Relation. Sadly, there can’t be many copies of Ludowyk’s unlikely gem left in the world today. Of the few that are, one may well have found its way into the hands of that American historian I mentioned earlier, the lady who thinks Knox was the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. I don’t know whether she acknowledges it in her own book, but Ludowyk earlier made exactly the same suggestion in his introduction to Robert Knox in the Kandyan Kingdom. He seems, in fact, to have been convinced that it was true, for he repeated it in print on at least two later occasions. I have no idea whether we’re looking at a case of intellectual plagiarism here, nor do I especially care – though I suppose somebody ought to. Still, if you ever get your hands on Ludowyk’s book, don’t fail to read the introduction. Except for the Crusoe punt, it is a solid, insightful essay by one of the best-ever Lankan writers and critics in English.
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But what of the Relation itself, and its remarkable appeal to Lankans?
Technically, since he was involved in the India trade under the sponsorship of the British East India Company, Knox was an imperialist – albeit a prentice one. But Lanka at the time lay out of British reach; its central regions, together with its thinly-populated southern and eastern littoral, belonged to the King of Kandy, who ruled what was left of the ancient Kingdom of Sinhalé after four hundred years of steady decline, endless wars, shifting capitals and gradual encirclement by foreign powers. The rest of the island was in the hands of another European corporation, the Dutch East India Company or VOC. Knox’s vessel, dismasted in a storm, had put in at Trincomalee for repairs; young Robert himself was a member of the shore-party sent to locate and fell a suitable tree to replace the lost mast. But Trincomalee, halfway down the east coast, was Kandyan territory, and the party were quickly – if very civilly – taken prisoner. Yet though they had been arrested on his standing orders, Rajasinha had no interest in the captives. Europeans were scarcely a novelty to him; his own court was full of white men – who were treated as privileged guests or ‘ambassadors’ until they tried to leave, whereupon they learnt their true status. Rather than have the prisoners brought to him, the king ordered them dispersed among certain villages, whose inhabitants were enjoined to provide them with security and sustenance. This was hard on the villagers, who were already very poor and were granted no additional resources with which to support their charges. It was also very much in keeping with the generally cruel and exploitative character of Rajasinha’s regime. Knox expiates at great length on the king’s tyrannical nature, describing the traditions and decrees that reserved to the ruler nearly all the land in the kingdom (only Buddhist temple lands were exempt) and all of its finest produce, squeezing the people dry. He also lists many of the cruelly whimsical dictates that forbade ordinary Lankans the simplest of household conveniences, such as stools, chairs, bedsteads, candles, tiled roofs and walls and even, in the case of lower castes, clothing enough to keep them warm and decent.
In spite of its deprivations and discomfort, Knox and most of his shipmates eventually adapted to the strictures of Kandyan life. The terms of their captivity were mild; they were given houses to live in, permitted some freedom of movement and allowed to engage in various forms of trade (making knitted caps was Knox’s speciality) in order to support themselves. Their status as prisoners of the crown ensured that their condition was, in fact, less miserable than that of the king’s native subjects. Still, their lives were far from easy, and some soon died; among the casualties was Knox’s father, who passed away, apparently of malaria, in spite of all his son’s efforts to preserve his life.
Knox himself was something of a refusenik compared to his fellow sailors, abhorring intercourse with the native women (he found them unattractive and their sexual morals revolting, or so he says) and holding as aloof as possible from native society. He did what he could to preserve his own faith and culture, saying his prayers regularly, preserving his reading skills with the help of a Bible sold him by a Jesuit and sternly holding out against ‘going native’ except in practical matters such as dress and diet. Even so, he had none of the typical imperialist’s contempt for ‘lesser breeds without the law’ and took a close interest in Lankans and their ways, as well as in the country to which Fate had brought him. The greater part of An Historical Relation is dedicated to an account of these matters.
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The picture Knox draws of Kandyan society and culture is, on the whole, balanced and persuasive, and provides us with a detailed picture of ordinary life in the Kandyan kingdom that is rivalled by few other olden-day travellers’ tales. European travellers and explorers prior to the nineteenth century generally fared from court to court and saw relatively little of the lives of the common people, whereas Knox saw nothing but the latter, and wisely took pains never to bring himself to the attention of the mighty. That his portrayal of the Kandyans has been so equably accepted by its subjects is no mystery: though he finds much to condemn in their customs and manners, he was also quick to give credit where it was due and was clearly sympathetic towards the poverty and oppression they suffered. Racism and other forms of prejudice seem to have been alien to him, a fact that partly accounts for the unusual clarity and accuracy of his observations. The only exception here was religion: a devout Christian, Knox found the superstition and syncretism of the Sinhalese repellent and literally damnable. Of Buddhism he knew little, because his peasant neighbours were similarly ignorant; Buddhism in those days was far from the cultural monolith it has since become, and though enjoying royal patronage it was only one among many forms of spiritual consolation pursued by the Sinhalese.
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Apart from the sections recommended above, readers with an interest in history and politics are sure to relish the depiction of Rajasinha himself, which, though drawn from hearsay only – Knox admitted to van Goens that he had never set eyes on the monarch – portrays a despot so selfish and capricious as to make his royal contemporary Louis XIV of France, then in the pomp of his own absolutist reign, seem a philanthropist by comparison. The liberal philosopher John Locke was deeply impressed: ‘What the protection of absolute monarchy is,’ he wrote in an introduction to one of his own essays, ‘what kind of fathers of their countries it makes princes to be, and to what a degree of happiness and security it carries civil society… he that will look into the late Relation of Ceylon may easily see.’ The maxim ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ would not be coined for another two hundred years, but it describes Knox’s Rajasinha to perfection. The king was, admittedly, driven to extreme shifts by the reality that his kingdom was encircled and cut off from the outside world and that he himself was – or fancied he was – under constant threat from enemies domestic and foreign. All the same, the Kandyan kingdom, as Knox describes it, was little better than an open concentration-camp for its neglected and mercilessly exploited inhabitants and rich only in deprivations – so rich, indeed, that, listed in the form of a poem, the lacunae Knox identified cover two whole pages.
His popularity among Lankan readers endures in spite of rather than because of his portrayal of Rajasinha, whom we commonly speak of as a hero for holding off the Portuguese and Dutch as long as he did, ignoring his grotesque treatment of his own people and the deadly paranoia that saw him slaughter much of contemporary Kandyan nobility. It rests, instead, on Knox’s depiction of ordinary life among the Sinhalese and the judicious compliments he paid them. Some of the latter have, it is true, been improved upon over the years – for instance, his much-quoted observation that a Kandyan ploughman only needed to have the mud washed off him to be fit to rule a kingdom was made with special regard to the aristocratic residents of Udunuwara, but today is commonly taken to apply to all Sinhalese. Such frailties are perhaps excusable in a people whose history has been unhappy as ours has, and our affection for an unwilling guest who was, in the end, no particular friend of Lanka arguably does us credit.
