There was nothing at all about our watercraft on the Web. Only a big "black hole". Researchers and laymen, at home or abroad, are unaware of our ships, technology and nautical heritage. There were the occasional references in travel blog sites, but nothing more: Only ignorance.
"Sri Lankan SHIPS? Don't be mad! They never went to sea!" was the refrain, which spawned the Great Colonial Myth: "The Sinhalese people never looked towards the sea and the navigators…were always foreigners. The outriggers themselves are of foreign origin…" This is the Myth - here articulated by Auguste Toussaint – which I try to put to sleep here.
There was pretty little these "Ancients of the Western World" knew of us. We – Sinhalese, Tamil, Moor, Javanese, or Burghers – came here by sea. We all loved it, but we never forgot the sea. We sailed everywhere - to Rome, to China (the Alpha and Omega of the then-known world - but those voyages are not what this site is about. It is about the ships we evolved, built and sailed and became redundant only by 1940: killed by the Second World War. But the most ancient types remain, yet vibrantly alive! It is time to show-case our research into them and to those that have disappeared, to a more open-minded generation of scholars.
So this web site is not merely research, but a paean in praise of the "Lost Ships of Sri Lanka" and the "Mariners, Merchants and Monks" that sailed on them
There was only one thing to do: put all my findings on a web site. This. It's not quite scholarly and has bits and pieces of odd things I have done in my life. But its logo, derived from a 2nd. Century BCE potsherd from the southern coast, shows my focus. It is from our ancient port of Godawaya, near our newest port, Hambantota. (How the Old and the New overlap!)
We came here by sea and we are a nation because the sea rose, and made us an island. Every ship sailing across the Indian Ocean broke journey here to ride out the monsoons, leave its thumb print on our own watercraft (and us!) making Sri Lanka a palimpsest of nautical cultures. By that time we had evolved our own watercraft – we have unearthed a complete boat that sank in 2400 BCE – and developed a distinctive nautical culture. This is "the ORU culture." And I hope to fill up that big "black hole" with facts and original, new research.