The Story of Madras Part 1 – From Fishing Village to Fort St. George

A Village on the Coromandel Coast

Three hundred years ago, Madras, under the name of ‘Madraspatnam’ was a tiny rural village on the Coromandel Coast. Scattered about in the neighbourhood there were other rural villages, such as Egmore, Vepery, and Triplicane, which are crowded districts in the great city of Madras to-day.

In Triplicane there was an ancient temple, a centre of pilgrimage, dating, like many village temples in India, from very distant times; this was the Parthasarathy temple, which is the ‘Triplicane Temple’ still. A little fishing village called Kuppam, lying directly on the seashore, sent out, even as Kuppam does now, its bold fishermen in their rickety catamarans in perilous pursuit of the spoils of the sea.

There was one small town in the neighbourhood, namely, the Portuguese settlement at Mylapore, where the tall facades of the several churches, peeping over the trees, formed a land-mark for the Portuguese ships that occasionally cast anchor in the roads.

European Rivals in India

Such was the scene in 1639, the year in which our story of Madras begins. The Portuguese had already been in India for nearly a century and a half; and under their early and able viceroys they had made themselves powerful. The stately city of Goa was the capital of their Indian dominions, and they had settlements at Cochin, Calicut, Mylapore, and elsewhere. But the influence of the Portuguese was now on the wane.

For nearly a century they had been the only European power in India and the Eastern seas; but merchants in other European countries had marked with jealous eyes the rich profits that the Portuguese derived from their Eastern traffic, and competitors appeared in the field. First came the Dutch, who in India established themselves at Pulicat, some twenty-five miles north of Mylapore.

Holland had lately thrown off the yoke of Spain, and was full of new-born vigour; and Dutch trade in the East–chiefly in the East India Islands–was pushed with a rancorous energy that roused the vain indignation of the decadent Portuguese. Six years later, in 1600, came the English.

The English traders were employees of the newly-established East India Company, and were sent out to do business for the Company in the East; and they had to face the opposition of the Dutch as well as of the Portuguese. Their earliest enterprise was in the East India Islands, and it was eleven years before they gained their first footing in India, at Masulipatam.

Here they established an agency and did very considerable business; later they formed a fortified sub-agency at Armagaum, a good way down the coast, not far from Nellore. At first their fortunes went well; but local rulers exacted ruinous dues, and at Armagaum in particular the local ruler, alarmed at the influence that the English merchants had gained, set himself so seriously to the work of handicapping their trade that Mr.

Francis Day, the Company’s representative at Armagaum and a member of the Masulipatam Council, proposed to the Council that he should be allowed to seek a field for commercial enterprise more favourable than either Armagaum or Masulipatam. To Mr. Francis Day was committed the business of finding a suitable spot for a fresh settlement.

The Search for a New Settlement

It was an important commission. The East India Company’s existence depended entirely upon the profits of their trade. The Company’s enterprise at Armagaum was hopeless; at Masulipatam it was very unsatisfactory; and Mr. Francis Day was appointed to find a place where the commercial prospects would be bright.

It should always be remembered that the East India Company was established purely as a commercial association, with its head office in London, and that its employees in India were men with business qualifications, appointed to carry on the Company’s trade.

The prime concern even of an Agent or a Governor was the making of good bargains on the Company’s behalf–and sometimes on his own–getting the best prices for European broadcloths and brocades, and buying as cheaply as possible Indian muslins and calicoes and natural produce, for exportation to London, where they were sold at a large profit.

Any fighting in which the Company’s servants engaged was merely incidental to the pursuit of business in a land in which the ruling sovereigns, as well as the many small chiefs, were constantly at war. It is a maxim that ‘Trade follows the Flag;’ but in the case of India the Flag has followed Trade.

It is as a commercial man, therefore, that we must picture Mr. Francis Day setting out on his commercial mission; but it can be imagined that the English merchant, starting on an expedition in which he would be likely to seek personal interviews with rajas and nawabs and bid for their favour, set out in such style as would do the Company credit.

In our mind’s eye we picture Master Francis Day, Chief of Armagaum, standing on the deck of one of the Company’s vessels lying at anchor in the Armagaum roads, and receiving his colleagues’ farewells. His garb is that of a substantial merchant in the days of King Charles I. It has none of the extravagances that were the fashionable affectations of gay Cavaliers, but its sobriety makes it none the less smart.

He wears a purple doublet and hose, a broad white collar edged with lace, and a gracefully-short black-velvet cloak. Curly hair falls beneath his broad-brimmed black hat, but not in long and scented ringlets such as were trained to fall below the shoulders of fashionable gallants at King Charles’s court. He is in every way a fitting representative of the Honourable Company.

Setting Sail

The bo’sun has piped his whistle, and the last good-byes have been said. The anchor’s weighed, and the white sails are spread to the breeze. Master Day waves his hand to his colleagues in the surf-boat which is taking them shoreward, and the ship is headed to the south. The expedition is important–yes, and it was much more important than Master Day imagined; for something more serious than profits on muslin and brocade was on the anvil of fate.

The Beginning

Francis Day’s Voyage

Mr. Francis Day was not sailing southward without definite plans. As the result of enquiries for a promising spot for a new settlement, it was his purpose to see if there was a favourable site in the neighbourhood of the old established Portuguese settlement at Mylapore. The Portuguese authorities at Mylapore, with whom Mr. Day seems to have corresponded, were not unwilling to have English neighbours.

The ill-success of the English merchants at Masulipatam had probably allayed any fears that they would be formidable rivals to Portuguese trade at Mylapore; and furthermore the Portuguese welcomed the idea of European neighbours who would be at one with them in opposition to the forceful Dutchmen at Pulicat, up the coast, who showed no respect, not even of a ceremonious kind, for any vested interests–commercial or administrative–to which the Portuguese laid claim.

So Mr. Francis Day’s vessel, standing no doubt well out to sea as it sailed past the foreshore of the Pulicat lagoon with its unfriendly Dutchmen, kept its course till the Mylapore churches were sighted and showed that the place where the first inquiries were to be made had been reached. The sails were furled and the anchors were dropped, and we may imagine that a salute was fired in honour of the King of Portugal, and was duly acknowledged.

Arrival at Madras

It was in winter that Mr. Francis Day arrived–a time of the year when Madras looks its best and when the sea-horses are not always at their wildest tricks; and Mr. Francis Day landed without accident, and was pleased with the scene. There are always breakers, however, on the Coromandel Coast, and Mr. Day found the landing so exciting that in his report to the Council at Masulipatam he wrote of ‘the heavy and dangerous surf’.

But after an inspection of the surroundings he was satisfied with the conditions; he considered that at the mouth of the Cooum river there was an advantageous site for a commercial settlement; and the local ruler, the Naik of Poonamallee, following the advice of the Portuguese authorities, encouraged him in the idea of an English settlement within the Poonamallee domain.

It is not surprising that Mr. Francis Day was pleased with what he saw; for Madras is not without beauty. In those idyllic days, moreover, the Cooum river, which was known then as the Triplicane river–and which even to-day can be beautiful, although for the greater part of the year it is no more than a stagnant ditch–must have been a limpid water-way; and to Mr.

Francis Day, seeing it in winter, in which season the current swollen by the rain sometimes succeeds in bursting the bar, it must have appeared almost as a noble river, rushing down to the great sea–a river such as might well have deserved the erection of a town on its banks.

The fact that the Portuguese had been at Mylapore for more than a century showed that a settlement was full of promise–and the more so for men with the energy of the English Company’s representatives; and the conditions were such that Mr. Francis Day felt himself justified in entering into negotiations with the Naik for the grant of an estate extending five miles along the shore and a mile inland.

Securing the Grant

The negotiations were successful: but the Naik was subordinate to the lord of the soil, the Raja of Chandragiri, who was the living representative of the once great and magnificent Hindu empire of Vijianagar; and any grant that was made by the Naik of Poonamallee had to be confirmed by the Raja if it was to be made valid.

Two or three miles from Chandragiri station, on the Katpadi-Gudur line of railway, is still to be seen the Rajah-Mahal, the palace in which the Raja handed to Mr. Francis Day the formal title to the land. The palace still exists, and it is a fine building, though partly in ruins.

It is constructed entirely of granite, without any woodwork whatsoever; but its abounding interest lies not in its structure but in the fact that it was in this palace that the British Empire in India may be said to have been begotten.

There is no little interest in the thought that it was the Raja of Chandragiri that delivered the deed of possession to Mr. Francis Day. The Raja was an obscure representative of a magnificent Indian Empire of the past; Mr. Francis Day was an obscure representative of a magnificent Indian Empire that was yet to be; and the document that the Raja handed to Mr. Francis Day was in reality a patent of Empire, transferred from Vijianagar to Great Britain. It was at Chandragiri that the British Empire in India was begotten; it was at Madras that the British Empire was born.

Mr. Francis Day had fulfilled his mission. He had secured territory where the conditions seemed to give promise of success; and his work was approved. His superior officer, Mr. Andrew Cogan, Agent at Masulipatam, came away from Masulipatam to take charge of Madras, and with the co-operation of Mr. Francis Day he set about the development of the Company’s new possession.

The Man Behind the Mission

Of Mr. Francis Day’s personal history we know little or nothing except that he was one of the Company’s employees, and that he founded first an unsuccessful settlement at Armagaum–represented to-day by no more than a lighthouse–and afterwards a successful settlement at Madras. Later he was put in charge of the second settlement that he had founded, but he was relieved of, or resigned, the office at the end of a year. He then went to the Company’s head-quarters at Bantam, in Java, and afterwards to England. What finally became of him is apparently unknown.

It would probably be difficult to say whether Mr. Francis Day was a great man with great ideals, or was merely a shrewd man of business, reliable for an important commercial mission.

Remembering that the Company was strictly a commercial concern, we may think it likely that, in fixing upon Madras as a site for the Company’s business, he was guided almost entirely by the question of trade-profits, and that in his mind’s eye there were no prophetic visions of imperial glory.

And it has been asked indeed whether or not he really chose well in choosing Madraspatnam by the Triplicane river as the site of the proposed new settlement; for there are those who have argued that the prosperity of Madras has been due to dogged British enterprise and placid Indian co-operation, not to natural advantages, and that Madras has prospered in spite of Madras.

We must bear in mind, however, the limited geographical knowledge of the times and the limitations to Mr. Francis Day’s choice; and, whatever the verdict may be, the fact remains that the Madraspatnam of Mr. Francis Day’s selection is now a vast city, and that the Empire of India which was born at Chandragiri is now a mighty institution.

Fort St. George

Building the Fort

When the tract of land at Madras had been formally acquired, the European colony at Armagaum was forthwith shipped thereto (February, 1640). According to accounts, the colony, with Mr. Andrew Cogan at the head, assisted by Mr. Francis Day and perhaps another chief official, included some three or four British ‘writers,’ a gunner, a surgeon, a garrison of some twenty-five British soldiers under a lieutenant and a sergeant, a certain number of English carpenters, blacksmiths and coopers, and a small staff of English servants for kitchen and general work.

‘Madras was a sandy beach … where the English began by erecting straw huts.’ So says an old-time chronicle,[1] the work of an early resident of Madras; and, if we take the word ‘straw’ in a broad sense, we can easily conceive the scene. In Madras the bamboo and the palmyra grow in abundance, furnishing materials for the quick provision of cheap and commodious accommodation; and we can picture the pilgrim fathers of Madras camped in palmyra-thatched mat-sheds on the north bank of the Cooum river, near the bar, the while that the houses within the plan of the fort are being built.

[Footnote 1: The chronicle was written by Manucci, an Italian doctor of an adventurous disposition, who, after varied and surprising experiences in northern India, settled down in Madras in 1686, and married a Eurasian widow. ‘Manucci’s Garden,’ where he lived, covered a large area which is now occupied by a number of the houses at the Law College end of Popham’s Broadway, on the side that is nearest the sea. The garden was watered by a stream that used to flow where the Broadway tram-lines now hold their course]

The ‘sandy beach’ has been waked from its longaeval placidity. Trains of bullock-carts are lumbering along new-made tracks, bringing stone and laterite and bricks and timber from various centres; and endless files of coolies, with baskets on their heads, are bringing sand from the summer-dry edges of the bed of the Cooum river.

In the foreground of the picture, scores of chattering village-labourers, from Triplicane and other hamlets hard by, are working under the directions of the mechanical employees of the Company, chipping stone, mixing lime, sawing timber, carrying bricks and stones and mortar, or laying them adroitly in place, with little dependence on line and level.

In the course of a few months the buildings were sufficiently advanced for occupation. The main building was the ‘factory,’ which formerly signified a mercantile office; and it was here that the Company’s chief officials, who were styled ‘factors’ (agents), assisted by writers and apprentices, transacted the Company’s business, and were also lodged. Included amongst the buildings were warehouses for the Company’s goods, and also barrack-like residences for the Company’s subordinate British employees, civil and military, according to their rank.

Sieges and Alarms

From the very beginning the settlement was called Fort St. George, but it was several years before the buildings were surrounded by a high and fortified wall. It was in no spirit of military aggression that the Company’s agents enclosed their settlement with a bastioned rampart, from whose battlements big cannon frowned on all sides round.

The Company’s representatives were ‘gentle merchants,’ to whom peace spelt prosperity; but the times were lawless, and the gentle merchants were wise enough to recognize that days might come when it would be necessary to defend their merchandise and themselves, as well as the town of Madras, from the roving robber or the princely raider or the revengeful trade-rival, and that military preparedness was a dictate of prudence. The days came!

On such occasions the excitement in Fort St. George must have been great. We can imagine the anxiety with which, when the sentry gave the alarm, the gentle merchants climbed upon the walls and looked out at the horsemen that were to be descried in the distance, and asked one another disconsolately whether it was in peace or in war that they came. A brief notice of some of the occasions on which the Fort was in danger will be interesting.

Some fifty years after the Fort had been founded, a party of soldiers under the Commander-in-Chief of the Mohammedan King of Golconda pursued some of the King’s enemies into Madras, “burning and Robbing of houses, and taking the Companies Cloth and goods,” whereupon the Governor of the Fort sent them word that “he would use means to force them out of the Towne: Uppon which they retreated out of shott of the Fort.” They returned, however, with additional strength, and for eight months they besieged the stronghold, but without success; and then they wearied of their hopeless endeavour, and marched away.

Later, a Dutch force, supported by Mohammedan cavalry, besieged San Thome, which was then in the hands of the French; and for the purpose of the siege they occupied Triplicane village, mounting their cannon within the walls of Triplicane Temple, which they used as a fort. During the several weeks of the siege of San Thome a powerful Dutch squadron blockaded the coast of Madras; and, as Britain and Holland were at war in Europe, there was constant anxiety in Fort St. George; but the Dutchmen contented themselves with the capture of San Thome, and were prudent enough to let Fort St. George alone.

In the days of Queen Anne, Da-ud Khan, Nawab of the Carnatic, at the head of a large force, was reported to be marching to Madras. In Fort St. George there was much anxiety as to the purpose of his visit, and ‘By order of the Governor and Council’ various protective measures were immediately proclaimed.

The proclamation is to be found in full in the Company’s Minutes; and we find an amusing reminder of the Company’s mercantile _raison d’etre_ in the fact that immediately after the military edicts comes the order ‘That all the Company’s cloth be brought from the washers, washed and unwashed, to prevent its being plundered.’ The Nawab came, and he uttered threats, but he was mollified with luxurious entertainment.

Inviting himself and his dewan and his chamberlain to dinner with the Governor and Councillors in the Fort, he was received with imposing honours, and was feasted in the Council Chamber at a magnificent banquet.

The minutes relate that after dinner he was “diverted with the dancing wenches,” and finally he got “very Drunk.” At breakfast the next day in the Company’s ‘Garden,’ His Highness again got “very drunk and fell a Sleep;” and a few days later he marched his army away. In his sober moments, however, he had been slyly measuring the Company’s strength; and six months later he came back with a larger force, and blockaded Madras.

He plundered all that he could, and on one occasion his spoil included “40 ox loads of the Company’s cloth.” For more than three months the blockade continued, and the Company’s trade was entirely stopped, and provisions in Madras were exceedingly scarce.

Da-ud Khan, eventually wearying of the unsuccessful siege, named the price that would buy him off; and the Council, fearing the wrath of the Directors at the loss of their trade, were glad to come to terms. The Company’s Minute on the occasion is a brief but exultant record: ‘The siege is raised!’

In 1746 there was a siege of a more serious sort. England and France were at war in Europe, and suddenly a squadron of French ships appeared off Fort St. George. After a week’s siege, the English merchants capitulated to superior force, and they were all sent to Pondicherry as prisoners, and the French flag waved over Madras; but by the treaty which ended the war, Madras was restored to the Company. Twelve years later Madras was once more besieged by the French, but unsuccessfully, and eventually the French leaders marched their forces away, quarrelling among themselves over their ill-success.

On several occasions, bodies of horsemen in the service of the adventurous Haidar Ali of Mysore, raided the country almost up to the Fort ditch, and were sometimes to be seen shaking their spears in defiance at the sentries on its walls.

The Fort Today

These were not the only occasions on which Fort St. George was assailed, but they suffice to show how necessary it was that the Company’s employees and their wares should be housed within the walls of a fort.

Fort St. George in the beginning was very small. Its external length parallel with the seashore was 108 yards, and its breadth was 100 yards. When White Town, which grew up around it, was fortified, there was ‘a fort within a fort’, but eventually the inner wall was demolished. At various times the outer wall has been altered, but the Fort as we have it to-day is the selfsame Fort St. George nevertheless, a glorious relic of bygone times, and verily a history in stone.

The gates of Fort St. George open towards main thoroughfares of Madras, and it is permitted to anybody to pass in and out; but it is not visited nearly so much as its historic associations deserve. Let us pass within, and see if we cannot catch something like inspiration from the scene where so much history has been made, and where a great Empire was born.

An old-world feeling comes over us directly we leave the highroad and make our way down the sloped passage and across the drawbridge over the moat, past the massive gates and under the echoing tunnel that leads through the mighty walls. Within we see the parapets on which in bygone days the cannon thundered at the foe.

We pass on into the great spaces of the Fort; and in our imagination we can people them with ghosts of the illustrious–or notorious–dead. It was here that, in the reign of King James the Second, Master Elihu Yale assumed the Governorship of Madras, did hard work in the Company’s behalf but also made a large fortune for himself, lost his son aged four, quarrelled long and bitterly with his councillors, and was at last superseded.

It was here that Robert Clive, aged nineteen, newly arrived from England, entered upon his duties as an apprenticed writer in the Company’s service, at a salary of five pounds per annum; it was here, in St.

Mary’s Church, eight years later, when he had won his first laurels, that he married the sister of one of the fellow-writers of his griffinhood; and it was here, in ‘Clive’s House,’ which is still to be seen (now the Office of the Accountant-General), that he lived with his wife. The ancient Council Chamber is replete with historic associations; and St. Mary’s Church offers material for many researchful and meditative visits.

The streets have history in their names. ‘Charles and James Street,’ for example, which is a present-day combination of two streets of yore, is jointly commemorative of the days of the Merry Monarch and of his royal but unfortunate brother. Enough! It is not my purpose to produce a guide-book to Madras, but to promote an appreciation of the historic interests of the city; and I take it that the reader has realized that Fort St.George is interesting indeed.

Continue with Part 2: The Town Grows, where the young settlement expands into White Town and Black Town and builds its first defensive wall.

Adapted from Glyn Barlow, The Story of Madras (Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1921), a public-domain work. Barlow drew principally on the Records of Fort St. George and Colonel Love’s Vestiges of Madras for his own research.

Related Posts

• The Story of Madras Part 7 – How Education Grew in the City
• The Story of Madras Part 6 – Madras and the Sea
• The Battle of Talikota: Fall of the Vijayanagara Empire
• The Story of Madras Part 5 – Life in the City
• The Story of Madras Part 4 – Faith in the Fort City
• The Story of Madras Part 3 – New Territory and the Nawab’s Palace
• The Story of Madras Part 2 – White Town, Black Town, and the Wall
• Forgotten Forts of Tamil Nadu: Beyond Vellore and Gingee