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Updated: June 29, 2025
We pass under the high stern of a lumbering native craft; its grey sun-bitten woodwork is loosely put together: on a collection of dried palm leaves and coir ropes on the stern, sit the naked, brown crew feeding off a bunch of green bananas.
The stench of putrid vegetable matter arising from these heaps must be highly deleterious. Subsequently the husks are beaten and the fibre is separated and dried. Coir rope is useful on account of its durability and power of resisting decay during long immersion. In the year 1853, twenty-three hundred and eighty tons of coir were exported from Ceylon.
Two days later, and after nearly fifteen weeks of arduous and unremitting labour, there came, one calm night, a glorious spring tide, and the Dolphin, under a full head of steam, and with her stout, broad frame quivering and throbbing and panting, tugged away at the giant hulk of the stranded ship; and the ship's own donkey engine and winch wheezed and groaned as it slowly brought in inch by inch a heavy coir hawser made fast to a rock half a cable length ahead of the tug.
This was the celebrated conflict at Glenfruin, near the southwestern extremity of Loch Lomond, in the vicinity of which the MacGregors continued to exercise much authority by the coir a glaive, or right of the strongest, which we have already mentioned.
Canon Kingsley, in his charming book on the West Indies, says, "The undoubted fact is known I find to few educated English people, that the Coco palm, which produces coir rope, cocoanuts, and a hundred other useful things, is not the same plant as the cacao bush which produces chocolate, or anything like it.
The exports of Ceylon are cinnamon, arrack, coir, cocoa nuts: the imports are grain, piece goods, and European merchandize. The commerce of the eastern coast of Hindostan centers in Madras: the exports from this place are principally piece goods, grain, cotton, &c.; the imports, woollen manufactures, copper, spirits, pepper, and other spices.
Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons, copper-fastened, and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands. We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel consequently crank.
What would all the boats do that traverse the backwater, or lie at anchor in the bay, or line the sandy beach? From the cable of the great pattimar, now getting under weigh for the Persian Gulf with a cargo of coconuts, to the painter of the dugout, "hodee," every yard of cordage about them is made of imperishable coir.
It was a different case with the rope. The fibre had smouldered badly; it would be unwise to attempt to raise the heavy bucket by it. Cutting adrift a length of the coir rope the subaltern bent it to the neck of one of the jars and drew up the vessel full of liquid. The water was loathsome in appearance, its surface being covered with ash and fragments of charcoal of various sizes.
The fibre that surrounds the nut makes up the other mysterious article of commerce known as coir, which is twisted into stout ropes, or woven into coco-nut matting and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are also made of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest fashion, in place of real horse-hair in stuffing cushions.
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