INDIAN SHIPPING
No. 5 appears to be in collision with some other vessel, or perhaps it shows a smaller vessel which used to be carried as a provision against damages or injury to the larger one from the perils of navigation. This was, as already pointed out, true of the merchantman in which Fa-Hien took passage from Ceylon to Java. No. 5 illustrates also the use of streamers to indicate the direction of winds.
There is another type of ships represented in Nos. 2 and 4. The fronts are less curved than in the first type; there is also only one mast. No. 2 shows a scene of rescue, a drowning man being helped out of the water by his comrade. No. 4 represents a merrier scene, the party disporting themselves in catching fish.
Some of the favourite devices of Indian sculpture to indicate water may be here noticed. Fresh and sea waters are invariably and unmistakably indicated by fishes, lotuses, aquatic leaves, and the like. The makara, or alligator, showing its fearful row of teeth in Fig. 2, is used to indicate the ocean; so also are the albatrosses or sea-gulls of Fig. 6. The curved lines are used to indicate waves.
astrologers are said to have used the magnet as they still use the modern compass, in fixing the North and East, in laying foundations, and other religious ceremonies. The Hindu compass was an iron fish that floated in a vessel of oil and pointed to the North. The fact of this older Hindu compass seems placed beyond doubt by the Sanskrit word maccha-yantra, or fish machine, which Molesworth gives as a name for the mariner's compass."
48
