Excerpt from Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 3Bishop Whitehead has recently* placed on record his experiences of coracles as a means of conveyance. We embarked, he writes, in a boat (at Hampi on the Tungabhadra) which exactly corresponds to my idea of the coracle of the ancient Britons. It consists of a very large, round wicker basket, about eight or nine feet in diameter, covered over with leather, and propelled by paddles. As a rule, it spins round and round, but the boatmen can keep it fairly straight, when exhorted to do so, as they were on this occasion. Some straw had been placed in the bottom of the coracle, and we were also allowed the luxury of chairs to sit upon, but it is safer to sit on the straw, as a chair in a coracle is generally in a state of unstable equilibrium. I remem ber once crossing a river in the Trichinopoly district in a coracle, to take a confirmation at a village on the other side. It was thought more suitable to the dignity of the occasion that I should sit upon a chair in the middle of the coracle, and I weakly consented to do so. All the villagers were assembled to meet us on the opposite bank, four policemen were drawn up as a guard of honour, and a brass band, brought from Tanjore, stood ready in the background. As we came to the shore, the villagers salaamed, the guard of honour saluted, the band struck up a tune faintly resembling See the conquering hero comes, ' the coracle bumped heavily against the shelving bank, my chair tipped up.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.