Richard Boyle concludes his two part series on the life and times of Richard Spittel

'Oh island mine, you are heaven to me'

"He carried the barest equipment. A 20 foot square of canvas to be slung between two trees for a tent a simple wooden food box containing, always, some eggs, biscuits, tea, tinned milk, matches, a tin plate, a knife, fork, spoon, and a little sugar. There would be further food boxes with corned beef, rice, and so on - no luxuries, no mineral waters or alcohol. The main thing was presents for the Veddahs such as cloth for the women, who until he finally made contact with them had no clothes to cover their nakedness - except animal skins. 

Then there were medicines, malaria tablets, etc. He found the Veddahs riddled with Framboesia Tropica, a specific disease which he gave them injections for. He also took them rice, tobacco leaves, caps and gunpowder for their muzzle-loading guns (I think they had two), and axe heads." (Christine Wilson: personal communication, October 30 1986.)

One of Richard Spittel's most significant treks was in quest of the Veddah outlaw Tissahamy. Many years earlier, Tissahamy's daughter had been murdered by her husband. There followed a saga of murder and revenge in which Tissahamy was implicated. Surrounded by police, he had killed a constable before disappearing into the jungle, where he was to evade capture for over 15 years. Tissahamy finally gave himself up and after a short prison sentence, went back to live with the Veddahs. His amazing story is told in Richard Spittel's book, Savage Sanctuary.

In 1935, at the age of 53, Richard Spittel retired from government service. The Governor of Ceylon, Sir Reginald Edward Stubbs, wrote to him on the occasion: "Your work as a surgeon to the General Hospital and your association with the Medical College as Lecturer in Surgery have advanced the standard of surgical practice in Ceylon and received wide recognition."

Apart from his anthropological and historical writings, Richard Spittel was the author of three important and influential medical books - A Basis of Surgical Ward Work (Colombo: 1915), Framboesia Tropica (Colombo: 1923) and Essentials of Surgery (Colombo: 1932). For his service to medicine he was awarded first the C.B.E (Commander of the British Empire) and then the C.M.G (Companion of St. Michael and St. George). He felt so undeserving of the latter that he had to be persuaded by the Prime Minister, D. S. Senanayake (who undoubtedly recommended him) to accept the honour.

Professionally, he still had his large private practice. He also ran his own nursing home, a venture in which his wife, Clarie - one of the few women doctors of the period - gave him invaluable help. The nursing home was now situated at Wycherley, the residence he had built for his family in Colombo, and which is an architectural landmark to the present day. He continued to lecture and was to be largely responsible for the emergence of a new generation of surgeons. In addition, he still operated on emergency cases throughout the island and was to remain a faithful doctor to the Veddahs for another 30 years. Now, however, he had another objective in mind.

In 1916 he had joined the Ceylon Game Protection Society - known today as the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society. His enrolment was a significant event, as membership was then almost exclusively European. He was to change the very nature of the society, bringing to it new horizons and new recognition. 

From the narrow interests of game and sport, he guided the society into the wider fields of wildlife conservation and the establishment of national parks. In an age when ecology was a scarcely defined word, his aim was to protect the island's wildlife for future generations, not only for the privileged few but also for the population at large.

From being a committee member, Richard Spittel was elected the first Ceylonese president of the society. He helped to establish Wilpattu as a national park, and Ruhunu, which had for so long existed as a sportsman's reserve, changed its status. They became the wildlife sanctuaries that Richard Spittel had long envisaged.

His next ambition was to start a magazine on Ceylon's wildlife. No name has been associated so strongly with Loris as that of Richard Spittel. He was to be its editor from 1937 to 1964 with just one brief break. Possibly nothing gave him greater satisfaction, and perhaps no other writing of his served a wider purpose. Here is a continuous record of the island's national parks and wildlife, and the endeavour to save them from the depredations of man.

There is a need, I believe, to publish a collection of Spittel's Loris writings. Leafing through the 1940s and 1950s issues of the magazine turns up many of his delightful articles - on the devil bird, the dugong, the pearl fishery and the nittaewo, among many others. I have also come across a marvellous short story of his called "The Ruby," about an illusory gemstone that entraps the greedy and unwary.

One of my favourite passages from these writings is the almost mystical introductory paragraph to his article, The Pearl Banks, contained in the June 1958 issue. "Over the tranquil sea of the Gulf of Mannar the morning breeze blew fresh. The blue unruffled sheet stretched to the low horizon where it met the vast immensity of the pastel sky, with its soft cloud masses motionless as in a picture. It was a scene of breathless beauty, a glory of the firmament that whispered to the heart of man: It is God." How successful Spittel was at conveying the quintessence of the island's wilderness areas.

When the need arose, Richard Spittel would always speak out courageously. During the early 1950s, he noted with growing concern how pneumonia and other illnesses were depopulating the Veddahs. He wrote a vehement article to the press declaring that the backward communities, such as the Veddahs, Rodiyas and Kinnarayas, should receive special protection. "These pockets of degraded humanity are shameful anachronisms that should have no place in the present day world. They are festering sores in an otherwise enlightened land. It is time for the conscience of the people to be awakened to its obligations."

Although he was in his 70s, Richard Spittel pleaded their cause with D.S. Senanayake. The Prime Minister was sympathetic and as a result, the Backward Communities Welfare Board came into being. In order to make a detailed report to the government, the board of investigation, including Richard Spittel, visited every settlement in the island. This experience was an immensely fulfilling one for him as it entailed extensive travel into the very heart of Ceylon in order to help some of its most hapless inhabitants. 

"He was incredibly slim - under eight stone. But when he entered a room, somehow he had the power of being noticed - I think because of his very piercing, observant dark eyes. The fire that lit them, and his impassioned speech when he talked of the things nearest his heart - the Veddahs, the Kinnarayas and the Rodiyas, whom he fought so hard to try to get equal rights for - was extraordinary. So too when he talked of the forests and the animals that he so often had to defend." (Christine Wilson: personal communication, October 30th, 1986)

As well, he was to prove to be a worthy member of his own community, the Burghers. He was to become President of the Dutch Burgher Union and contributed much to the establishment of a Burgher identity in this country.

He was nearly 85 and extremely frail when he made what was to be his last journey to see the Veddahs. He noticed that in the space of a few brief years, the Veddahs had started to cut their hair, wear sarongs and work chenas. When he had first met them, they were still hunter-gatherers. It struck him just how quickly thousands of years of evolution could be wiped out. His work for them was now done - and had not been in vain.

Richard Spittel died on September 3, 1969, at the ripe old age of 88. The following day he was buried in the Anglican section of the General Cemetery, Kanatte. The obituary notices that appeared in the Colombo press at the time correctly highlighted his unusual and multiple accomplishments:

"Dr. R. L. Spittel, the last of the great savants who dedicated their lives to explore the heritage of Ceylon, died yesterday.

"He belonged to that generation of scholars which included Dr. Andreas Nell, Dr. Lucian de Zilwa and Dr. Paul E. Peiris - all of whom, though steeped in western culture, went off the beaten tracks of clubs and tennis courts into the wilderness where the Ceylonese habits, customs, traditions, arts and crafts were studied and revealed to the world," and:

"Frail of physique but a dedicated man of scholarship, he belonged to that dwindling group who snatch a few hours from lives of strenuous professional activity to devote themselves to research.

"One of the most eminent surgeons of his day, his bias for surgery developed with medical training, as he himself candidly admitted at an interview not so long ago. 'Humanity was not the primary incentive - that came afterwards with professional practice. I felt I had a flair for surgery, the artistry and glamour of it.'

"His reputation as a surgeon was enhanced by a literary mind. He earned a name as one of Ceylon's most widely read novelists. Books by him were always something of an occasion, for Spittel was without doubt one of the best of our writers in English.

"His writings always conveyed his deep and intimate knowledge of the jungles and a deep and abiding interest in the Veddahs. In fact Dr. Spittel will, in the years to come, be best remembered as an authority on the Veddahs of Ceylon and the author of the best writings on this vanishing tribe. So much so that Dr. Spittel was one of the few besides the Veddahs themselves who could claim to have travelled deeply into their domain." 

A short time after his death, a Veddah arrived at Wycherley with tears streaming down his face. Placing his axe in front of a portrait of Richard Spittel, he began to sing to the spirits of his ancestors, the Nae Yakku. Representing the Veddahs, he was paying his last respects to his Hudu Hura. The Veddahs have good reason to be thankful to Dr. Spittel - as have we all. For his work was so wide-ranging that it has contributed to the enrichment of life of everyone in Sri Lanka today.

We persuaded a Veddah by the name of Unapane Warage Sudubandiya to travel to Colombo in order to re-enact this final scene. Shambling up Buller's Road in his span-cloth, with axe over one shoulder, he is spotted by a European lady driving a Morris Minor, who treads on the brakes and gawks at him. The Veddah stops, too, and peers in curiousity through the closed car window at the strange white woman dressed in her fashionable late-1960s frock. It is a meeting of two cultures behind glass.

The Veddah enters Wycherley and appears before the portrait of his Hudu Hura. This portrait, executed by David Paynter in 1937, was gifted to the nation in 1991 and now hangs at the Art Gallery. According to Christine and Alastair Wilson, Paynter, upon seeing the portrait after many years, declared it to be his finest. In particular, he was pleased to have captured his subject's sensitive surgeon's hands.

It is 30 years since Richard Spittel died. Much has happened to his beloved Lanka since then, much which would disturb and appal him should he return to our midst. The systematic destruction of the jungles and the wanton killing of wildlife that has occurred in that comparatively short space of time would dismay him. Even though he predicted the extinction of the wild elephant in his poem To the Elephants Doomed at the Kraal, never could he have imagined that "the pride of our land" would be machine-gunned, become the victims of landmines, and reduced to being harassed and often persecuted exhibits in national parks that are themselves facing destruction from inexorable outside forces. 

Similarly, he would be distraught at the way the Veddahs now exist, either as commercialised exhibits at Dambana or as sad misfits in the sterile atmosphere of resettlement schemes. And he would be troubled that despite his sterling work in assisting the so-called 'backward' communities, the Rodiyas and Kinnarayas are as disadvantaged and marginalised as ever. 

Yet while the land falls into decay, his legacy survives, in particular in his books and writings. Immutable, they will forever contain within their pages the grandeur and spirit of the island's lost jungles and their inhabitants. 

With a number of his books now being republished locally in English (Wild White Boy) and also translated into Sinhala (Leaves of the Jungle, Wild Ceylon), Spittel will be introduced to a new generation of readers. Hopefully his legacy will live on into the new millennium, and will induce Sri Lankans yet unborn to care for the country as he did: 

Hail Lanka!

Let others belaud the ways of the West,
 

Or homeland or township, wherever it be,

However mighty, however blest -

Lanka, my Island, you are all to me.

When homeward I keel from travels afar,

And your mountains arise like wraiths from the sea,

By rose of the dawn or beam of the star:

Oh, Island mine, you are heaven to me.

And from the Peak and the table-land

That brave the blue dome's immensity,

From tree-girt shore and glittering sand,

The emerald Island calls to me.

Ancestral strains on her breezes blown

Steal out of her solitudes eerily:

The tales that are shrined in legend and stone

Are the songs the old Island sings to me.

But oh for the trails that the wild men tread,

For the hills that are haunts of the hiving bee,

For the twittering bill and the branching head:

Oh Island, wild Island, you are home to me.

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