H. A. J. Hulugalle assembled here the reports of eighteen travellers who reached the island and wrote about what they saw. The sequence opens with Sri Lankan envoys who went to Rome around 48 AD and closes in 1815, with the British conquest of the Kingdom of Kandy — a span that takes in Greek and Roman chroniclers, Chinese and Moorish traders, Italian voyagers, and the Portuguese, Dutch, German, French, Danish and British visitors who followed the European trading routes east.
What the accounts have in common is that they are all outsiders' accounts. Each traveller arrived with his own reasons for coming, his own idea of what mattered, and his own audience at home; what he chose to record — the harbours, the pearl fishery, the elephants, the courts, the customs, the price and provenance of goods — tells you something about the island and something about the observer. Hulugalle brings them together in one volume so that the sequence can be read as a whole, from the earliest classical notices through to the fall of the last Sinhalese kingdom.
Hulugalle came to the material as a journalist. He spent thirty years in the profession, seventeen of them as editor of the Ceylon Daily News, before being appointed head of the Ceylon Information Department in 1948; he later represented Ceylon as ambassador in Rome and Athens. That background shows in the handling — the emphasis falls on the narrative and on the travellers themselves rather than on scholarly apparatus. Several of his books on Sri Lanka continue to be used as reference works.
The book suits readers who want the island's history in the words of the people who described it at the time, rather than in summary. It is a useful starting point for anyone tracing how Ceylon entered the geographical imagination of the Mediterranean world, how it appeared to Chinese and Arab merchants working the Indian Ocean trade, and how the European powers wrote about it as they arrived in succession. Visitors to Sri Lanka who have read the standard histories will find here the raw material those histories draw on. It also reads well simply as travel writing, since much of what these men set down was written to astonish readers who would never make the voyage themselves.
Published in Sri Lanka by Vijitha Yapa, an established Colombo house publishing in English and Sinhala.
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