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As an illustration of the white man's supremacy, in dealing with black and brown peoples, Marichchikkaddi probably has no equal.
Morning came, and the Indian skipper was plying his furnace with lubricating oil and turpentine with anything that would help him get me to Colombo and medical skill. At last, eighteen hours out from Marichchikkaddi, the Active was in the harbor and I was being carried to the Grand Oriental Hotel. "What about the two bags of oysters, the captain wishes to know!" the hotel interpreter asked.
For a dozen reasons it is a wonderful town, and the foremost of these is that it is the only city of size that comes and goes like the tide's ebbing and flowing. When a fishery is proclaimed, Marichchikkaddi is only a name a sand-drifted waste lying between the jungle of the hinterland and the ocean.
Colombo is facetiously spoken of by Englishmen as the Clapham Junction of the East, for the reason that one can there change to a steamer carrying him virtually to any place on the globe. But it is simpler for a white man to get to Melbourne, or Penang, or New York, from Colombo, than to obtain passage to Marichchikkaddi, only a hundred and fifteen miles up the coast.
The dingy fleet blossoms into a cloud of canvas, with every boat headed for Marichchikkaddi, the instant the "cease work" gun is fired. The scene suggests a regatta on a gigantic scale, and from a distance the leaning lug and lateen sails of the East give the idea of craft traveling at terrific speed. It is a regatta, a free-for-all, devil-take-the-hindmost affair.
Sitting upright on his cot-bed, the poor fellow said to me with an earnestness almost compelling tears: "Help me to get out of this place, please. I want to be with my boat, for there is no better diver than I am, and I can earn a hundred rupees a day as easily as any man in Marichchikkaddi."
Stories of towns rising overnight wherever gold is found, or diamonds discovered, or oil struck, have become common to the point of triteness. Tales of the uprising of Klondike and South African cities, once amazing, fade to paltriness in the opinion of one who has seen the teeming city of Marichchikkaddi.
Confident was I that the bags on the stern grating that had been freshly soused with seawater as the Active steamed away from Marichchikkaddi contained a wealth of pearls. In the cool of the early morning I would subsidize the eight native sailors, getting them to open the shelled treasures, while I garnered the pearls.
No Colombo merchant or magnate, or man or woman of the official set, is superior to tempting fortune by buying a few thousand oysters freshly landed from Marichchikkaddi. And the interminable question of caste, banning many things to Cingalese and Tamil, inhibits not the right to gamble upon the contents of a sackful of bivalves.
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