MY SRI LANKAProper documentation of the area begins with the Portuguese, the first European power to seize control of the maritime districts of Sri Lanka. During their administration from 1505 to 1656, t he Portuguese carefully compiled lists of villages so that the task of collecting taxes would be made easier. These lists(thombos) contained not merely names but detailed descriptions of the location and extent of each village as well as of the agricultural produce, including timber and fruit trees, fount there. The antiquity of certain village is made manifest in these Portuguese records for modern towns and villages in the Sinharaja region such as Kalawana and Pothupitiya still bear the same name they had when the Portuguese wrote about them four centuries ago.
The next European power, the Dutch, (1656 - 1796) not only took over and maintained these records but also made a more important contribution of charting the area on maps. By 1789, the Sinharaja region had been demarcated on a map that also traced the course of the two large rivers, the Gin Ganga and the Kalu Ganga which had their head waters in the Sinharaja.
The Dutch maps made systematic exploration easier during the British colonial period (1796 - 1948) that followed. Under British rule, a number of expeditions were mounted for a variety of purposes. Some, especially the official surveys, were purely commercial in nature. The 1873 exploration by James Gunn, The example was meant to ascertain the suitability of the region for raising coffee plantations and for the possible exploration of its timber resources. On the other hands, George Henry Thwaites in the 1850's was responsible for the first comprehensive documentation of the island's flora in "Enumeratio Plantarum Zelaniae" (1858 -1864) which made numerous references to plants found in the Sinharaja. The most notable of early British explorations of the Sinharaja was that of the soldier-ornithologist, Captain Vincent Legge who incorporated the result of his forays into his work, "The History of the Birds of Ceylon" (1880). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, foresters, botanists and surveyors occasionally visited the flora began to appear in recognized journals. For instance, The forest by Frederick Lewis a forester, appeared in 1896 in "The Ceylon Forester". Further references to plant life in Sinharaja appeared in Henry Trimen's "The Handbook to the Flora of Ceylon" (1893 - 1900).
As far back as 1840, the Sinharaja become Crown Property under the Wasteland Ordinance, Which declared all forest and unoccupied or uncultivated land in the country as crown land. In May 1875, Under an amended ordinance aimed at regulating the felling and removal of timber from land an area of 6,000 acres was declared as the reserved forest of "Sinharaja Mukalana". (Ceylon Government Gazette No. 4046 dated 8th May,1875.)
