[Illustration: Chepauk Palace. (Southern half)]

 THE

 STORY OF MADRAS

 BY

 GLYN BARLOW, M. A. 

 WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

 BY THE AUTHOR

 HUMPHREY MILFORD

 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

 LONDON, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, MADRAS

 1921

 * * * * *

PREFACE

This little book is not a "History of Madras, " although it contains agood deal of Madras history; and it is not a "Guide to Madras, "although it gives accounts of some of the principal buildings in thecity. The book will have fulfilled its purpose if it helps the readerto realize that the City of Madras is a particularly interestingcorner of the world. This fact is often forgotten; and even many ofthe people who live in Madras itself, and who are aware that Madrashas played an important part in the making of India's history, arestrangely uninterested in its historic remains. They are eloquentperhaps in denouncing the heat of Madras and its mosquitoes and theiniquities of its Cooum river; but they have never a word to say onits enchanting memorials of the past. Madras has memorials indeed. Madras is an historical museum, where the sightseer may spend many andmany an hour--in street and in building--studying old-world exhibits, and living for the while in the fascinating past. Madras is not anancient city; its foundation is not ascribed to some mythic king whoruled in mythic times; it has no hoary ruins, too old to be historicand too legendary to be inspiring. But Madras is old enough for itsrecords to be romantic, and at the same time is young enough for itsearliest accounts of itself to be--not unsatisfying fables, butinteresting fact. The story of Madras fills an absorbing page ofhistory, and the sights of Madras are well worthy of sympatheticinterest--especially on the part of those whose lines of life are castin the historic city itself or within the historic presidency of whichit is the capital. 

In the following pages certain places and events have been brieflydescribed more than once with different details; any such repetitionsare due to the fact that the Story of Madras has been told in a seriesof vignettes, appertaining to particular buildings or particularconditions, and each vignette had to be complete in itself. It ishoped that such repetitions will be of familiar interest, rather thantedious. 

In respect of the facts that are recorded, apart from general history, I am indebted principally to the valuable Records of Fort St. George, which the Madras Government have been publishing, volume by volume, during several years, and which I have studied with interest since thefirst volume appeared. Of other works that I have consulted, I mustspecially mention Colonel Love's "Vestiges of Madras, " which is a verymine of information. 

G. B. 

MADRAS, 1921. 

 * * * * *

CONTENTS

 PAGEPREFACE v

CHAP. 

I. BEFORE THE BEGINNING 1

II. THE BEGINNING 5

III. FORT ST. GEORGE 9

IV. DEVELOPMENT 18

V. 'THE WALL' 25

VI. EXPANSION 35

VII. OUTPOSTS 41

VIII. THE CHURCH IN THE FORT 47

IX. ROMAN CATHOLIC MADRAS 56

X. CHEPAUK PALACE 63

XI. GOVERNMENT HOUSE 69

XII. MADRAS AND THE SEA 78

XIII. THE STORY OF THE SCHOOLS 87

XIV. HERE AND THERE 101

XV. 'NO MEAN CITY' 111

 * * * * *

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHEPAUK PALACE _Frontispiece_

 PAGE

MAP OF MADRAS, ABOUT 1710 10

CORRESPONDING MAP, 1921 11

CLIVE'S HOUSE 16

A BIT OF THE BLACK TOWN WALL 26

CENTRAL GATE OF THE BLACK TOWN WALL 28

A MAGAZINE IN THE BLACK TOWN WALL 30

'THE OLD AND THE NEW' 32

MAP OF MADRAS 36

SAN THOMÉ FORT 42

EGMORE FORT (SIDE VIEW) 44

REMAINS OF THE EGMORE FORT 46

ST. MARY'S, FORT ST. GEORGE 49

GOVERNMENT HOUSE, MADRAS 74

THE SEA GATE 80

THE COMPANY'S FLAG 81

SURF-BOAT 83

UNIVERSITY SENATE HOUSE 96

PACHAIYAPPA'S COLLEGE 97

DOVETON PROTESTANT COLLEGE 98

ST. GEORGE'S CATHEDRAL 102

ST. ANDREW'S (THE 'KIRK') 104

ST. THOMÉ CATHEDRAL 106

 * * * * *

CHRONOLOGICAL NOTES

The East India Company established A. D. 1600

First English settlement, at Masulipatam 1611

Site of Madras acquired by Mr. Francis Day 1639

The acquisition confirmed at Chandragiri by the Hindu 'Lord of the Carnatic' 1639

The Hindu lord of the Carnatic (the Raja of Chandragiri) dethroned by the Mohammedan Sultan of Golconda 1646

The Company secure from Golconda a fresh title to their possessions

The Sultan of Golconda dethroned by the Moghul Emperor, Aurangzeb, who appoints a 'Nawab of the Carnatic' 1687

The Company secure from a representative of the Emperor a fresh title to their possessions

Da-ud Khan, Nawab of the Carnatic, invests Madras for three months, and is finally bought off 1702

In Europe, England and France are engaged in the War of the Austrian Succession 1740-1748

Dupleix, who is possessed with the idea of making France politically influential in India, is appointed Governor of Pondicherry 1742

In the war in Europe he sees an opportunity for fighting the English in India, and French forces under LaBourdonnais capture Madras 1746

Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which Madras is restored to the English 1748

Two Carnatic princes quarrel for the Nawabship 1749

The French and the English in South India join in the quarrel on opposite sides. In the name of the claimant whom the English supported, Clive captures Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, and then defends the town against the rival claimant and his French supporters 1749

The French are defeated in the open field, and the struggle is at an end 1752

In Europe, England and France are engaged in the Seven Years' War 1756-1763

In India, Count Lally besieges Madras unsuccessfully for more than two months A. D. 1758-1759

The English defeat the French at Wandiwash 1760

The English capture Pondicherry 1761

Treaty of Paris, by which Pondicherry is restored to the French 1763

(The town was captured again in 1786 and in 1803). 

Haidar Ali makes himself Sultan of Mysore about 1760, and reigns till his death, which occurred in 1781

Tipu, his son, succeeds him, and reigns till he is slain in defending his capital, Seringapatam, against an assault by the English 1799

(Madras was frequently disturbed by the raids of the father and of the son; and Tipu's death relieved the townsmen of constant anxiety. )

The Supreme Court of Judicature established at Madras 1801

In default of an heir, the Carnatic 'lapses' to the Company 1855

The Madras Railway opened for traffic 1856

The Indian Mutiny 1857-1859

The Madras University instituted 1857

The High Court established 1861

 * * * * *

ERRATUM

On page 1, _for_ 'Madraspatnam' _read_ 'Madraspatam. '

 * * * * *

CHAPTER I

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

Three hundred years ago, Madras, under the name of 'Madraspatnam' wasa tiny rural village on the Coromandel Coast. Scattered about in theneighbourhood there were other rural villages, such as Egmore, Vepery, and Triplicane, which are crowded districts in the great city ofMadras to-day. In Triplicane there was an ancient temple, a centre ofpilgrimage, dating, like many village temples in India, from verydistant 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, itsbold fishermen in their rickety catamarans in perilous pursuit of thespoils of the sea. There was one small town in the neighbourhood, namely, the Portuguese settlement at Mylapore, where the tall façadesof the several churches, peeping over the trees, formed a land-markfor the Portuguese ships that occasionally cast anchor in the roads. 

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 theyhad settlements at Cochin, Calicut, Mylapore, and elsewhere. But theinfluence of the Portuguese was now on the wane. For nearly a century theyhad been the only European power in India and the Eastern seas; butmerchants in other European countries had marked with jealous eyes the richprofits that the Portuguese derived from their Eastern traffic, andcompetitors appeared in the field. First came the Dutch, who in Indiaestablished themselves at Pulicat, some twenty-five miles north ofMylapore. Holland had lately thrown off the yoke of Spain, and was full ofnew-born vigour; and Dutch trade in the East--chiefly in the East IndiaIslands--was pushed with a rancorous energy that roused the vainindignation of the decadent Portuguese. Six years later, in 1600, came theEnglish. The English traders were employees of the newly-established EastIndia Company, and were sent out to do business for the Company in theEast; and they had to face the opposition of the Dutch as well as of thePortuguese. Their earliest enterprise was in the East India Islands, and itwas eleven years before they gained their first footing in India, atMasulipatam. Here they established an agency and did very considerablebusiness; later they formed a fortified sub-agency at Armagaum, a good waydown the coast, not far from Nellore. At first their fortunes went well;but local rulers exacted ruinous dues, and at Armagaum in particular thelocal ruler, alarmed at the influence that the English merchants hadgained, set himself so seriously to the work of handicapping their tradethat Mr. Francis Day, the Company's representative at Armagaum and a memberof the Masulipatam Council, proposed to the Council that he should beallowed to seek a field for commercial enterprise more favourable thaneither Armagaum or Masulipatam. To Mr. Francis Day was committed thebusiness of finding a suitable spot for a fresh settlement. 

It was an important commission. The East India Company's existencedepended entirely upon the profits of their trade. The Company'senterprise at Armagaum was hopeless; at Masulipatam it was veryunsatisfactory; and Mr. Francis Day was appointed to find a placewhere the commercial prospects would be bright. 

It should always be remembered that the East India Company wasestablished purely as a commercial association, with its head officein London, and that its employees in India were men with businessqualifications, appointed to carry on the Company's trade. The primeconcern even of an Agent or a Governor was the making of good bargainson the Company's behalf--and sometimes on his own--getting the bestprices for European broadcloths and brocades, and buying as cheaply aspossible Indian muslins and calicoes and natural produce, forexportation to London, where they were sold at a large profit. Anyfighting in which the Company's servants engaged was merely incidentalto 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 amaxim that 'Trade follows the Flag;' but in the case of India the Flaghas followed Trade. 

It is as a commercial man, therefore, that we must picture Mr. FrancisDay setting out on his commercial mission; but it can be imagined thatthe English merchant, starting on an expedition in which he would belikely to seek personal interviews with rajas and nawabs and bid fortheir favour, set out in such style as would do the Company credit. Inour mind's eye we picture Master Francis Day, Chief of Armagaum, standing on the deck of one of the Company's vessels lying at anchorin the Armagaum roads, and receiving his colleagues' farewells. Hisgarb is that of a substantial merchant in the days of King Charles I. It has none of the extravagances that were the fashionableaffectations of gay Cavaliers, but its sobriety makes it none the lesssmart. He wears a purple doublet and hose, a broad white collar edgedwith lace, and a gracefully-short black-velvet cloak. Curly hairfalls beneath his broad-brimmed black hat, but not in long and scentedringlets such as were trained to fall below the shoulders offashionable gallants at King Charles's court. He is in every way afitting representative of the Honourable Company. 

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

CHAPTER II

THE BEGINNING

Mr. Francis Day was not sailing southward without definite plans. Asthe result of enquiries for a promising spot for a new settlement, itwas his purpose to see if there was a favourable site in theneighbourhood of the old established Portuguese settlement atMylapore. The Portuguese authorities at Mylapore, with whom Mr. Dayseems to have corresponded, were not unwilling to have Englishneighbours. The ill-success of the English merchants at Masulipatamhad probably allayed any fears that they would be formidable rivals toPortuguese trade at Mylapore; and furthermore the Portuguese welcomedthe idea of European neighbours who would be at one with them inopposition to the forceful Dutchmen at Pulicat, up the coast, whoshowed no respect, not even of a ceremonious kind, for any vestedinterests--commercial or administrative--to which the Portuguese laidclaim. 

So Mr. Francis Day's vessel, standing no doubt well out to sea as itsailed past the foreshore of the Pulicat lagoon with its unfriendlyDutchmen, kept its course till the Mylapore churches were sighted andshowed that the place where the first inquiries were to be made hadbeen reached. The sails were furled and the anchors were dropped, andwe may imagine that a salute was fired in honour of the King ofPortugal, and was duly acknowledged. 

It was in winter that Mr. Francis Day arrived--a time of the year whenMadras looks its best and when the sea-horses are not always at theirwildest tricks; and Mr. Francis Day landed without accident, and waspleased with the scene. There are always breakers, however, on theCoromandel Coast, and Mr. Day found the landing so exciting that inhis report to the Council at Masulipatam he wrote of 'the heavy anddangerous surf'. But after an inspection of the surroundings he wassatisfied with the conditions; he considered that at the mouth of theCooum river there was an advantageous site for a commercialsettlement; and the local ruler, the Naik of Poonamallee, followingthe advice of the Portuguese authorities, encouraged him in the ideaof an English settlement within the Poonamallee domain. 

It is not surprising that Mr. Francis Day was pleased with what hesaw; for Madras is not without beauty. In those idyllic days, moreover, the Cooum river, which was known then as the Triplicaneriver--and which even to-day can be beautiful, although for thegreater part of the year it is no more than a stagnant ditch--musthave been a limpid water-way; and to Mr. Francis Day, seeing it inwinter, in which season the current swollen by the rain sometimessucceeds in bursting the bar, it must have appeared almost as a nobleriver, rushing down to the great sea--a river such as might well havedeserved the erection of a town on its banks. The fact that thePortuguese had been at Mylapore for more than a century showed that asettlement was full of promise--and the more so for men with theenergy of the English Company's representatives; and the conditionswere such that Mr. Francis Day felt himself justified in entering intonegotiations with the Naik for the grant of an estate extending fivemiles along the shore and a mile inland. 

The negotiations were successful: but the Naik was subordinate to thelord of the soil, the Raja of Chandragiri, who was the livingrepresentative of the once great and magnificent Hindu empire ofVijianagar; and any grant that was made by the Naik of Poonamalleehad to be confirmed by the Raja if it was to be made valid. Two orthree miles from Chandragiri station, on the Katpadi-Gudur line ofrailway, is still to be seen the Rajah-Mahal, the palace in which theRaja handed to Mr. Francis Day the formal title to the land. Thepalace still exists, and it is a fine building, though partly inruins. It is constructed entirely of granite, without any woodworkwhatsoever; but its abounding interest lies not in its structure butin the fact that it was in this palace that the British Empire inIndia may be said to have been begotten. 

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

Mr. Francis Day had fulfilled his mission. He had secured territorywhere the conditions seemed to give promise of success; and his workwas approved. His superior officer, Mr. Andrew Cogan, Agent atMasulipatam, came away from Masulipatam to take charge of Madras, andwith the co-operation of Mr. Francis Day he set about the developmentof the Company's new possession. 

Of Mr. Francis Day's personal history we know little or nothing exceptthat he was one of the Company's employees, and that he founded firstan unsuccessful settlement at Armagaum--represented to-day by no morethan a lighthouse--and afterwards a successful settlement at Madras. Later he was put in charge of the second settlement that he hadfounded, but he was relieved of, or resigned, the office at the end ofa year. He then went to the Company's head-quarters at Bantam, inJava, and afterwards to England. What finally became of him isapparently unknown. 

It would probably be difficult to say whether Mr. Francis Day was agreat man with great ideals, or was merely a shrewd man of business, reliable for an important commercial mission. Remembering that theCompany was strictly a commercial concern, we may think it likelythat, in fixing upon Madras as a site for the Company's business, hewas guided almost entirely by the question of trade-profits, and thatin 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 inchoosing Madraspatnam by the Triplicane river as the site of theproposed new settlement; for there are those who have argued that theprosperity of Madras has been due to dogged British enterprise andplacid Indian co-operation, not to natural advantages, and that Madrashas prospered in spite of Madras. We must bear in mind, however, thelimited geographical knowledge of the times and the limitations to Mr. Francis Day's choice; and, whatever the verdict may be, the factremains that the Madraspatnam of Mr. Francis Day's selection is now avast city, and that the Empire of India which was born at Chandragiriis now a mighty institution. 

CHAPTER III

FORT ST. GEORGE

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

'Madras was a sandy beach . .. Where the English began by erectingstraw huts. ' So says an old-time chronicle, [1] the work of an earlyresident 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 palmyragrow in abundance, furnishing materials for the quick provision ofcheap and commodious accommodation; and we can picture the pilgrimfathers of Madras camped in palmyra-thatched mat-sheds on the northbank of the Cooum river, near the bar, the while that the houseswithin the plan of the fort are being built. 

[Footnote 1: The chronicle was written by Manucci, an Italian doctorof an adventurous disposition, who, after varied and surprisingexperiences in northern India, settled down in Madras in 1686, andmarried a Eurasian widow. 'Manucci's Garden, ' where he lived, covereda large area which is now occupied by a number of the houses at theLaw College end of Popham's Broadway, on the side that is nearest thesea. The garden was watered by a stream that used to flow where theBroadway tram-lines now hold their course. _Vide_ map, p. 10. ]

[Illustration: MADRAS about 1710, A. D. ]

[Illustration: Modern map (approximate) corresponding to the foregoingmap. (1) Old black Town is no more. (2) the Fort was extended about1750. To provide ground, the Cooum was diverted. (3) The sea hasreceded. ]

The 'sandy beach' has been waked from its longaeval placidity. Trainsof bullock-carts are lumbering along new-made tracks, bringing stoneand laterite and bricks and timber from various centres; and endlessfiles of coolies, with baskets on their heads, are bringing sand fromthe summer-dry edges of the bed of the Cooum river. In the foregroundof the picture, scores of chattering village-labourers, fromTriplicane and other hamlets hard by, are working under the directionsof the mechanical employees of the Company, chipping stone, mixinglime, sawing timber, carrying bricks and stones and mortar, or layingthem adroitly in place, with little dependence on line and level. 

In the course of a few months the buildings were sufficiently advancedfor occupation. The main building was the 'factory, ' which formerlysignified a mercantile office; and it was here that the Company'schief officials, who were styled 'factors' (agents), assisted bywriters and apprentices, transacted the Company's business, and werealso lodged. Included amongst the buildings were warehouses for theCompany's goods, and also barrack-like residences for the Company'ssubordinate British employees, civil and military, according to theirrank. 

From the very beginning the settlement was called Fort St. George, butit was several years before the buildings were surrounded by a highand fortified wall. It was in no spirit of military aggression thatthe Company's agents enclosed their settlement with a bastionedrampart, from whose battlements big cannon frowned on all sides round. The Company's representatives were 'gentle merchaunts, ' to whom peacespelt prosperity; but the times were lawless, and the gentle merchantswere wise enough to recognize that days might come when it would benecessary to defend their merchandise and themselves, as well as thetown of Madras, from the roving robber or the princely raider or therevengeful trade-rival, and that military preparedness was a dictateof prudence. The days came!

On such occasions the excitement in Fort St. George must have beengreat. We can imagine the anxiety with which, when the sentry gave thealarm, the gentle merchants climbed upon the walls and looked out atthe horsemen that were to be descried in the distance, and asked oneanother disconsolately whether it was in peace or in war that theycame. A brief notice of some of the occasions on which the Fort was indanger will be interesting. 

Some fifty years after the Fort had been founded, a party of soldiersunder the Commander-in-Chief of the Mohammedan King of Golcondapursued some of the King's enemies into Madras, "burning and Robbingof houses, and taking the Companies Cloth and goods, " whereupon theGovernor of the Fort sent them word that "he would use means to forcethem out of the Towne: Uppon which they retreated out of shott of theFort. " They returned, however, with additional strength, and for eightmonths they besieged the stronghold, but without success; and thenthey wearied of their hopeless endeavour, and marched away. 

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

In the days of Queen Anne, Da-ud Khan, Nawab of the Carnatic, at thehead of a large force, was reported to be marching to Madras. In FortSt. George there was much anxiety as to the purpose of his visit, and'By order of the Governor and Council' various protective measureswere immediately proclaimed. The proclamation is to be found in fullin the Company's Minutes; and we find an amusing reminder of theCompany's mercantile _raison d'être_ in the fact that immediatelyafter the military edicts comes the order 'That all the Company'scloth be brought from the washers, washed and unwashed, to prevent itsbeing plundered. ' The Nawab came, and he uttered threats, but he wasmollified with luxurious entertainment. Inviting himself and his dewanand his chamberlain to dinner with the Governor and Councillors in theFort, he was received with imposing honours, and was feasted in theCouncil Chamber at a magnificent banquet. The minutes relate thatafter dinner he was "diverted with the dancing wenches, " and finallyhe got "very Drunk. " At breakfast the next day in the Company's'Garden, ' His Highness again got "very drunk and fell a Sleep;" and afew days later he marched his army away. In his sober moments, however, he had been slyly measuring the Company's strength; and sixmonths 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 theblockade continued, and the Company's trade was entirely stopped, andprovisions in Madras were exceedingly scarce. Da-ud Khan, eventuallywearying of the unsuccessful siege, named the price that would buy himoff; and the Council, fearing the wrath of the Directors at the lossof their trade, were glad to come to terms. The Company's Minute onthe occasion is a brief but exultant record: 'The siege is raised!'

In 1746 there was a siege of a more serious sort. England and Francewere at war in Europe, and suddenly a squadron of French shipsappeared off Fort St. George. After a week's siege, the Englishmerchants capitulated to superior force, and they were all sent toPondicherry as prisoners, and the French flag waved over Madras; butby the treaty which ended the war, Madras was restored to the Company. Twelve years later Madras was once more besieged by the French, butunsuccessfully, and eventually the French leaders marched their forcesaway, quarrelling among themselves over their ill-success. 

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

These were not the only occasions on which Fort St. George wasassailed, but they suffice to show how necessary it was that theCompany's employees and their wares should be housed within the wallsof a fort. 

Fort St. George in the beginning was very small. Its external lengthparallel with the seashore was 108 yards, and its breadth was 100yards. When White Town, which grew up around it, was fortified, therewas 'a fort within a fort' (_vide_ Map, p. 10); but eventually theinner wall was demolished. At various times the outer wall has beenaltered, but the Fort as we have it to-day is the selfsame Fort St. George nevertheless, a glorious relic of bygone times, and verily ahistory in stone. 

The gates of Fort St. George open towards main thoroughfares ofMadras, and it is permitted to anybody to pass in and out; but it isnot visited nearly so much as its historic associations deserve. Letus pass within, and see if we cannot catch something like inspirationfrom the scene where so much history has been made, and where a greatEmpire was born. 

[Illustration: CLIVE'S HOUSE]

An old-world feeling comes over us directly we leave the highroad andmake our way down the sloped passage and across the drawbridge overthe moat, past the massive gates and under the echoing tunnel thatleads through the mighty walls. Within we see the parapets on which inbygone days the cannon thundered at the foe. We pass on into the greatspaces of the Fort; and in our imagination we can people them withghosts of the illustrious--or notorious--dead. It was here that, inthe reign of King James the Second, Master Elihu Yale assumed theGovernorship of Madras, did hard work in the Company's behalf but alsomade a large fortune for himself, lost his son aged four, quarrelledlong and bitterly with his councillors, and was at last superseded. Itwas here that Robert Clive, aged nineteen, newly arrived fromEngland, entered upon his duties as an apprenticed writer in theCompany'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 firstlaurels, that he married the sister of one of the fellow-writers ofhis griffinhood; and it was here, in 'Clive's House, ' which is stillto be seen (now the Office of the Accountant-General), that he livedwith his wife. The ancient Council Chamber is replete with historicassociations; and St. Mary's Church offers material for manyresearchful and meditative visits. The streets have history in theirnames. 'Charles and James Street, ' for example, which is a present-daycombination of two streets of yore, is jointly commemorative of thedays 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 topromote an appreciation of the historic interests of the city; and Itake it that the reader has realized that Fort St. George isinteresting indeed. 

CHAPTER IV

DEVELOPMENT

When an English colony had settled down in Fort St. George, it wasonly to be expected that a town would spring up outside. The personalnecessities of the numerous colonists had to be supplied, andpurveyors and bazaarmen and workmen made themselves readily availablefor the supply. The requirements in respect of the Company'smercantile business were yet greater. The Company's agents wanted notonly native employees in their office--'dubashes' and 'shroffs' andclerks and interpreters and porters and peons, but they also wantedwholesale buyers of the cloth and other articles that they importedfrom England for sale, and also merchants who could supply them withlarge quantities of the Indian wares that the Company exported toEngland; and they were able to get the men that they wanted. 

A crowd attracts a crowd; and when once a town has begun to grow, itgoes on growing of its own accord; and ten years after the acquisitionof Madras, the population of the town was estimated at as many as15, 000 souls. The Fort itself, moreover, had to be enlarged; for thegrowth of the Company's business meant that more and more factors andwriters had to be brought out from England, and more and morewarehouses had to be provided for the multiplied wares; and, moreover, the increasing lawlessness of the times necessitated a largergarrison. Outside the Fort, Indian and other immigrants flocked fromnear and far to settle down within the Company's domains, looking forprofit under the white men's protection; and, with their enterprisingspirit, they played no small part in the development of Madras. 

The town that grew up outside the little fort was divided into twosections--'the White Town' and 'the Black Town. ' The boundaries ofWhite Town corresponded roughly with what are now the boundaries ofFort St. George itself. The original Black Town--'Old BlackTown'--covered what is now the vacant ground that lies between theFort and the Law College, and included what are now the sites of theLaw College and the High Court (_vide_ Map, p. 10). The inhabitants ofWhite Town included any British settlers not in the Company's servicewhose presence the Company approved, also all approved Portuguese andEurasian immigrants from Mylapore, and a certain number of approvedIndian Christians. White Town indeed was sometimes called the'Christian Town. ' Black Town was the Asiatic settlement. The greatmajority of the original Indian settlers were not Tamilians butTelugus--written down as 'Gentoos' in the Company's Records. 

The Company's agents encouraged people of various races to reside inMadras; and the names of some of the streets and districts of the townare interesting testimonies as to the variety of the people who came. 

Armenian Street--which began as an Armenian burial-ground (_vide_ Map, p. 10)--is an example. Armenians from Persia, like theirfellow-countrymen the Parsees, have a racial gift for commerce; andArmenian merchants had been in India long before the English arrived. Enterprising Armenian merchants settled in Madras in its early days totrade with the English colonists, and the Company's agents were gladto have as middlemen such able merchants who were in close touch withthe people of the land. The most celebrated of the earlier Armeniansin Madras was Peter Uscan, Armenian by race but Roman Catholic inreligion, who lived in Madras for more than forty years, till hisdeath there in 1751, at the age of seventy. He was a rich andpublic-spirited merchant. He built the Marmalong Bridge over the Adyarriver, on one of the pillars of which a quaint inscription is still tobe read, and he left a fund for its maintenance; he also renewed themultitude of stone steps that lead up to the top of St. Thomas'sMount. His inscribed tomb is to be seen in the churchyard of theAnglican Church of St. Matthias, Vepery, which in olden days was thechurchyard of a Roman Catholic chapel. Within the last half-centurythe Armenian community in Madras has been rapidly declining, as theresult, probably, of inability to cope with the hustling style ofcommercial competition in these latter days; and only a very fewrepresentatives of the race are now to be seen in the city. 

In Mint Street there is a small enclosure which is the remains of whatwas once a Jewish cemetery of considerable size; and the graves thatare still to be seen are interesting reminders of the fact that inbygone times there was a Hebrew colony in Madras. In more than one ofthe Company's old records the Jews in Madras are referred to as beingrich men, some of whom held positions of high civic authority. Some ofthem were English Jews, and others were Portuguese; and most of themwere diamond merchants, on the look-out for diamonds from the mines ofGolconda, which were formerly very productive. The English Jewsexported diamonds to England, and imported silver and coral to Madras;coral was in great demand in India, and was sent out by Jewish firmsin London. There is still a 'Coral Merchants' Street' in Madras, acontinuation of Armenian Street, and it is a living reminder of theold Jewish colony. The Golconda mines eventually ceased to beproductive, and Jewish diamond merchants are no longer to be seen inthe city, and the Jewish colony has long since disappeared. Jews arenotorious all the world over as money-lenders, and it may perhaps bewondered why none of them survived as money-lenders in Madras; but thefact that Coral Merchants' Street is now the habitat of NattukottaiChetties, who are past-masters in the art of money-lending, suggeststhat even the Jews were unable to compete with Madras sowcars in thebusiness of usury, and that the Chetties displaced the Jews who usedto live in the street. The little Jewish cemetery in crowded MintStreet is an interesting spot. One of the antique tomb-stones has beencaught in the branch of a tree and has been lifted high in air, and isa quaint sight; and the deserted little Hebrew graveyard itself issymbolic of the dispersion of the ancient people. 

It is a curious fact that the Company's employees in South India neverspoke of Indian Mohammedans as Mohammedans or as Moslems or asMussalmans, but always as 'Moors. ' It is thus that the name of 'MoorStreet' is to be accounted for. The original 'Moors Street' was astreet in which Mohammedans used to live, and the fact that oneparticular street in a large city should have borne such a name isevidence of another fact, namely, that in the earlier years of Madrasvery few Mohammedans resided in the town. It should be remembered thatMadraspatnam, Triplicane, Egmore, and the other hamlets that went tomake up the city of Madras were all of them Hindu villages; and it wasonly now and again that Mohammedans, in some capacity or another, found their way into the town. In the earlier years of Madras a singlemosque sufficed for all the few Mohammedans therein. The mosque waslocated in 'Moors Street' in old Black Town, a street that was thepredecessor of the 'Moor Street' of to-day. It was not till nearlyfifty years after the acquisition of the site of Madras that a secondmosque was built--in Muthialpet; and these two small mosques suppliedMohammedan requirements for many years. The fact is that Madras was sofrequently troubled by successive Mohammedan enemies--the King ofGolconda; Da-ud Khan, Nawab of the Carnatic; Haidar Ali, Sultan ofMysore; his son Tipu, and others--that the Company was disposed toregard all 'Moors' with mistrust, so much so that they discouragedMohammedan residents; and a measure was passed with the specialintention 'to prevent the Moors purchasing too much land in the BlackTown. ' There are large crowds of Mohammedans in Madras now, groupedespecially in Chepauk and the adjoining Triplicane and Royapettah; andthis is due to the fact that in later days Nawab Walajah of Arcot, whowas friendly to the English, came and settled down in Madras. He builtChepauk Palace for his residence, and the many Mohammedans whofollowed him into the city formed the nucleus of a large Mohammedancolony. 

The name 'China Bazaar' appears early in the Madras Records; and itwould seem to have been the place where Chinese crockery was on sale. Whether or not the salesmen were Chinese immigrants I cannot say; butthe fact that another street in Madras bears the name of 'ChinamanStreet' suggests that there was at one time a colony of pig-tailedyellow-men in the city. The supposition is not unlikely, for China wasincluded within the sphere of the Company's commercial operations, with Madras as the head-quarters of the trade, and ships of theCompany plied regularly between China and Madras. Tea was one of thearticles of trade, but Chinese crockery was in great demand in India, and ship-loads of cheap China bowls and plates and dishes wereimported; and valuable specimens of Chinese porcelain were highlyesteemed by wealthy Indians--so much so that it is on record that oneof the Moghul emperors had a slave put to death for havingaccidentally broken a costly China dish which the emperor particularlyadmired. 

As the Company's trade was very largely in cloth, it can be understoodthat the Company's agents were eager to induce spinners and weavers tosettle in Madras, so that cloth might be bought for the Company at thelowest possible prices from the weavers direct. Elihu Yale, who wasone of the early Governors of the Fort, imported some fiftyweaver-families and located them in 'Weavers' street', the street thatis now known as Nyniappa Naick Street, in Georgetown. Some twenty-fiveyears later, Governor Collet established a number of imported weaversin the northern suburb of Tiruvattur, in a village that was given thename 'Collet Petta' in the Governor's honour--a name that degeneratedinto 'Kalati Pettah'--'Loafer-land'--its present appellation. Therewas still a demand for more weavers, and eventually a large vacanttract was marked out as a 'Weavers' Town, ' under the name of ChindadrePettah--the modern Chintadripet. In order to attract weavers, houseswere built at the Company's expense, which weavers were permitted tooccupy as hereditary possessions. It was formally decreed that "Nonebut Weavers, Spinners, and other persons useful in the Weaving trade, Painters (i. E. Designers of patterns for chintz), Washers (bleachers), Dyers, Bettleca-merchants (beetle-sellers), Brahmins and Dancingwomen, and other necessary attendants on the pagoda (erected in thesettlement) shall inhabit the said town. " In Chintadripet to-day thereare still many spinners and weavers; and one of the sights inChintadripet--growing gradually more rare--is the spectacle ofprimitively-clad urchins or grown men spinning in the streets withprimitive gear and in primitive fashion; and it is interesting torecall the fact that this has been going on in Chintadripet for nearlytwo centuries--an industry which the Company established. 

Washermanpet is another such locality. It was not so called, as manypeople imagine, for being a land of dhobies (male laundresses). In theCompany's vocabulary a 'washerman' was a man who 'bleached' new-madecloth; and the Company employed a number of bleachers. The bleachingprocess needed large open spaces--washing-greens--on which the clothcould be laid out in the sun to be bleached; and Washermanpet covereda considerable area. 

A great many more of the streets and districts of Madras have historyin their names; but the few that we have dealt with suffice toexemplify the manner of the expansion of the city of Madras. We canpicture the rustic suppliers crowding into the city to sell theproduce of their fields; we can picture the humble weavers migratinginto the city with their wives and their children, and with their potsand their pans and their quaint machines, in response to the Company'stempting invitation; we can picture the small tradesmen and the smallmechanics setting up their humble shops in the new city in which theybelieved that fortunes were to be made. And in the higher grades oflife we can picture the grave Armenian merchants, the submissive Jews, the mistrusted 'Moors, ' and others seeking interviews with Stuart orGeorgian-garbed factors of the Company, and eager all of them to turnthe Company to profitable account. 

CHAPTER V

'THE WALL'

Skirting a thoroughfare in Old Jail Street, in North Georgetown, isstill to be seen a part of 'the Wall' that protected Black Town inbygone days. This interesting remnant of the Wall of Madras mightbefore long have been levelled to the ground, either by successivemonsoons or by philistine contractors in want of 'material;' but, witha happy regard for a relic of Old Madras, the Madras Government haverecently undertaken the task of preserving the ruin, which they haveofficially declared an 'historic memorial. '

The 'Wall of Madras' is worthy of a meditative visit, but, in orderthat the meditation may be on an historic basis, it is necessary toknow something about the Wall itself. 

We have seen that when the Company established themselves at Madras, in 1639, they first built a small fort for the protection ofthemselves and their goods. Around the walls of the Fort a number ofChristians--English and Portuguese and Eurasians--settled down, andwhat was called 'White Town' came into being. Within a term of yearsthis White Town was itself enclosed within fortified walls, which werefinally identical with the wall round Fort St. George to-day. Therewas thus 'a fort within a fort;' but in course of time the inner wallwas pulled down. 

Immediately outside the northern wall of White Town lay Black Town, inhabited by Indians--employees and purveyors of the Company, as wellas merchants, shop-keepers, industrialists, and the rest. It should beborne in mind that the site of this original Black Town wasaltogether different from the site of the later Black Town, the'Georgetown' of to-day. Old Black Town, as already explained, extendedfrom the northern wall of the Fort to what is now called the EsplanadeRoad, and it covered the ground that is now taken up by the WirelessTelegraph enclosure, the grounds of the High Court, and those of theLaw College (_vide_ map, p. 10). 

Black Town was at first without any wall, and, as the times wereunsettled, the place was exposed to the serious danger of being raidedby any adventurous band of marauders. Very soon, however, a beginningwas made of enclosing the town with a mud wall; and in the reign ofQueen Anne a wall was built with masonry. Meanwhile, moreover, numerous houses and streets had sprung up outside the wall, on thesite of the Georgetown of to-day. 

[Illustration: A BIT OF THE BLACK TOWN WALL]

In 1746 the French captured Fort St. George; and they destroyed notonly the Black Town Wall but also Black Town itself. It was adisastrous episode in the history of Madras. For six years the Englishand the French had been at war in Europe, and the relations betweenthe English and French colonists in India were naturally strained; butthey were settlers within the dominions of Indian rulers, and, although both the English and the French had ships and soldiers forthe protection of their settlements, they realized that they were notat liberty to make war upon each other. The settlers, moreover, wereemployees of mercantile companies, working for dividends; and war, with its calamitous expenditure, was not within their design. ButDupleix, the talented French Governor of Pondicherry, had ambitiousideas for the extension of French influence in India, and, in defianceof Indian rulers, war broke out. In the beginning there were severalengagements at sea between a French squadron under Labourdonnais andan English squadron under Captain Peyton. The English squadron wasworsted, and had to put into Trincomalee Harbour, in Ceylon, to refit. Thereupon Labourdonnais, after making quick preparations atPondicherry, sailed for Madras; and the alarm in the Fort and in thecity must have been great when his ships appeared off the coast andproceeded to bombard the settlement. His guns, however, did but littledamage, and the citizens woke up the next morning to find, to theirgreat content, that the enemy had sailed away during the night. Meanwhile Captain Peyton, having repaired his ships, was unaware ofwhat had happened at Madras, and sailed from Ceylon to Bengal, withouttouching at Fort St. George. Possibly he was lured to Bengal by bogusmessages of French origin; for, as soon as he was out of the way, Labourdonnais reappeared off Madras, better prepared than before. Having succeeded in landing a considerable force, he erected batterieson shore and from various points he bombarded White Town, which wasnow the actual Fort St. George. At the end of an unhappy seven daysthe garrison capitulated. The French marched into the Fort, and allthe English residents, civil and military--including the Governor andthe Members of Council, and also Robert Clive, who was then a youngclerk--were sent to Pondicherry as prisoners of war. 

For nearly three years the French flag flew over Fort St. George, until, in accordance with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, made betweenthe combatants in Europe, Madras was restored to the Company. 

[Illustration: CENTRAL GATE OF THE BLACK TOWN WALL]

During their occupation the French had made great changes. Feeling thenecessity of strengthening their position, their military commandersrealized what had apparently not been recognized by the Company'semployees, untrained in war--namely that a weak-walled native townlying right against the northern wall of Fort St. George was aserious danger. The houses offered convenient cover for any enemiesthat might attack the Fort; and, moreover, any disaffected or venaltownsman was in a position to give the assailants valuable help. TheFrench Governor set himself, therefore, to the deliberate destructionof Black Town. He first destroyed the Town Wall, and then--for adistance of 400 yards from the northern wall of White Town, or thepresent Fort St. George--he demolished every house. The area that isnow represented by the Wireless Telegraph Station and the grounds ofthe High Court thus became an open space. Meanwhile they constructed amoat and glacis round the walls of White Town, which, with certainalterations, are the moat and glacis of Fort St. George to-day. 

The Records express the melancholy interest with which the Company'semployees, when they re-entered Madras, took note of the changes that theenemy had made in the familiar settlement. The Councillors apparentlyconceived that it was in a wanton spirit of destruction that the greaterpart of Black Town had been wiped out; for they formally decided that thestreets that had been destroyed should be rebuilt. It may be supposedhowever, that their military advisers counselled them otherwise; for, sofar from the old houses being rebuilt, those that had been left standingwere destroyed. The open space was allowed to remain; and 'New BlackTown'--the modern 'Georgetown'--began to be developed. It continued to becalled 'Black Town' until the visit of the Prince of Wales (afterwards KingGeorge V) to Madras in 1906 when it was formally re-named'Georgetown'--ostensibly in Prince George's honour, but in reality to meetthe wishes of a number of the residents who sought an opportunity ofgetting rid of what they regarded--quite reasonably--as an objectionablename for the locality in which their lot was cast. The disappearance of thehistoric name is a matter for historic regret, but a concession had to bemade to the intelligible wishes of residents. 

[Illustration: A MAGAZINE IN THE BLACK TOWN WALL]

The Company, bearing in mind that the French had been able to captureMadras, realized that it was necessary to strengthen the defences ofFort St. George and also to provide adequate protection for the newnative city that had grown up outside the Fort's protective walls andwas absolutely without defence. The defences of the Fort were taken inhand at once, though the work was by no means completed; and theDirectors in England readily sanctioned the construction of a wallround New Black Town. It was well that the security of the Fort waslooked to without any long delay; for in 1758, a large French armyunder Count Lally besieged the Fort again--but so unsuccessfully that, after sixty-seven days of persistent endeavour, they beat a suddenretreat. It was a good many years, however, before the building ofthe wall round Black Town was taken seriously in hand--and then onlybecause the Company had been given a succession of sharp warnings thatit was absolutely necessary that new Black Town should be protected. 

The French themselves had given the first warning during the siegeunder Count Lally; for, although they were powerless against the Fort, they were able to enter Black Town without opposition, and they madeuse of some of the houses for the purpose of the siege. The nextwarning was given a few years later when Tipu, the son of Haidar Ali, Sultan of Mysore, after ravaging the country round Madras, came sonear to the city itself that parties of his horsemen were scamperingabout in the suburb of Chintadripet. Tipu's raid induced the Companyto bring forth the approved but long-shelved plans for a wall roundBlack Town; but there was still much more discussion than work. TheCompany needed yet another awakening; and they got a stern one twoyears later. We quote the story from the Company's official records, published by the Madras Government. It is contained in a minute in theofficial Diary of Fort St. George, dated the 29th of March, 1769, which runs as follows:--

 About 8 o'Clock this morning several Parties of the Enemy's (Haidar Ali's) horse appeared in the Bounds of this Place at St. Thomé and Egmore, from which latter place some guns were fired at them. .. . At eleven o'Clock a fellow was caught plundering at Triplicane and brought into Town, who gave Intelligence that Hyder himself was on the other side of St. Thomé with the greatest part of his horse. In the afternoon Advice came that the Enemy's horse were moving from St. Thomé round to the Northward with a design, as was supposed, to make an attempt on the Black Town. 

It would have been difficult to have defended the unwalled town; andon the following day the Council of Fort St. George sent Mr. DuPre, Chief Councillor and succeeding Governor, to Haidar Ali's camp, onthe other side of the Marmalong Bridge, to come to terms with theinvader; and within three days a treaty had been made. The treaty, said Mr. DuPre, writing to a friend, "will do us no honor: yet it wasnecessary, and there was no alternative but that or worse. "

After this humiliation the building of the Wall was regarded as apressing necessity; and within a year the work was practicallyfinished. 

[Illustration: 'THE OLD AND THE NEW'

Corner of the Medical School built into a portion of the Black TownWall. ]

It was well indeed that the work was done; for a few years afterwards, on the 10th of August, 1780, Haidar's cavalry raided San Thomé andTriplicane, killing a number of people; and the terror in Black Townwas so great that crowds of the inhabitants took flight. Fortunately, however, the Governor was able to issue the following notification forthe reassurance of the public:--'A sufficient number of guns have beenmounted on the Black Town wall, ' and 'nothing has been omitted that Ican think of for the security of the Black Town. ' Haidar was notsufficiently venturesome to attack the fortified town; but the terrorof the inhabitants was by no means at an end; for a little later camethe disastrous news that a British force sent out to meet the invaderhad been cut to pieces at Conjeevaram. Eventually, however, theMysoreans were defeated, and the treaty of peace was a triumph for theCompany. 

The long delay in the building of the Wall was chiefly due to the factthat the representatives of the Company, being commercial men, naturally gave their chief attention to the Company's mercantilebusiness, and were apt to disregard the immediate necessity ofexpensive schemes which the Company's military officers put forward asstrategic requirements. When the Wall was first talked about, afterthe recovery of Madras from the French, the Directors in England, whoalways kept a tight hand on the Company's purse-strings, declared thatthe inhabitants of Black Town ought to be made to pay for the cost oftheir own defences, and should be taxed accordingly; and the name ofthe 'Wall Tax Road, ' which runs alongside the Central Station to theSalt Cotaurs, is a standing reminder of the Directors' decree, whilethe road itself is an indication of the alignment of the western wall. The people protested indignantly against being taxed for the purpose, and, as a matter of fact, the representatives of the Company in Indiadoubted whether they would be within their legal rights in compellingthem to pay; and the tax was never actually levied. What with the WallTax Road on the west and the seashore on the east, the existingremains on the north, and the Esplanade on the south, it is notdifficult to form a general idea of the direction of the four sides ofthe wall within which the later Black Town was enclosed. 

Such is the story of 'The Wall;' and the remains are an interestingrelic of lawless times when at any minute it was possible that crowdsof terror-stricken folk would suddenly be pouring through thegateways of the city at the alarming news that strange horsemen weredashing here and there in one or another of the suburbs, demandingmoney and jewels from the people and slaughtering unhappy individualswho tried to evade a response. 

CHAPTER VI

EXPANSION

We have seen that the Company were careful to develop both White Townand Black Town. They were not content, however, with meredevelopments, for they took pains also to extend their territorialpossessions. 

The strip of land that was acquired by Mr. Francis Day was not large. Roughly, it extended along the seashore from the mouth of the Cooum toan undefined point beyond the present harbour, somewhere in theneighbourhood of Cassimode, and inland as far as what was called theNorth River, which is now represented by Cochrane's Canal--the canalthat runs between the Central Station and the People's Park. It willbe interesting to note how some of the various other parts of thepresent city came into the Company's possession. 

[Illustration: MADRAS (APPROXIMATELY)]

On several occasions the representatives of various dynasties thatwere successively supreme over Madras made grants of additional landto the Company. The village of Triplicane was the firstaddition, ----some twenty years after the acquisition of Madras. Thevillage was granted by the representative of the Mohammedan King ofGolconda, for an annual rent of Rs. 175, which ceased to be paid whenthe Golconda dynasty shortly afterwards came to an end. Later, incompliance with a petition by Governor Elihu Yale to the EmperorAurangzeb, the Company received a free grant of 'Tandore (Tondiarpet), Persewacca (Pursewaukam), and Yegmore (Egmore). ' Still later, in thereign of Aurangzeb's son and successor, the village of Lungambacca(Nungumbaukam), now the principal residential district of Europeans inMadras, was granted to the Company, together with four adjoiningvillages, for a total annual rent of 1, 500 pagodas (say Rs. 5, 250). The Emperor's officers argued that the rent ought to have been larger, but the Company, conforming to the spirit of corruption that was infashion, were wily enough to send by a Brahman and a Mohammedanconjointly a sum of Rs. 700 'to be distributed amongst the King'sofficers who keep the Records, in order to settle this matter. ' Thevillage of Vepery--variously called in olden documents Ipere, Ypere, Vipery, and Vapery--lay between Egmore and Pursewaukam; and theCompany, being naturally desirous of consolidating their territory, proceeded at once to try to obtain a grant of the place; butsuccessive efforts on the part of Governor Elihu Yale came to naught;and it was not till much later (1742) when the Nawab of Arcot was lordof the soil, that Vepery was acquired from the Nawab. The manner ofits acquisition is interesting. The preceding Nawab had just beenmurdered, and the Carnatic army disowning the ambitious rival who hadmurdered him, proclaimed the dead Nawab's son as his successor. Thenew Nawab was but a youth, and he was residing at the time in one ofthe big houses in Black Town. The Company were politic enough tocelebrate the lad's accession with grand doings. They escorted him ina splendid procession to the Company's Gardens, which were situatedalong the bank of the river Cooum, where the General Hospital and theMedical College now stand. In the Gardens there was a fine house, containing a spacious hall, which the Company had specially designedfor great occasions; and there the lad's accession was formallyannounced; and finally he was escorted in procession back to hisdwelling. The Company profited by their politic demonstration; for, inreturn for their courtesies to the young Nawab, the lad gratifiedtheir desires by making them a rent-free grant of the village ofVepery, and also of Perambore and other lands. It may be added thatthe boy-king was unfortunate; for he was murdered within two years ofhis accession, at the instance of the man who had murdered his father. 

San Thomé was acquired in 1749; and the story of the acquisition isnot without interest. The names 'San Thomé' and 'Mylapore' are oftenused as alternative designations for one and the same locality; but inbygone days the two names represented quite different places. Mylaporewas a very ancient Indian town, which seems to have been in existencelong before the birth of Christ. San Thomé was a seventeenth centuryPortuguese settlement close by. It is an old tradition that St. Thomasthe Apostle was martyred just outside Mylapore; and when thePortuguese first came to India some of them visited Mylapore to lookfor relics of the saint. They found some ruined Christian churches, and also a tomb which they believed to be the tomb of St. Thomas; andsoon afterwards a Portuguese monastery was established on the spot. APortuguese town grew up around the monastery; and in course of timethe town became a commercial centre, and was surrounded with afortified wall, and was the Portuguese settlement of San Thomé, overagainst the Indian town of Mylapore. An Italian dealer in preciousstones who visited India in the sixteenth century wrote of San Thométhat it was 'as fair a city' as any that he had seen in the land; andhe described Mylapore as being an Indian city surrounded by its ownmud wall. Mylapore was thus in effect the Black Town of San Thomé; butin later days the two towns were combined. When the English came toFort St. George, the power of the Portuguese was already waning; andthe development of the influence of the English at Madras meant afurther lessening of the influence of the Portuguese at San Thomé;and it was a natural consequence that San Thomé, including Mylapore, became a prey to successive assailants. Its first captor was the lordof the soil, the Mohammedan King of Golconda. Next, the French took itfrom Golconda; and two years later Golconda, with the help of theDutch, recaptured it from the French. The Dutch were content with ashare of the plunder for their reward, and left Golconda inpossession. On the self-interested advice of the English at Fort St. George, Golconda destroyed the fortifications. He then put the town upfor sale. The Company were prepared to buy it, and so were thePortuguese; but a rich Mohammedan named Cassa Verona found favour withGolconda's Moslem officials, and secured the town on a short lease. Next it was leased to the Hindu Governor of Poonamallee; and then fora big price it went back again to the Portuguese. Towards the end ofthe seventeenth century the great Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb dethronedthe lord of the soil, the King of Golconda; and, although thePortuguese were not turned out of San Thomé, it was now a part of theMoghul Empire, and was put in charge of a Moslem ruler. AfterAurangzeb's death, the Moghul Empire broke up, and the Nawab of Arcoteventually became independent, and San Thomé was part of hisdominions. In 1749, when Madras, after the French occupation, wasrestored to the English by an order from Paris, in accordance with thetreaty of Aix la Chapelle, Dupleix at Pondicherry was bitterlydisappointed at the rendition, and he formed designs for theacquisition of San Thomé for France, as a set-off for the loss ofMadras. The English at Fort St. George had information of his schemes, and, being in no way desirous of having aggressive Frenchmen for closeneighbours, they forestalled Dupleix by persuading the Nawab to makethe Company a grant of 'Mylapore, _alias_ St. Thomé, ' on conditionthat the Company should undertake to help the Nawab with men andmoney whenever he should call upon them to do so. It was thus that SanThomé became a British possession; and, although it was afterwardsravaged successively by the French under Count Lally and by Haidar Aliof Mysore, it has remained a British possession ever since. 

We have said enough to show the manner in which the different parts ofthe modern city of Madras came into the hands of the English. Themethods were not always wholly admirable; but we must remember thatthe East India Company was a mercantile association, fighting for itsexistence under diamond-cut-diamond conditions; and we must rememberalso that, although its representatives at Madras were sent out toIndia not to rule but to earn dividends for the shareholders, yet theCompany's rule over Madras was so upright that crowds of people werecontinually flocking into Madras to enjoy its benefits. 

CHAPTER VII

OUTPOSTS

The suburban lands which were successively granted to the Company werenot protected either by the walls of Fort St. George or by the wallsof Black Town, and it was accordingly necessary that special meansshould be adopted for their defence. The Company's military engineersdevised the erection of small suburban forts ('redoubts'), block-houses, and batteries, which were to be mounted with cannon andto be in charge of an appropriate garrison, and were to serve asoutposts for the protection of the outlying quarters of the city. 

On the northern side of Black Town the batteries and block-houses werelinked together by a thick-set hedge of palmyras, bamboos, prickly-pear, and thorny bushes, such that neither infantry norcavalry could force a way through. Later it was decreed that the'Bound Hedge, ' as it was called, should be extended so as to encirclethe whole city. The work, however, was never completed, for as late as1785 an influential European inhabitant of Madras, addressing theGovernment on the subject of the insecurity of the city, wrote:--

 "Was the Bound Hedge finished, no man could desert. No Spy could pass; provisions would be cheap. All the Garden Houses, as well as thirty-three Square Miles of Ground, would be in security from the invasions of irregular Horse. "

Of the suburban fortifications the two largest were at Egmore and atSan Thomé. Next in size were those at Nungumbaukam and at Pursewaukam. Of smaller works there were many. Of the fortifications atNungumbaukam and at Pursewaukam all traces have disappeared; but ofthe larger ones at San Thomé and at Egmore interesting remains arestill to be seen. 

[Illustration: San Thomé Fort. 

A PORTION OF THE EXTENSIVE RUINS IN THE GROUNDS OF 'LEITH CASTLE, ' SANTHOME]

The remains of the San Thomé Redoubt stand within the grounds of'Leith Castle, ' a house that lies south of the San Thomé Cathedral. The remains are ruins, but the massive walls fifteen feet high andthree feet thick, are suggestive of the purpose for which the redoubtwas built. The 'Records' show that the San Thomé Redoubt, built in1751, was a very complete fortification, with a moat forty feet wide, a glacis, and all the other works that are usual in respect of a wellappointed building of the kind. That it was of a large size is to beseen in the fact that, when the French under Count Lally werebesieging Madras, an English officer was officially directed 'to stayin St. Thomé Fort with the Europeans belonging to Chingleput, fourCompanies of sepoys, and fifty horse. '

The Egmore Redoubt was a good deal older than that of San Thomé. Itwas constructed in the days of Queen Anne. It was intended, of course, for the special protection of Egmore; but in those distant days whentrips to the hills were unknown, even Egmore was a health-resort inrespect of the crowded Fort St. George, and it was officially reportedthat the Egmore Redoubt might 'serve for a convenience for the sickSoldiers when arrived from England, for the recovery of their health, it being a good air. ' The Egmore Redoubt was evidently a need; for the'Records' tell us that on various occasions its guns were fired at theenemy. The enemy were for the most part horsemen of Haidar Ali or ofTipu, his son and successor; and in 1799 the year in which Tipu waskilled, the need for the Redoubt disappeared. Adjoining the precinctsof the Redoubt were the premises of the Male Asylum, an Anglo-IndianOrphanage, which required to be extended, and in the following yearthe Madras Government gave the Redoubt to the Asylum, and the twopremises were turned into a common enclosure. In the beginning of thepresent century the Directors of the Asylum sold their Egmore estateto the South Indian Railway Company and removed to new premises in thePoonamallee road; and what remains of the Egmore Redoubt is now thehabitation of some of the Railway employees. 

[Illustration: THE EGMORE FORT (SIDE VIEW)]

The remains are of quaint interest. At some date or another theauthorities of the Asylum had an upper story added to one of themilitary buildings, with the result that there is the strangespectacle of a row of windowed chambers on the top of a buttressed andbattlemented wall, windowless and grim. The upper story has been builtinto the battlements in such a manner that the outline of thebattlements is still clearly visible, and the building is a compositereminder of old-time war and latter-day peace. The whole of thelower part of the building, with its massive walls and its frowningaspect, is of curious and suggestive interest; and the ground around, which is extensively bricked, is a reminder of the fact that theRedoubt in its original form was large indeed. The place providesinteresting material for antiquarian speculation. 

[Illustration: REMAINS OF THE EGMORE FORT. 

_The building is in the Male Asylum Road, and is now the residence ofsome railway employees. Its upper part has been built upon abattlemented wall, and doors have been let into the wall. The outlinesof the original wall and of some of the battlements can be easilytraced. _]

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHURCH IN THE FORT

St. Mary's Church within the walls of Fort St. George is the oldestProtestant church in India, and, except for some of the oldest bits ofthe Fort walls, it is the oldest British building in Madras city, andeven in India itself. It dates from 1680. 

When Madras was rising upon its foundations, the Company's employeeswere not only without a church but also without a pastor; for theCompany did not think it necessary to go to the expense of providing achaplain for so small a community. But it was an age in whichreligious services on Sunday were seldom neglected; and it may beconceived that, in default of a chaplain at Fort St. George, theGovernor himself or his delegate read the Church Service on Sundaymorning and evening, in the hearing of the assembled employees of theCompany, and perhaps also some selections from the published sermonsof distinguished Elizabethan divines. 

In the Portuguese settlement of San Thomé there were numerous RomanCatholic priests, and some of them ministered to the numerousPortuguese and other Roman Catholic residents of White Town aroundFort St. George, as also of Black Town close by. So numerous indeedwere the Roman Catholic residents of White Town within three years ofthe foundation of the Fort that the Governor permitted a French priestto build a chapel in the Town. It was thus not a little anomalous thatin a British settlement, founded under the auspices of such aredoubted antipapist as Queen Elizabeth, there was a Roman Catholicchurch with a priest in charge, yet neither a church nor a pastor ofthe established religion. 

In 1645, however, the Company's Agent at Fort St. George forwarded tohigher authority "a petition from the souldiers for the desireing of aminister to be here with them for the maintainance of their souleshealth;" and in the following year a chaplain was sent out. There wasstill no Protestant church, but the celebration of religious serviceswas held in careful regard; for the chaplain read morning and eveningprayers every day of the year in a room in the Fort appointed for thepurpose, and it was compulsory upon all the youthful employees of theCompany to attend regularly, under the penalty of a fine. 

Chaplains came and chaplains went, and for some sixteen years theycontinued their ministrations in the room in the Fort. A small churchwas then built; but, with the Company's developing trade, thepopulation of White Town increased so rapidly that before long thelittle church was too small for the number of the worshippers. WhenMr. Streynsham Master, after a long term of years in the Company'sservice, was appointed Governor of Madras, one of his first acts wasthe circulation of a voluntary subscription paper for the building ofa church that should be worthy of the Company's rapidly developingSouth Indian possession. He headed the list with a subscription of ahundred pagodas (Rs. 350), a sum which represented much more than itdoes now; for it was more than Mr. Streynsham Master's pay for a wholemonth as Governor of Madras. Subscriptions from the Councillors, aswell as from the factors and writers and apprentices, wereproportionately big; and on the 28th of October, 1680, St. Mary'sChurch was solemnly opened, and the guns of the Fort roared forth loudvolleys in honour of the event. The steeple and the sanctuary wereadded later; but, for the rest, the present church, except fordetails, is the very same church that was built some two hundred andfifty years ago, in the reign of Charles II. 

[Illustration: ST. MARY'S, FORT ST. GEORGE. ]

It is interesting to note that the church at Madras was built during aperiod when in London a great many churches were being built--orrebuilt--after the Great Fire. Church-building was in vogue, with thedistinguished Sir Christopher Wren as the builder in chief; and it isnot unlikely that what was being done so energetically in London wasone of the influences that inspired Mr. Streynsham Master to be soearnest over a scheme for building a church in Madras. It may benoted, moreover, that St. Mary's Church within the Fort at Madras isof a style that was very much in fashion in London at the time. 

In deciding to build a new church, the Governor and his colleaguesrealized that if ever the Fort should be bombarded, a shot from theenemy's guns was as likely to fall upon the church as upon a fortifiedbastion; so the roof of the church was made 'bomb-proof, ' inpreparation for possibilities. Events proved the reasonableness of themeasure; for on more than one occasion the church was a factor in war. 

In 1746, when the French were besieging Fort St. George, the Britishdefenders lodged their wives and children and their domestic servantsin the bomb-proof church, and they took refuge there themselves in theintervals of military duty. During the three years that they occupiedMadras, the French, fearing that they might be besieged in their turn, used the bomb-proof church as a storehouse for grain and as areservoir for drinking-water. The church organ they sent off toPondicherry as one of the spoils of war. 

At the end of the war Madras was restored to the Company, but a fewyears later the Fort was besieged by the French again. During theinterval, some of the houses had been made bomb-proof, and in thesethe women and children were lodged, but St. Mary's Church was used asa barrack, and its steeple as a watch-tower. Lally, the Frenchcommander, failing to capture Madras, had to march away with his hopesbaffled; but, notwithstanding its bomb-proof roof, the church, as alsoits steeple, had been badly damaged during the destructive siege, andthe necessary repairs were considerable. 

A few years later the English had their revenge. They capturedPondicherry, and they destroyed its fortifications. They recovered, with other things, the organ that had been looted from St. Mary's;but, as a new one had in the meanwhile been obtained for St. Mary's, the recovered instrument was sent to a church up-country. Accordingto accounts, moreover, they took toll for the Frenchmen's loot bysending to St. Mary's from one of the churches in Pondicherry thelarge and well-executed painting of the 'Last Supper, ' which is stillto be seen in the church. The origin of the picture is not known forcertain; but it is believed with reason to be a fact that it was aspoil of war from Pondicherry on one or another of the three occasionson which that town was captured by the British. 

The stray visitor who wanders round St. Mary's without a guide is aptto be astonished at what he sees in the churchyard. A multitude of oldtomb-stones, of various ages and with inscriptions in various tongues, lie flat on the ground, as close to one another as paving-stones, insuch fashion that the visitor must wonder how there can be sufficientroom for coffins below. As a matter of fact, the coffins and theircontents are not there, and the inscriptions of 'Here lyeth' and 'Hicjacet' are not statements of facts. The explanation is an interestingstory, which is worth the telling. 

In the Company's early days, the 'English Burying Place, ' (_vide_ Map, p. 10) lay a little way outside the walls of White Town, in an areawhich is now occupied by the Madras Law College with its immediateprecincts. Later, when a wall was built round old Black Town, theBurial Ground was included within the enclosure of the wall. AnEnglish cemetery in a corner of an Indian town was not likely to betreated with any particular respect; and on various counts the'English Burying Place' was a sadly neglected spot. Nearly everyEnglishman that died in Madras was an employee of the Company, and wasa bachelor, without any relatives in India to mourn his loss. Hiscolleagues gave him a grand funeral; but his death meant promotion forsome of those selfsame colleagues, and his place in the Company'sservice was filled up by an official 'Order' on the following day. Abig monument in the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar ugliness waspiously built over his remains, and possibly there was genuine regretat a good fellow's loss; but water is less thick than blood, and therewas no near one or dear one in India to take affectionate care of thebig tomb; so it was left to itself to be taken care of by the peopleof Black Town. An unofficial description of Madras dated 1711 speaksof the 'stately Tombs' in the English cemetery, and an official Recordof the same year speaks of the unhallowed uses to which the statelytombs were put. The Record says that "Excesses are Comitted onhallowed ground, " and that the arcaded monuments were "turned intoreceptacles for Beggars and Buffaloes. " We have seen in a previouschapter that the French, when they captured Madras, demolished thegreater part of old Black Town together with its wall, and that theEnglish, when they were back in Madras, completed the work ofdemolition. In the two-fold destruction, both French and English hadsufficient respect for the dead to leave the tombs alone. But, nowthat Black Town was gone, the big tombs were the nearest buildings tothe walls of White Town and Fort St. George; and when the French underLally besieged Madras a few years later, they used the 'stately Tombs'as convenient cover for their attack on the city. The cemetery now wasa receptacle not for beggars and buffaloes but for soldiers and guns. The siege lasted sixty-seven days, during which the cemetery was avantage ground for successive French batteries. It is therefore not tobe wondered at that when Count Lally had raised the unsuccessfulsiege, the authorities at Fort St. George decided that the 'statelytombs' were to disappear. The tombs themselves were accordinglydestroyed, but the slabs that bore the inscriptions were laid in St. Mary's churchyard. At a later date some of them were taken up and wereremoved to the ramparts, for the extraordinary purpose of 'buildingplatforms for the guns, '[2] but eventually they were restored to thechurchyard and were relaid as we see them to-day. 

[Footnote 2: Rev. F. Penny's _Church in Madras_, vol. I, p. 366. ]

When the burying ground was dismantled, two of its monuments wereallowed to remain. They are still to be seen on the Esplanade, outsidethe Law College, and the inscriptions can still be read; and the twotombs are interesting memorials of the past. One is a tall, steeple-like structure, which represents a woman's grief for her firsthusband, and for her child by her second. Her first husband was JosephHynmers, Senior Member of Council, who died in 1680, her second wasElihu Yale, Governor of Madras, whom she married six months after thedeath of her first. When her little son David died at the age of four, she had him buried in her first husband's grave. The other monumentcovers a vault which holds the remains of various members of thePowney family, a name which figured freely in the list of theCompany's employees throughout the eighteenth century. When thecemetery was dismantled, members of the Powney family were still inthe Madras service, and it was doubtless in respect for their feelingsthat the vault was not disturbed. 

It may be added that amongst the gravestones that pave the groundoutside St. Mary's Church there are several that record the death ofRoman Catholics. It is supposed that they were taken from thegraveyard of the Roman Catholic church in White Town, which wasdemolished by the Company when they recovered Madras after the Frenchoccupation. 

Although the gravestones around St. Mary's Church bear the names ofpersons who were buried elsewhere, there are memorials within thechurch itself which mark the actual resting-place of mortal remains. Most of the monuments in St. Mary's are of historic interest, andit is fascinating indeed to stroll round the building and study

 Storied urn or animated bust;

but it is noteworthy that no inscription records the very first burialwithin the walls of the church. It is noteworthy too that theforgotten grave was not the grave of an obscure person, but of LordPigot, Governor of Madras; and, in view of the extraordinarycircumstances of his death, the first burial is the most notable ofall. 

George Pigot was sent out to Madras as a lad of eighteen, to take upthe post of a writer in the Company's service. He worked so well thathe rose rapidly, and at the early age of thirty-six he was appointedGovernor of Madras. It was in the middle of his eight years'governorship that the French under Lally besieged Madras forsixty-five days; and Governor Pigot's untiring energy and skilfulmeasures were prime factors in the successful defence. After the warhe did great things for the development of Madras; and when heresigned office at the age of forty-five and went to England, thestrenuous upholder of British honour in the East was rewarded with anIrish peerage. Well would it have been for Lord Pigot if he hadsettled down for good on his Irish estate! But twelve years later heaccepted the offer of a second term of office as Governor of Madras. It is not infrequently the case that a man who has been eminentlysuccessful in office at one time of his career fails badly if after along interval he accepts the same office again. Times have altered andmethods that were successful before are now out of date. In LordPigot's case the conditions at the time of his second appointment werevery different from those at the time of the first. On the firstoccasion he had risen to office with colleagues who had been hiscompanions in the service. On the second occasion he was sent out toMadras as an elderly nobleman selected for the job, and as a strangerto his colleagues, who moreover were particularly given to factiousdisputes. It is not unlikely too that Lord Pigot himself had becometouchy and overbearing in his declining years. Any way, he quarrelledwith his Councillors almost immediately, and within six or sevenmonths there had been some very angry scenes. He had been accustomedto being obeyed, and in his wrath at being obstinately resisted hewent to the length of ordering the arrest not only of some of theleading members of Council but also of the Commander-in-Chief. TheCouncillors check-mated the Governor's order by arresting theGovernor! It was a daring proceeding. He was arrested one night afterdark, while driving along a suburban road on his imagined way to afriendly supper, and he was sent as a prisoner to a house at St. Thomas's Mount. He was in captivity for some nine months, while thetriumphant Councillors were representing their case to the Directorsin England; and then he died, in Government House, Madras, to whichwhen he fell ill he had been transferred. It is on record that hisremains were specially honoured with burial within St. Mary'sChurch--the first burial within the building--but no permanentmemorial was raised to the unhappy Governor's memory; and theparticular spot where he was buried is only a matter of conjecture. 

St. Mary's Church is less than 250 years old. Compared with hundredsof the grey-walled or ivy-covered churches in England, St. Mary's atMadras is prosaically new; but it is of exceeding interestnevertheless. Madras itself is a great and historic city, which owesits existence to British enterprise, with Indian co-operation, and St. Mary's Church, as the oldest British building therein, is the earliestmilestone of progress. It is not a church that is best visited, likeMelrose Abbey, 'in the pale moonlight, ' but in the bright daylight, when the inscriptions on the tomb-stones without and on the monumentswithin can be clearly read. 

CHAPTER IX

ROMAN CATHOLIC, MADRAS

When the English first came to Madras, there were numerous RomanCatholic churches in the neighbouring Portuguese settlement of SanThomé, but there were none within the tract of land that Mr. FrancisDay acquired in the Company's behalf. When, therefore, at theCompany's invitation, a number of Portuguese from San Thomé, bothpure-blooded and mixed, came and settled down in the Company's WhiteTown, they were necessarily compelled to resort to the ministrationsof Portuguese priests who belonged to the San Thomé Mission; andwithin a year of the foundation of Fort St. George, the Portuguesemissionaries built a church in the outskirts of the Britishsettlement. This was the Church of the Assumption, which stands inwhat is still called 'Portuguese Street' in Georgetown, and istherefore a building of historic note. To the Company'srepresentatives the ministrations of Portuguese priests to residentsof Madras were objectionable; for the relations between Madras and SanThomé were by no means friendly. It is true that when Mr. Francis Daywas treating for the acquisition of a site, the Portuguese at Mylaporehad furthered his efforts; but such a mark of apparent good will wasno more than the outcome of Portuguese hostility to the Dutch; forthey hoped that the English at Madras would be powerful allies withthemselves against the aggressive Hollanders. As soon, however, asMadras had begun to be built and English trade to be actively pushed, jealousies arose and disagreements occurred; and the Company'srepresentatives chafed at the idea that Portuguese priests should bethe spiritual advisers of residents of Madras. 

In 1642, when Madras was in its third year, a certain Father Ephraim, a French Capuchin, chanced to set foot in Madras. Father Ephraim hadbeen sent out from Paris as a missionary to Pegu; and he had travelledacross India from Surat to Masulipatam, where, according to hisinstructions, he was to have secured a passage to Pegu in one of theCompany's ships. His information was out of date; for the Agency hadlately been transferred from Masulipatam to Madras, and the Company'sships for Pegu were sailing now from Madras instead of fromMasulipatam; so Father Ephraim journeyed southward from Masulipatam tolook for a vessel at the new settlement. At Madras no vessel wasstarting immediately, and Father Ephraim had to bide his time. Meanwhile he made himself useful by ministering to the Roman Catholicsof the place. Official and other documents show that Father Ephraimwas a very devout and a very able man. He was 'an earnest Christian, ''a polished linguist, ' able to converse in English, Portuguese andDutch, besides his own French, and he was conversant with Persian andArabic. He had the charm of attractive friendliness, which is socommon with Frenchmen, and he captivated all with whom he conversed. The Portuguese and other Roman Catholic inhabitants of Madras, to whomthe Company's disapproval of the ministrations of Portuguese priestshad been a frequent source of trouble, formally petitioned FatherEphraim to settle down in the city; and the Governor in Council, greatly preferring a French priest to a Portuguese and thoroughlyapproving of Father Ephraim personally, supported the petition with aformal order that, if the priest would stay, a site would be providedon which he might build a church for his flock. Father Ephraim himselfwas not unwilling to stay, but he was under orders for Pegu, and, furthermore, Madras was within the diocese of San Thomé, and theBishop was not likely to approve of a scheme in which theministrations of his own priests would be set at naught in favour of astranger. The Company, however, was influential. A reference was madeto Father Ephraim's Capuchin superiors in Paris, and they approved ofhis remaining in Madras; another reference was made to Rome, askingthat the British territory of Madras should be ecclesiasticallyseparated from the Portuguese diocese of Mylapore, and the Pope issueda decree to that effect. 

A site for a church, as also for a priest's house, was provided inWhite Town, within the Fort St. George of to-day, and a small church, dedicated to St. Andrew, was built; and for a good many years it wasthe only church of any kind in the settlement. 

The Portuguese ecclesiastics of Mylapore were never reconciled to thisecclesiastical separation of Madras, and when Father Ephraim went byinvitation to Mylapore to discuss certain ecclesiastical business, hewas forthwith arrested, clapped in irons, and shipped off to Goa andlodged in the prison of the Inquisition. The Governor of Fort St. George took the matter in hand, but Father Ephraim was in prison morethan two years before he was eventually released and sent back toMadras. 

Later, Father Ephraim rebuilt St. Andrew's Church on a larger plan, and the building was opened with ceremony; and Master Patrick Warner, the Company's Protestant Chaplain at Fort St. George, complainedindignantly to the Directors in England that Governor Langhorn hadcelebrated the popish occasion with the 'firing of great guns' andwith 'volleys of small shot by all the soldiers in garrison. '

Father Ephraim had already built a church in old Black Town, whichseems to have stood somewhere within what is now the site of the HighCourt. Another French Capuchin had meanwhile come to Madras to helphim in his ministrations to his ever-increasing flock; so the churchin Black Town had its regular pastor. 

After more than fifty years of self-sacrificing work in Madras, FatherEphraim died of old age, sincerely esteemed by all who knew him. 

Some years after his death St. Andrew's was again rebuilt, and it wasnow a large edifice, with a high bell-tower, and a small churchyardaround. In the suburban district of Muthialpet there was also a'Portuguese Burying Place, ' which is now the 'compound' of the RomanCatholic Cathedral and its associated buildings in Armenian Street;and a small church stood within this enclosure. Adjoining thePortuguese Burying Place was the 'Armenian Burying Place, ' which isnow the enclosure of the Armenian church; and it was the ArmenianBurying Place that gave the name to the street. 

When Madras was captured by the French, there were people who saidthat the French priests in Madras had given information to theircountrymen; and three years later, when Madras was restored to theCompany, the Governor in Council confiscated St. Andrew's church. Areference to the Directors in England as to what they were to do withthe confiscated building brought back the very decisive reply thatthey were "immediately on the receipt of this, without fail todemolish the Portuguese Church in the White Town at Madras, and notsuffer it to stand. " The church was demolished accordingly, as also aRoman Catholic chapel in Vepery. The church in old Black Town hadalready been demolished by the French when they destroyed the greaterpart of old Black Town itself; and, in accordance with another edictof the Directors in England, by which the Company's representatives inMadras were "absolutely forbid suffering any Romish Church within thebounds, or even to suffer the public profession of the Romishreligion, " Roman Catholicism was altogether scouted in Madras. 

Twenty-five years later, the English troops, after defeating theFrench in various engagements, captured Pondicherry and demolished itsfortifications; and the peace of Paris left the French in Indiapowerless. With the danger of French aggression removed for good, theCompany were less intolerant of the religion which Frenchmenprofessed; and a few years later they paid the Capuchin priests someRs. 50, 000 as compensation for the destruction of the church in WhiteTown and of the chapel in Vepery. 

With funds thus in their hands, the Capuchin fathers set aboutbuilding a new church in the 'Burying Place. ' This new church, whichthey built in 1775, was the edifice which is now the Roman CatholicCathedral in Armenian Street. On the gate-posts appears the date 1642, but this was the year in which the Company made a grant of the landfor a Roman Catholic Cemetery and in which Father Ephraim arrived andthe Madras Mission began, and is not the date of the building of thepresent church or of its predecessor. The Capuchin missionariescontinued in charge of Roman Catholic affairs in Madras until 1832, inwhich year they were put under episcopal jurisdiction. 

Reference has been made in this chapter and elsewhere to the churchesthat were already in existence in Mylapore when the English firstsettled in Madras. According to local tradition, the Apostle St. Thomas made his way to the East, and, after preaching in various partsof India, settled down in the ancient Hindu town of Mylapore, where hemade numerous converts. The Hindu priests, indignant at the loss of somany of their clients, sought the missionary's life. The Apostle, according to the tradition, lived in a small cave on a small hill--the'Little Mount'--fed by birds and drinking the water of a spring thatbubbled up miraculously within the cave. Driven from the cave, hefled to another hill, a mile or so away--'St. Thomas's Mount'--wherehe was killed with a lance. The dead body was buried at Mylapore. Suchis the story; and in the present-day church on the Little Mount thevisitor is shown a cave which is said to have been the Apostle'shiding-place; and within the nave of the cathedral at Mylapore he isshown a hole in the ground--now lined with marble--in which theMartyr's remains are said to have been buried. 

When the Portuguese came to Mylapore in the early part of thesixteenth century, they built a church upon the ruins of an ancientchurch that had enclosed the tomb; and the new church becameeventually the Cathedral of San Thomé. The sixteenth century buildingwas pulled down in 1893, and the present Cathedral--a handsome Gothicstructure--was built. Mylapore is now a suburb of Madras, and iswithin British dominion; but the bishopric, which was originallysupported by the King of Portugal, who had the right of nominating thebishop, is still supported by the Portuguese Government. 

Mylapore has a history of its own that is outside the scope of the'Story of Madras;' but a few words about the glories of a city that isnow a suburb of Madras will not be out of place. 

Mylapore and Madras, standing side by side, are a conjunction of theold and the young. Mylapore, or Meliapore, the 'Peacock City' of theancient Hindu world, has existed for twenty centuries, and perhaps agreat many more; Madras has existed less than three. It was atMylapore that, according to tradition, the body of the martyredApostle St. Thomas was buried; Mylapore was the birth-place ofTiruvalluvar, an old and illustrious Tamil author who belonged to thedown-trodden class, and of Peyalvar, an eminent Vaishnavite saint andwriter; it was here that a company of Saivaite saints, Appar and hisfellows, assembled together and wrote their well-known hymns; and itwas here also that Mastan, a renowned Mohammedan scholar, lived andwrote and died. 

Of the ancient glories of Mylapore no vestige remains; but several ofthe churches of the Mylapore diocese belong to the sixteenth century, including the celebrated 'Luz' Church, the Church of the Madre-de-Deusat San Thomé and the little Church of Our Lady of Refuge betweenMylapore and Saidapet, besides the churches at the Little Mount andSt. Thomas's Mount, of which the latter is a sixteenth-centurydevelopment of an old chapel that existed there before the coming ofthe Portuguese. 

It is of interest to note that there are those who say that a Mylaporechurch gave its name to the city of Madras. They say--not, I believe, without evidence--that the rural village of Madraspatam, where Mr. Francis Day selected a site for the Company's settlement, had beencolonized by fisherfolk from the parish of the Madre-de-DeusChurch--the Church of the Mother of God--and that the emigrantfisherfolk called their village by the name of their parish, and thatthe name was eventually corrupted into 'Madras. ' The origin of thename 'Madras' is uncertain; and the explanation is at any rateinteresting and not unlikely to be true. 

CHAPTER X

CHEPAUK PALACE

Among the interesting buildings in Madras must be included ChepaukPalace, which was built about a century and a half ago as a residencefor the Nawab of the Carnatic, and which is now the office of theBoard of Revenue. The high wall that enclosed the spacious Saracenicstructure in its palace days has been pulled down, and the public cannow gaze at a building that was once carefully screened from thepublic eye, and can enter at will without having to satisfy thescrutiny of armed men at the gate. A change indeed--from the sleepyresidence of a Muhammadan ruler, with his harem and his idle crowd ofretainers, to bustling offices where a multitude of officials andclerks are working out the cash accounts of the Government of Madras!

The 'Carnatic' was a dominion that extended over the territory that isnow included in the Collectorates of Nellore, North Arcot, SouthArcot, Trichinopoly, and Tinnevelly. The town of Arcot was the capitalof the dominion, and the Nawab of the Carnatic was sometimes spoken ofas the Nawab of Arcot. Chepauk Palace belongs to the history of theCarnatic, and a few historical notes will make things clear. 

In our first chapter we intimated that Madras, when Mr. Francis Dayacquired it, was within the domain of the disappearing Hindu Empire ofVijianagar, of which the living representative at the time was theRaja of Chandragiri, from whom Mr. Francis Day accordingly obtained adeed of possession. Seven years afterwards, the Raja of Chandragiriwas a refugee in Mysore, driven from his throne by the MuhammadanSultan of Golconda, who assumed the sovereignty of Hyderabad and theCarnatic. The Sultan of Golconda thus became the recognized overlordof Madras; and the Company were careful to secure from their newsovereign a confirmation of their possession. But the power of theSultan was destined to fall in its turn; for Aurangzeb, the MoghulEmperor at Delhi, being desirous of uniting all India under Moghulrule, waged war against the Sultan of Golconda--who, as a ShiahMohammedan, was a heretic in Aurangzeb's eyes--and defeated him. Aurangzeb put Hyderabad under a Nizam whom he named 'Viceroy of theDeccan' and the Carnatic under a Nawab who was to be subordinate tothe Viceroy. But the Emperor who succeeded Aurangzeb had none of theirpredecessors' greatness; and soon after Aurangzeb's death the Nizam ofHyderabad assumed independence, with the Nawab of the Carnatic as hisvassal. 

In 1749 there was a quarrel for the Nawabship. The French atPondicherry supported one claimant, and the English at Madrassupported the other. This was the gallant Clive's opportunity. Exchanging the clerk's pen for the officer's sword, the youthful'writer' marched with a small force to Arcot and captured it on behalfof the Company's nominee, and then sustained most heroically a lengthysiege. Clive triumphed; and Mohammed Ali, otherwise known as NawabWalajah, became undisputed Nawab of the Carnatic. Later, with Britishsupport, the Nawab renounced his allegiance to Hyderabad, and reignedas an independent prince. 

In his capital at Arcot, Nawab Walajah, who had many factionaryenemies, would assuredly have found himself in a dangerous centre ofintrigue; but he was wise in his generation; for as soon as he hadgained his independence he sought and obtained from the Governor ofMadras permission to build a palace for himself within the protectivewalls of Fort St. George. Arrangements for the work were made; and oneof the streets of the Fort--the street which still bears the name of'Palace Street'--received its name because it was the street in whichthe Nawab's residence was to be built. Eventually, however, the schemewas set aside; and in the following year the Nawab acquired privateproperty in Chepauk, and engaged an English architect to build him ahouse. Chepauk Palace thus came into existence. The grounds of thePalace, which the Nawab surrounded with a wall, formed an immenseenclosure, which included a large part of the grounds of GovernmentHouse of to-day and a great deal of adjoining land. 

Chepauk Palace was the scene of some grand doings in its time; andsoon after it was built the Nawab entertained the Governor of Madrasand his Councillors, one of whom was Mr. Warren Hastings, at 'anelegant breakfast;' and, when the feast was over, he divided some Rs. 30, 000 among his guests. The Governor got Rs. 7, 000, and, on a slidingscale, the Secretaries, who were last on the list, got Rs. 1, 000 each. 

The relations, however, between Nawab Walajah and a later Governor ofMadras were not so cordial. In 1780 Haidar Ali with an immense armysuddenly invaded the Carnatic, and annihilated a British force thatwas sent to oppose him; and Tipu, his son and successor, continued thecampaign. The Company's treasury at Madras was straitened with theexpenses of the war, and the Nawab, whose capital was in the hands ofthe enemy, was unable to contribute thereto; but when Tipu waseventually defeated, the Nawab was induced to assign the control ofthe revenues of the Carnatic to the Company. A few months later theNawab felt that he had made an unwise bargain, and he declared hisrenunciation of the agreement; but Baron Macartney, the newlyappointed Governor of Madras, kept him strictly to his word. The Nawabwrote various official letters, complaining in one that Lord Macartneyhad 'premeditatedly' offered him 'Insults and Indignity, ' and inanother that he had shown him 'every mark of Insult and Contempt. ' TheDirectors in London, expressly declaring their desire to content theinfluential Nawab, decided in his favour; whereupon Lord Macartney, who in the opinion of his friends had been set at naught for the sakeof the wealthy potentate, indignantly resigned the Governorship ofMadras, and went home. Friendly relations between the Nawab and theMadras Government were thereupon resumed, and when Nawab Walajah died, at the age of seventy-eight, he was eulogised in an official note inthe _Fort St. George Gazette_. 

The career of his son and successor, Umdat-ul-Umara, was lessauspicious. Although his accession was the occasion of friendlyletters between himself and the Government of Madras, the Nawab'srejection of the Governor's suggestion that the financial arrangementsbetween himself and the Company should be made more favourable to theCompany irritated the Governor, and the Governor's efforts to inducethe Nawab to change his mind irritated the Nawab. Meanwhile TipuSultan was preparing for another war with the Company, and when, aftera brief campaign, Tipu was killed while fighting bravely in defence ofhis capital, it was declared that an examination of Tipu'scorrespondence showed that the Nawab of Arcot had been guilty oftreasonable communications with Mysore. It was accordingly resolvedthat the Company should assume control of the Carnatic; but, as theNawab was seriously ill, nothing was done until his death, whenBritish troops were sent to occupy Chepauk Palace. 

The Nawab's son refused to recognize the Company's right to controlhis father's dominions, whereupon the Company set him aside, and puthis cousin on the throne in his stead. The Company were now the actualrulers of the Carnatic, and the future Nawabs were styled 'TitularNawabs. ' In 1855 the third of the Titular Nawabs died without any sonto succeed him. Lord Dalhousie was Governor-General of India at thetime, and it was Lord Dalhousie's declared policy that if the ruler ofany native state died without issue, his dominions should formallylapse to the Company. On this principle the Carnatic now became aformal part of the British dominions, and the dynasty of the Nawabscame to an end; Chepauk Palace, which was the personal property of theNawabs, was acquired by the Company's Government for a price, and waseventually turned into Government offices. 

The many thousands of Mohammedans, however, who dwelt in the crowdedstreets and lanes of Chepauk, and who had looked upon the Nawab astheir religious chief, would have been afflicted at the cessation ofthe Carnatic line; and after the Indian Mutiny the Government ofIndia, respecting Mohammedan sentiment, recognized the succession ofthe nearest relative of the late Nawab and obtained for him from theKing of England the hereditary title of Amir-i-Arcot, or 'Prince ofArcot'--an honorary title but higher than that of Nawab. A sum of Rs. 1, 50, 000 per annum--(not an excessive sum in relation to the revenuesof the Carnatic, which are now collected by the Madras Government)--isexpended annually in pensions to the Prince and to certain of hisrelatives; and he lives in a house called the 'Amir Mahal' (the Amir'sPalace), which was given to him by the Government. The Amir Mahalstands in spacious grounds in Royapettah. At the principal entrance, the gate-house is a tall and imposing edifice in red brick. At thegateway, sentries, armed with old-fashioned rifles, stand--orsometimes sit--on guard; and the Prince's Band is often to be heardpractising oriental music in the room up above. 

Regarded in relation to its history, Chepauk is something more than'one of the Government buildings on the Marina. ' Let us remember that, when it was enclosed within the walls that are now no more, it was thehome of Mohammedan potentates--sometimes a scene of gorgeousfestivity--sometimes a scene of desperate intrigue. In imagination wemay people the front garden with the gaily-uniformed Body-Guard of theCarnatic sovereign, mounted on gaily-bridled steeds; and we may seethe Nawab himself coming magnificently down the front steps andclimbing into the silver howdah that is strapped on the back of akneeling elephant. A blast of oriental music, and the procession goeson its way; and we may wonder at which of the tiled windows on theupper floor the bright eyes of the Lalla Rookhs and the Nurmahals ofChepauk are slily peeping at the spectacle. The vision vanishes. Theprocession now is a procession of clerks to their homes when theirday's work is over; and the music is a ragtime selection by the Bandof the Madras Guards on the Marina, close by, with ayahs and childrenaround. We are in the twentieth century; but for a moment we havelived in the past. 

CHAPTER XI

GOVERNMENT HOUSE

In the early days of Madras all the employees of the Company, from theGovernor down to the most junior apprentice, lived in common. Theirbedrooms were in one and the same house, and they had their meals atone and the same table. The house stood in the middle of the Fort, andwas the 'Factory'--a word which, as already explained, was used informer times to mean a mercantile office, or, as Annandale in hisdictionary defines it, 'an establishment where factors in foreigncountries reside to transact business for their employers;' and theFactory in Fort St. George was both an office and a home. 

The community life, with the common table, was maintained for manyyears, but in course of time, when the number of the employees hadgreatly increased and some of the senior officials had wives andchildren, one man and another were allowed to live in separatequarters, within the precincts of the Fort; and eventually the commontable, like King Arthur's, was dissolved. Even then, however, andright on until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the junioremployees had a common mess, and were under something like disciplinedcontrol. 

Like all the other buildings inside the Fort and within the walls ofWhite Town, the Factory--which was sometimes spoken of as 'TheGovernor's House'--was without a garden; and it was only to beexpected that the resident employees, most of whom were young men, should wish for a recreation ground to which they could resort intheir leisure hours. Some of the wealthy private residents of WhiteTown had shown what could be done; for they had acquired patches ofland outside the walls, which they had enclosed with hedges andcultivated as gardens, with a house in the middle of each garden, inwhich, as either a permanent or an occasional residence, the owner andhis family might hope to find relief from the stuffiness of thestreets of the rapidly developing city. In the 'Records' any suchvilla is spoken of as a 'garden-house' and even now in Madras the term'garden-house' is occasionally used in Indo-English as signifying ahouse that stands within its own 'compound, ' as distinct from housesthat open directly into the street. 

The Company's agents in Madras realized the desirability of laying outa garden for the recreative benefit of the Company's employees. Outside the walls, therefore, of White Town they hedged off some eightacres of land in the locality in which the Law College now stands, andthey cultivated it as a 'Company's Garden;' and within it they built asmall pavilion. We may imagine that in the cool of the evening it wascommon for a goodly number of the Company's mercantile employees toleave their apartments in the Fort and stroll beyond the walls theshort distance to the 'Garden, ' which in those early days wasrefreshingly near the seashore. In our mind's eye we can blot the LawCollege out of the landscape and can see a party of youthful merchantsengaged as energetically as was suitable to the heat of Madras in thethen fashionable game of bowls--or, less energetically but much moreexcitedly, gathered in a ring round two cocks that are tearing eachother to pieces--a particularly popular form of 'Sport' in old Madras;and, although the Directors in London appropriately forbade to theiremployees the use of cards or the dice-box, we can espy atense-visaged quartet within the shadow of the pavilion with a 'pool'of 'fanams' (coins worth about 2-½_d_. ) on the table, or possibly, rupees or pagodas, absorbed in a round of ombre or one of the othercard games that were in fashion. The sun has set, and the shadows arelengthening. A bugle sounds from the Fort; and the employees strollback to supper, which, according to an old account, invariablyconsisted of 'milk, salt fish, and rice, ' but which will be privatelysupplemented afterwards with potations of arrack-punch by those whocan afford nothing better and with draughts of sack or canary by thosewho can. 

In the course of a few years the 'Company's Garden' was spoiled. BlackTown had been springing up close by; and, when a wall was built roundold Black Town, the Company's Garden was unpleasantly includedtherein, and the Garden was now in the north-west corner of the Indiancity. Moreover, a part of the Garden had begun to be utilized as aEuropean burial-ground, and huge funeral monstrosities of the bygonestyle had begun to dominate the enclosure. 

The Company's agents in Madras felt that a new recreation ground was anecessity; and they were agreed that there ought to be not merely a'Company's Garden, ' but a 'Company's Garden-House. ' They wrote to theDirectors saying that there were occasions on which the Company inMadras had to entertain 'the King (Golconda) and persons of quality, 'and that they had no building that was suitable for any suchceremonial proceedings. True there was the Council Chamber in theFort, but the Council Chamber was the place where the Company'smercantile transactions were discussed; and the Chamber, as well asall the other buildings in the Fort, was closely identified with the'Factory;' and the Company's chief officials in Madras declared--not, we may suppose, without regard for their own convenience--that astately 'Garden House, ' unassociated with ledgers and bills of sale, ought to be built, in due accord with the stateliness of the Companyitself. Their application for permission to put the work in hand wasmet by the Directors in London with the typically frugal reply thatthe work might be done but care was to be taken that the Companyshould be put to 'no great charge. ' Possibly the representatives inMadras were able to provide additional supplies on the spot, but, however that may have been, the house was 'handsomely built, ' yet'with little expense to the Company. ' The new garden seems to havecomprised the area within which the Medical College and the GeneralHospital are now situated. The grounds, which stretched down, even asnow, to the bank of the river, were well laid out, and the Company'sfirst 'Garden House' was a fine possession. 

In 1686 Master William Gyfford, Governor of Fort St. George, had afancy for using the Garden House as a private residence for himself. It is not to be wondered at that he did so; for Master Gyfford, aftertwenty-seven years' residence in Madras and more than twenty-sevenyears in the East, was in poor health, and lately he had been takenill with a 'a violent fitt of the Stone and Wind Collick. ' Thegardenless 'Factory' in the Fort was a gloomy apology for a'Governor's House, ' and the crowd of employees that were accommodatedthere must have been a serious infliction upon the invalid Governor;and he found the Garden House an agreeable retreat. In his newquarters he got better of his illness; and he dwelt there aconsiderable time, till in the following year he left Madras forEngland for good. The story is interesting, for it records the firstoccasion on which a Governor of Madras lived in a separate houseoutside the Fort. 

On various occasions the Company's 'Garden House, ' with its extensivegrounds, was used for public purposes, justifying the plea for itsconstruction. For example, when the Company received the news of theaccession of King James II, the event was celebrated with brilliantproceedings at the Garden House. Similarly, at the accession of QueenAnne 'all Europeans of fashion in the City' were invited to the GardenHouse, where they 'drank the Queen's Health, and Prosperity to oldEngland. ' In an earlier chapter we have related how a young Nawab ofArcot who had just succeeded to his murdered father's throne wasentertained at the Garden House with great doings. Governor Pitt madegreat developments in the Gardens, and was another Governor who likedthe Garden House as a residence. An Englishman who was living inMadras in 1704, when Pitt was Governor, has left an interestingaccount of the Garden House as he saw it:--

 'The Governor, during the hot Winds, retires to the Company's new Garden for refreshment, which he has made a very delightful Place of a barren one. Its costly Gates, lovely Bowling-Green, spacious Walks, Teal-pond, and Curiosities preserved in several Divisions are worthy to be Admired. Lemons and Grapes grow there, but five Shillings worth of Water and attendance will scarcely mature one of them. '

Before long it had come to be an unwritten regulation that Governorsat Fort St. George might reside at their choice either in the Fort orat the Garden House. There came a time, however, when the Governor hadof necessity to betake himself to the Fort; it was the time when theFrench were besieging Madras. During the siege the enemy used theGarden House as a vantage-ground for their big guns; and afterwards, when they had captured Fort St. George and were in occupation of thecity, they pulled the Garden House down, lest the English, tryingperhaps to recapture the Fort, should be able to use it as avantage-ground in their turn. 

Thus, when Madras was restored to the English, the Garden House haddisappeared, and the only house for Governor Saunders was the originalresidence in the middle of the Fort. Governor Saunders, however, wasnot content with the walled-in accommodation that the Fort providedand was unwilling to forgo the residential privileges that hispredecessors had enjoyed; so a private 'garden-house' in Chepauk wasrented in his behalf. It belonged to a Mrs. Madeiros, a richPortuguese widow, whose husband, lately deceased, had been a leadingmerchant in White Town. 

Mrs. Madeiros's house was 'Government House, Madras, ' of the presentday. The house, however, has been enlarged and the grounds have beenextended since Governor Saunders lived there as a tenant. 

[Illustration: GOVERNMENT HOUSE, MADRAS]

Governor Saunders liked his residence, and, before he had been there ayear, the Company acquired it from the widow, who had no use for itnow that her husband was dead; and the Governor was careful to leaveon record the reason of the acquisition:--

 'It having been always usual for the Company to allow the President a house in the Country to retire to, and Mrs. Medeiros being willing to dispose of her House, situated in the Road to St. Thomé, for three thousand five hundred pagodas (say Rs 12, 250), Agreed That it be purchased accordingly, The Company's Garden-house having been demolish'd by the French when they were in Possession of this Place, and Mrs. Medeiros's being convenient for that Purpose, and on a Survey esteem'd worth much more than the Sum 'tis offer'd at. '

The Company always enjoyed a good bargain, and Governor Saunders wasjustified in thinking that he had made a very good one in respect ofthe house; for, a few years later, the house, with certain extensionsand improvements, was written down in the Company's books at avaluation of nearly four times the price that was paid for it. 

We have brought our story down to the acquisition of Government House, but it remains to relate some of the historic events in whichGovernment House has figured since it was acquired. 

During the second siege of Madras by the French, under Lally, thebesiegers occupied the Garden House, and during their occupation theydid a great deal of wanton damage before they ceased their vainendeavours. Two years later, however, the English had the enjoyment ofa delicate revenge. They captured Pondicherry and brought Lally toMadras, where they imprisoned him in the Garden House till a vesselwas available to take him to England. The damage that he had done hadnot yet been repaired; and a contemporary Record says that 'Mr. Lallywas lodged in those apartments of the Garden House which had escapedhis fury at the Siege of Madras, ' and that in respect of his table hewas allowed to give his own orders 'without limitation of expence, 'with the result that he 'seemed to have intended Revenge byProfusion. '

A few years later Tipu, Sultan of Mysore, at the head of a body ofhorsemen, made a sudden raid on Madras; and the troopers scamperedabout the well-laid-out grounds of the Garden House, looting thevillages on either side. According to accounts, Governor Bourchier andhis Councillors were there when the raiders came, and they wouldassuredly have been caught had they not managed to make their escapein a boat that was conveniently tied up on the bank of the Cooumriver. 

More than one Governor of Fort St. George has died at GovernmentHouse, and it was there that Governor Pigot died in extraordinarycircumstances. The tale has been told in a previous chapter, that LordPigot was arrested by his Councillors, with whom he had quarrelled, and that he died in confinement in the Garden House. 

The reader has yet to be told how the Garden House was finallytransformed into the Government House that we see to-day. 

In 1798 Lord Clive, son of the great Robert Clive, was sent out toIndia as Governor of Madras. Within the first six months of hisarrival there was the excitement of a war with Mysore, in which theterrible Tipu Sultan was killed during the assault on his capital. During the tranquil remainder of his five years in India, Lord Cliveturned his attention to domestic reforms, and amongst them he resolvedthat the Garden House should be improved. In an official minute hewrote:--

 'The garden house, at present occupied by Myself, is so insufficient either for the private accommodation of my family and Staff, or for the convenience of the public occasions inseparable from my situation, that it is my intention to make such an addition to it as may be calculated to answer both purposes. '

Lord Clive thereupon, in 1801, developed Government House at a cost ofmore than Rs. 3 lakhs; and two years later he built the beautifulBanqueting Hall, at a cost of Rs. 2½ lakhs. The recent fall ofTipu's capital of Seringapatam was an event that the Banqueting Hallcould appropriately commemorate; and Lord Clive, with pious respectfor his dead father's memory, coupled Plassey with Seringapatam, andordered that the fine figure-work on the façade of the hall should bea commemoration of both victories. In England the Directors of theCompany complained of what they called 'such wasteful extravagance;'but the developments were a real want, and it is a matter ofpresent-day satisfaction that the Madras Government have no need to beacquiring a site now and to be building a new Government House inthese expensive days. Lord Clive was certainly no miser with theCompany's money, for he built also a second Government House--a'country residence' at Guindy. The 'country residence' was developedand improved some forty years later by Lord Elphinstone, who wasGovernor of Madras in the middle of last century. It is a trulybeautiful house, standing in beautiful grounds; and it has lately beena proposition that the house at Guindy should be the Governor's onlyresidence, and that Government House, Madras, should be used forGovernment offices. 

'Government House, Madras!' To most people it is suggestive of dinnerparties within and garden parties without; and the Banqueting Hall issuggestive of dances and levees and meetings for good causes. But topeople who can look at Government House, Madras, with an historicglance it rouses other memories. Within its original walls more thantwo centuries ago a belaced Senhor kept Portuguese state. It was herethat Frenchmen were encamped while their guns were fruitlesslyhammering at the walls of Fort St. George. It was here that Lallylived sumptuously in prison, till he was sent to Europe--eventually tobe executed in Paris for having failed to capture Madras. It waswithin these grounds that Tipu's horsemen were scampering about on aSeptember morning, looking for houses where money or jewels could becommandeered. It was here that an ennobled Governor of Madras lived ingilded captivity till death set him free. 

CHAPTER XII

MADRAS AND THE SEA

Madras is now a seaport of considerable repute; but it is interestingto recall the fact that less than forty years ago the city was withouta harbour, and that ships which came there had to anchor out at sea. In the days of the Company, passengers and cargo had to be landed onthe beach in boats; and, as the waves that chase one another to theshores of Madras are nearly always giant billows crested with foamingsurf, the passage between ship and shore was not without itsdiscomforts and also its risks. 

Warren Hastings, when he was senior member of the Madras Council andwas in charge of Public Works, wrote it down that he thought it'possible to carry out a causeway or pier into the sea beyond theSurf, to which boats might come and land their goods or passengers, without being exposed to the Surf. ' At various times differentengineers devised plans for such a pier as Warren Hastings proposed, but nothing was actually done, and it was not until the sixties oflast century that a pier was actually made. It was not a stonecauseway such as Hastings seems to have had in his mind, but was alighter and likelier structure of wood and iron; and it did excellentwork, making it easy for passengers and cargo to be landed in fairweather. Madras was still, however, without a harbour; but before manyyears a harbour was taken in hand, and in the summer of 1881 its twoarms, enclosing the small pier, were practically finished. There wasmuch rejoicing; but the congratulations were short-lived, for on acertain night during the winter of the same year there was a cycloneoff Madras, and the next morning the citizens saw that their harbourhad been wrecked by the devastating waves. It was fifteen years beforethe harbour had been restored, upon an improved plan; and even then itwas a poor apology for a haven; for when a storm was expected, shipswere warned to put out to sea, as the cyclone had shown that a stormysea was less dangerous than the storm-beaten harbour. Within recentyears, however, the harbour has been so much altered and strengthenedand developed that it is regarded as a splendid piece of engineering, and shipping business in Madras has benefited greatly. Large vesselscan now lie up against wharves, to discharge or to load their cargo, and passengers can embark and disembark in comfort, and the increasein trade has been great. Much watchfulness, however, is still verynecessary; for, on an exciting night a few years ago, part of theextended harbour-wall was washed away by a storm. 

Yes, Madras is an important seaport; yet it is a fact that, except tomen whose business is with the sea, Madras is much less like a seasidetown than it was in its earlier years, and many of the people who livethere seldom see the briny ocean--even though they may sometimes bereminded of its nearness when in the stillness of the night they hear

 'The league-long breakers thundering on the shore. '

For one thing, the greater part of Madras is not so near the sea as itwas in former times; for the southern wall of the harbour has acted asa breakwater, causing the sea to recede a very long way from theoriginal shore; and houses in the thoroughfare that is still called'Beach Road' are now a very long way from the beach, and it is onlyfrom upper stories that the sea in the distance is visible. Southward, moreover, the magnificent road that is still called the 'Marina' isfast losing its right to the name; for it is only across a broadstretch of ever-extending dry sand that the dark blue ribbon oftropical sea is beheld therefrom. 

In earlier days Madras was verily a city of the sea. Both White Townand Black Town lay directly along the sea-beach, and the coming andgoing of the Company's ships were momentous events. Surf-boats used toland on the beach outside the 'Sea-Gate' of the wave-splashed Fort, laden with cargo from the Company's ships lying out in the roads; andthe bales were carried through the gateway into the Company'swarehouses within the Fort-walls. The Sea-Gate is still to be seen, and it still looks towards the sea; but the sea is far away, and theSea-Gate is now one of the least used of the entrances to the Fort. 

[Illustration: THE SEA GATE. 

The sea has now receded afar. ]

In former times the Company had a considerable fleet of first-classsailing-ships, and, owing to the frequency of wars with either theFrench or the Dutch, the Company obtained royal permission to equiptheir ships as men-of-war armed with serviceable guns, which could beturned against an enemy if occasion required. The voyage from Englandto India was by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and it lasted at leastthree or four months, and often very much more. For example, whenRobert Clive came out to India for the first time, the vessel was sobuffeted by contrary winds that the commander thought it best to runacross the Atlantic and let her lie up so long in a South Americanport that Clive learned to speak Spanish with considerable fluency;and it was not till nearly a year after leaving England that the youngwriter arrived at Madras. 

Furthermore, besides the various adventures that were natural to asea-voyage, there was the contingency of a sea-fight, and thepossibility of being taken to Pondicherry or Batavia as a prisoner ofwar instead of being landed at Madras as a paid employee of the'Honourable Company. '

[Illustration: THE COMPANY'S FLAG. ]

It was usual for several ships to sail together, for mutualprotection; and passengers had reason to congratulate themselves whenthey were eventually landed safe and sound at Madras. It can bereadily imagined that the sight of a vessel of the Company approachingin the distance caused a stir of excitement amongst the residents ofFort St. George. There were no telegraphs from other ports to giveprevious notice of a vessel's prospective arrival; and the fact that aship was at hand was unknown until her flag[3] or her particular rigwas discerned in the distance, or until one of her guns gave notice ofher approach. The comparative regularity, however, of the winds inEastern seas caused 'seasons' in which vessels might be expected; andwhen a season arrived, the look-out who happened to be on duty onthe Fort flagstaff must have been particularly alert. Ay, and theremust have been much hurrying to and fro in the streets of White Townwhen the signal had been given and the news had spread that the sailsof a Company's ship had been sighted, and while the vessel, perhapswith several consorts, came nearer and nearer, till at last theanchors were dropped and salutes were exchanged between ship andshore. 

[Footnote 3: 'The flag displayed by the Company's ships bore sevenhorizontal red stripes on a white ground, with a St. George's Cross inthe inner top corner. '--_Love_. ]

There was good cause for excitement. The ship brought letters fromhome--perhaps after several months of no news at all. There were theprivate letters that told the news about near ones and dear ones;there were the official letters that decreed appointments in theCompany's service and promotions and penalties, and dealt with theCompany's business; and there were the 'news-letters'--theold-fashioned predecessors of the modern newspaper, which were writtenby paid correspondents, whose duty it was to give their clients newsof London and of England and of Europe. The news was often astounding, and was sometimes extraordinarily behind-time. For example, theCompany's employees in India were still professing loyalty to the MostHigh and Mighty King James II nearly a twelvemonth after that monarchhad fled to France and had been succeeded by William and Mary; and theemployees at Madras were surprised indeed when a ship arrived one dayfrom England with the belated news. 

The salutes have been fired, and the vessel has been surrounded by aflotilla of surf-boats and catamarans. The commander and thepassengers are being rowed ashore, and the Governor with hisCouncillors, dressed all of them in their smartest official attire, are waiting on the beach outside the Sea-Gate of the Fort to bid thema hearty welcome. Amongst the passengers there are probably someyouths who have been posted to Madras either as apprenticed 'writers'or as military Cadets; and perhaps there is a senior employee who isreturning to India after the rare event of a holiday in England. Possibly too there are some ladies, either wives of employees who havebeen willing to accompany or to follow their husbands to themysterious East--or, as was not infrequently the case, young ladieswho, with the consent of the Directors, have been shipped out to Indiaby their parents or guardians or on their own account, in the hopethat companionable bachelor employees, pining in their loneliness, will jump at the chance of matrimony. 

[Illustration: SURF-BOAT]

The surf-boat comes nearer and nearer; and when it gets among thebreakers there are feminine screams of terror. The alarm is notwithout cause; for at one moment the boat is being balanced on the topof a heaving wave, and the next it is almost lost to sight in afoaming hollow. The excitement in the tossing boat is tremendous; butit is brief; for there are only three or four breakers to benegotiated, and in less than a minute a curling wave has caught theboat in its clutch and hurls it with a thud into the shallows. Nakedcoolies rush forward and lay hold of its sides, lest the backwashshould carry it seaward again; and, with the help of the next wave, they manage to haul the boat a little further on shore, and thepassengers are able to disembark--splashed, perhaps, but safe andsound. 

When the greetings are over, the Governor leads the way into the Fort, where a general meal is served and the news is told and theexclamations of surprise are many. In the evening there is a banquet, and after the banquet, 'when the gentlemen have finished their wine, 'and have rejoined the ladies, the stately dances of the period are'performed;' and it is not unlikely that before the assembly breaksup, some, if not all, of the newly-arrived young ladies have receivedand have accepted offers of matrimony; and it is possible that two ormore gallants have had a serious quarrel about this young lady orthat, and even possible that, out of the Governor's sight, swords havebeen drawn in her regard. 

On the morrow the unloading begins; and for many days a fleet ofsurf-boats is busily engaged in bringing ashore the broadcloths andother English wares which the Company will be able to sell at a largeprofit--not forgetting the barrels of canary and madeira and otherluxuries that have been imported both for private consumption and alsofor the general table in the Fort. And when the unloading is over andthe ship has been overhauled after her long voyage, the surf-boatswill then be engaged in carrying to the ship the calicoes and otherIndian wares that are to be exported to England for the Company'sprofit there. 

The sea-trade of Madras is very much greater now than it was in thedays of old. Not a day now passes but at least one steamship glidesinto the Madras Harbour, and it is always a much larger vessel thanwas the very largest of the sailing-ships that in those bygone timestacked laboriously to an anchorage in the Madras roads. But theexcitement has disappeared. The steamers come and go with as littlestir--or not so much--as when a tramcar leaves a crowdedstreet-corner. 

In Madras there are still some reminders of the times when nauticalaffairs were in more general evidence in Madras than they are now. Forexample, the 'Naval Hospital Road' is still the name of a thoroughfarewhich leads from the Poonamallee Road, opposite the School of Arts, toVepery, and it is a reminder of the fact that there were once upon atime sufficient naval men in Madras to make a hospital for sick seamena necessity. The buildings of the old Naval Hospital still exist; theyare the buildings in the Poonamallee Road opposite the School of Arts. In the early part of last century the Naval Hospital itself wasabolished, and the buildings were converted into a 'Gun CarriageFactory'--and this is now no more. It is a good many years indeedsince the Gun Carriage Factory was closed down; and in Madras at thisparticular time, when there is a very pressing demand for houseaccommodation, many people wonder that such spacious premises in sobusy a quarter of the city should have been lying idle for so long andare hoping to see them once more serving some useful purpose. 

Another reminder of the nautical conditions of those days is to befound in the existence of an 'Admiralty House. ' 'Admiralty House' is afine residence in San Thomé, and is now the property of the Raja ofVizianagram. It was apparently the San Thomé residence of the Admiralof the East Indian fleet. That official had another residence withinthe Fort, which used also to be called 'Admiralty House'--the housewhich Robert Clive occupied at the time of his marriage, and which isnow the Accountant-General's office. 

We will glance at one more reminder of the nautical Madras of bygonetimes. At Royapuram there is a large house which is now styled 'BidenHouse, ' and is used as a harbour-masters' residence, but which until afew years ago was called 'The Biden Home' or 'The Sailors' Home. ' Itis not an ancient building, but it was nevertheless built in the daysof the sailing-ship, and is a reminder of the times when sailing-shipsused to lie out in the Madras Roads and the 'Sailors' Home' offeredseamen entertainment more physically and morally wholesome than thatwhich was provided in the low-class hotels and saloons which laidthemselves out for the spoliation of Jack ashore--and of the time whenthe wreck of a sailing-ship on the Coromandel coast was not anuncommon occurrence and parties of distressed seamen were notinfrequently to be seen in Madras, for whom a temporary 'Home' had tobe provided. The 'Old Salt'--the picturesque sea-dog of sailing-shipdays--has disappeared except from story-books--the old-fashionedseaman with earrings in his ears and a villainous 'quid' in his mouth, dressed in a blue jersey and the baggiest of blue trowsers, andlurching as he walked, always 'full of strange oaths', and larding hisspeech with nautical jargon. On shore, after a long sea-voyage, andwith money in his pockets, the 'Old Salt' in an Eastern port was notalways a factor for peace and progress. He was not uncommonly toofrequent a visitor at what the Madras Records call the 'punch houses, 'and the Records show that he often caused a disturbance. But he was abrave fellow, and at sea he did much for England's trade and forEngland's greatness. In an Indian seaport he was a picturesque, iftroublesome, personage, and nautical Madras has changed with the OldSalt's disappearance. 

CHAPTER XIII

THE STORY OF THE SCHOOLS

A tourist who goes the round of Madras must surely be impressed withthe numerous signs of its educational activity. Apart from themultitude of juvenile schools in every part of the crowded city, thenumber of academic institutions is large, and educational buildingsare amongst the most prominent of its edifices. Our tourist, puttinghimself in charge of a guide at the Central Station for a drive alongthe beautiful Marina, sees a number of academic buildings on his way. The Medical College is just outside the station yard. The classicfaçade of Pachaiyappa's College for Hindus peeps at him gracefullyacross the Esplanade. The Law College lifts its Saracenic towers abovehim as he passes by. Across the road he sees the collection ofminiature domes and spires and towers that surmount the variousbuildings that make up the far-famed Christian College. Driving alongthe Marina he sees the Senate House of the Madras Universitysurmounted by its four squat towers; farther on he sees the staidEngineering College, and the still staider Presidency College, and, beyond, the whitewashed buildings of Queen Mary's residential Collegefor Women; and on his way back by the Mount Road he sees theMuhammedan College, with its little white mosque and its spaciousplaying-fields in the heart of the city. There are yet more collegesin Madras; and there are also numerous large schools, some of whichare attended by more than a thousand pupils. 

Yes, the educational activity in Madras is great; and it isinteresting to reflect that it is a development from very smalleducational enterprises in the days when Madras was young. 

The initial enterprise was small indeed. The first school in Madraswas the little "public school for children, several of whom areEnglish", which the French Capuchin priest, Father Ephraim, opened inhis own house in White Town very soon after Madras came into being. His pupils were mostly Portuguese or Portuguese Eurasians, thechildren of Portuguese subjects who had come from Mylapore and who, for purposes of trade or commerce, had settled down within the EnglishCompany's domain. His English pupils must have been children of thevery few of the Company's civil or military employees that weremarried, or of the still fewer English free settlers. Father Ephraim, who according to accounts was a really learned man, charged no fees, yet was deeply interested in the welfare of his scholars; and thelittle school must have supplied a great want in those far-off days. It is interesting indeed to think of that little 'public school;' forthe room in the priest's house was the scene of the very firstbeginning of what are now the mighty educational activities ofMadras--an earnest, moreover, of the great things that the RomanCatholic Church was going to do in the way of education, both for boysand for girls, in South India. 

Father Ephraim's school continued to prosper under his successors, andin the seventeenth century it was transferred, as a poor-school, to abuilding in the grounds of what is now the Roman Catholic Cathedral inArmenian Street; and in 1875 it was put under the control of thebrothers of St. Patrick, an Irish order of educational monks, and itbecame St. Patrick's orphanage. Later the brothers transferredthemselves and their orphanage to the spacious park--ElphinstonePark--on the southern bank of the Adyar River, the premises which theyoccupy still. 

For some thirty years the Company took no part in educational work, and the children of Madras were left entirely to Father Ephraim'scare. Then for two years a certain Master Patrick Warner was theCompany's temporary chaplain of Madras--a conscientious anduncompromising Protestant minister who wrote some long letters to theDirectors in England denouncing the laxity of the conduct of theCompany's employees and deploring the influence that Roman Catholicpriests had been allowed to obtain in Fort St. George. Finally, hewent back to England, with the threat that he was going to interviewthe Directors on various matters pertaining to Madras; and that hesucceeded in making himself heard is to be seen in the fact that inthe following year the Directors sent a Protestant schoolmaster out toMadras. The letter in which they notified the appointment to theGovernor in Council at Fort St. George was assuredly inspired byMaster Patrick Warner's undoubtedly high-minded representations. Theywrote that, as there were now in Fort St. George 'so many marriedfamilies, ' they were sending out 'one Mr. Ralph Orde to beschoolmaster at the Fort . .. Who is to teach all the Children to readEnglish and to write and Cypher gratis, and if any of the otherNatives, as Portuguez, Gentues (Telugus), [4] or others will send theirChildren to School, we require they be also taught gratis . .. And heis likewise to instruct them in the Principles of the Protestantreligion. ' Mr. Ralph Orde arrived by the same ship which brought theletter, and his arrival (1677) is another notable event in the historyof education in Madras. It was the first beginning of Governmenteducation--the laying of the first stone in what is now such a vastedifice. 

[Footnote 4: In modern Madras the great majority of the Hinduresidents are Tamils; but in the beginning there were very few Tamilimmigrants, and the Hindu residents were nearly all of them Telugus(Gentoos). ]

In appointing a schoolmaster, the Directors meant to do their best foreducation in their rising city; for they had [5]engaged no meandominie on a menial's pay. In choosing Mr. Ralph Orde they chose agood man, and they paid him accordingly. He was to dine at the GeneralTable, and his salary was to be £50 a year, which in those days was nosmall sum--more than the salary of some of the Members of Council. Perhaps, indeed, they got too good a man for the post; for after fiveyears of educational work in Madras, Mr. Orde complained that hisschoolmastering had been 'much prejudicial to my health, ' and he askedto be relieved of his duties and to be appointed to a post in theCompany's civil service instead. His request was granted. A newschoolmaster was appointed; and as a 'Civilian' Mr. Orde worked withsuch success that in two or three years he was sent to Sumatra to bethe Chief of a factory that he was to found on the west coast of theisland. The ex-schoolmaster would, perhaps, have risen to be Governorof Madras, but it would seem that life in the East had really been'much prejudicial to his health, ' for he died in Sumatra ten yearsafter his first arrival in Madras. 

In 1688, by virtue of the Company's Royal Charter, a Corporation ofthe City of Madras came into being, and it was among their delegatedduties that they should build a school in Black Town for the purposeof teaching 'Native children to speak, read, and write the EnglishTongue, and to understand Arithmetic and Merchants' Accompts. ' Threeyears later, however, Elihu Yale, Governor of Madras, complained tothe Corporation that, although they had been empowered to levy taxeson the citizens, they had not so much as thought about building aschool, and had neglected various other civic responsibilities. TheCompany--rightly or wrongly--sought to justify their inaction with theexcuse which the Corporation of Madras has--rightly or wrongly--madefor civic inaction so many times since, namely that 'no funds' hadbeen assigned to them by Government for the works that they werecalled upon to undertake. As for taxation, they remarked that thepeople in Black Town had not been schooled to civic taxation; and itis true that any ruthless collection of taxes might have meantwholesale departures from the city, or at any rate a serious check tofurther immigration. So the municipal school for Native children nevercame into being. 

Meanwhile the Company's free school in White Town, started by Mr. Orde, continued its work under Mr. Orde's successors; and elementaryinstruction was imparted therein to a heterogeneous crowd ofchildren--English, Eurasians, and Indians--Christians and Hindus. Eventually the school was put in charge of the chaplain of St. Mary'sChurch in the Fort, and the chaplain and his churchwardens agreed inthinking that such education was not of the kind that a Church shouldcontrol, and that it was rather their duty to institute in Madras aresidential free-school for poor Protestant children of Britishdescent, which should be conducted on the lines of the many 'charityschools' in England; and in 1715, with the approval of the Directors, 'St. Mary's Church Charity School' was founded. The event is ofparticular interest; for St. Mary's Church Charity School developedlater into the 'Male Asylum'--the institution which has done so muchfor boys and girls for so many years, and which, after changing itshabitation on various occasions, is now comfortably housed in spaciouspremises in the Poonamallee road. 

The year 1715 is noteworthy on another account. St. Mary's Schoolhaving been founded solely for the benefit of children of Europeandescent, the native children who had attended the Company's day-schoolwere deprived of education. The Society for the Promotion of ChristianKnowledge undertook to supply the want, by establishing schools inMadras for the special benefit of Indian children; and the year 1715, therefore, is the date which marks the first beginning of theeducational work that English Protestant missionary societies havedone in India. The Society found themselves unable to take up the workimmediately themselves; so they applied to the vigorous DanishLutheran Mission at Tranquebar, which was then a Danish settlement;and a Danish minister was sent to Madras to set things going. 

In the course of time Madras had become a much more habitable citythan it had been in its first beginnings, and a much more possibleplace of residence for European women. The Company's employees, therefore, were more and more disposed to matrimony; and, as alreadyrelated, the Directors, believing that married men made steadieremployees, had from early times encouraged the nuptial humour bysending out from England periodical batches of well-connected youngwomen as prospective brides for employees who lacked either the meansor the inclination to take a trip home to choose partners forthemselves. The number of European fathers and mothers, therefore, inMadras was continually increasing; and for the education of theirchildren, as also for that of children of well-to-do Eurasians, therewas need of a different kind of education than the variousfree-schools supplied. Home education, with or without paid tutors andgovernesses, probably served its turn with some, but it was certainthat sooner or later the private school would come into being. 

We are unable to say when the first private school in Madras wasstarted; but an advertisement in one of the issues of the _MadrasCourier_, in 1790, shows that a private school for boys was started inthat year; and it was probably the first. The enterprisingeducationist was Mr. John Holmes, M. A. , who opened the 'MadrasAcademy' in Black Town for the instruction of boys in 'Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, History, the use of the Globes, French, Greek, and Latin. ' Other towns in the Madras Presidency had their Englishresidents, so Mr. Holmes offered to accommodate 'a few Boarders;' andthe offer was found so convenient that certain parents wantedaccommodation for their girls as well as for their boys. Mr. Holmeswas willing to receive all the pupils that he could get; for in anadvertisement two months later he announced that he was going to moveto a larger house in which 'apartments will be allotted for the YoungLadies entirely removed and separate from the Young Gentlemen. '

The Madras Academy was eminently successful; but the mixed boardingschool was not its most commendable side; and in the following year anenterprising lady-educationist announced that she was opening in BlackTown a 'Female Boarding School, ' in which her young ladies would be'genteelly boarded, tenderly treated, carefully Educated, and the moststrict attention paid to their Morals, ' and the school was to beconducted as far as possible 'in the manner most approv'd of inEngland. ' The enterprising lady-educationist was a Mrs. Murray, whohad been a mistress in the Female Asylum. Her syllabus of educationwas of a more feminine sort than that which was followed at the MadrasAcademy; for, as announced in the prospectus, it included 'Reading andWriting, the English language and Arithmetic; Music, French, Drawingand Dancing; with Lace, Tambour, and Embroidery, all sorts of Plainand Flowered needle-work. ' The two syllabuses are interestingreminders as to what were the usual subjects of education for Europeanboys and girls a century and a half ago. 

Schools, therefore, were available for children of everyclass--European and Indian, rich and poor; but the schools forIndians, conducted either by missionaries or by indigenous teachers, were of an elementary kind; and, apart from Oriental studies inindigenous institutions, there was little or nothing in the way ofhigher education for Indians either in Madras or anywhere else inIndia. This condition was altered, however, during the governorship ofLord William Bentinck, the magnanimous if not brilliantgovernor-general whose term of office lasted for seven years, from1828 to 1835. 

During this period everything favoured educational progress in India. There was peace in England and there was peace in India. It was a timeof great educational developments in England, as is manifested by thefact that within this period the London University and DurhamUniversity were opened, and the great British Association for theAdvancement of Science was established. Such conditions in England hadtheir influence in India, and the more so because Lord WilliamBentinck was ardent for progress. The opening of the Madras MedicalCollege in 1835 was one of the signs of the times. During Lord WilliamBentinck's term of office education in India was reformed. Macaulay, afterwards Lord Macaulay, was an Indian official at the time, and hepenned a notable report on education in India, in which he belittledvernacular learning and asserted that the Government of India would dowell to discountenance it altogether, and to introduce westernlearning and the study of English literature into all schools underGovernment control, and to make it a rule that the English languagewas to be the only medium of instruction. Whether or not Macaulay'sviews were correct, they were adopted by the Government of India, andLord William Bentinck issued in 1835 a resolution in accordancetherewith, in which he sought to secure the people's acceptance ofEnglish education for their children by notifying that a knowledge ofEnglish would in future be necessary for admission into Governmentservice. Government service is particularly coveted in India, and theresolution encouraged the foundation of schools of a good class inwhich special attention would be given to the study of the Englishlanguage; and within a few years a number of important educationalinstitutions had been founded in different parts of India. 

In South India the Madras Christian College, called originally 'TheGeneral Assembly's Institution, ' was first in the field. It wasfounded in 1837, by the Rev. John Anderson, the first missionary thatthe Church of Scotland sent out to Madras. The name of the founder ispreserved in the 'Anderson Hall' in one of the college buildings; butthe remarkable progress of the institution has been very specially dueto the untiring energy of the Rev. Dr. Miller, whose statue stands onthe opposite side of the public road. Dr. Miller was Principal for anumber of years, and now (1921) at a great age the venerableeducationist is living in retirement in Scotland. 

In 1839, two years after the foundation of the Christian College, theRoman Catholic Bishop in Madras, Dr. Carew, founded St. Mary'sSeminary, which after forty-five years became St. Mary's College, andwhich is now represented by St. Mary's High School for Europeans andSt. Gabriel's High School for Indians. 

Two years later, in 1841, the Presidency College had its beginning, ina rented room in Egmore. At its foundation it was not a Governmentinstitution, but was a public school under the control of governors, who were chosen from among the leading Europeans and Indians inMadras, with the Advocate-General as their first president. It wasstyled 'The High School of the Madras University, ' and it was thefounders' intention that when a college department had been added, theinstitution should be called the 'Madras University, ' and should applyfor a charter. In the sixties, however, the Madras Government wasconsidering a scheme of its own for a University of Madras, whereuponthe governors of the 'University High School' transferred their schoolto the Government, who called it the 'Presidency College. ' ThePresidency College continued to work in the rented building until1870, when the building that it now occupies was publicly opened bythe Duke of Edinburgh. 

[Illustration: UNIVERSITY SENATE HOUSE]

Pachaiyappa's College, a well-known Hindu institution, had its firstbeginning in 1842. Like the other colleges in Madras, it began as aschool; the school was called 'Pachaiyappa's Central Institution, ' andwas located in Black Town. The present buildings were opened in 1850by Sir Henry Pottinger, an ex-governor of Madras, amid a largegathering of leading European and Indian residents; and for a numberof years the annual 'Day' at Pachaiyappa's College was an importantsocial event. Pachaiyappa was a rich and religious Hindu, who made hismoney as a broker in the Company's service, and who died more than ahundred years ago leaving a lakh of pagodas--some 3½ lakhs ofrupees--for temple purposes. The trustees neglected the provisions ofthe will, whereupon the High Court assumed control of the funds, which under the Court's control rose to the value of nearly Rs. 7½lakhs. The original amount was set apart for the fulfilment of theterms of the will, and the surplus was assigned to educationalpurposes in Pachaiyappa's name. 

[Illustration: PACHAIYAPPA'S COLLEGE. ]

The education of girls shared in the development; for in 1842 thefirst party of Nuns of the Presentation Order was brought out fromIreland, and a convent, with a boarding school and an orphanage, --the'Georgetown Convent' of to-day--was established in Black Town. The'Vepery Convent School' and some of the other successful conventschools in Madras are controlled by nuns of the same Order. 

Education in India was given further impetus in the time of LordDalhousie. During his term of office (1848-1856) the present system ofeducation, under a Director of Public Instruction, was introduced, andGovernment was empowered to make liberal educational grants, and toestablish universities. The despatch in which the educationaldevelopments were announced has been called 'the intellectual charterof India. '

[Illustration: DOVETON PROTESTANT COLLEGE]

Various institutions in Madras are representative of this laterdevelopment. A Government 'Normal School'--which has grown into the'Teachers' College' of to-day--was established in 1856, to increasethe number and the efficiency of indigenous teachers; and the MadrasUniversity was incorporated in 1857, for the control and thedevelopment of higher education. Of large high schools stillexisting, the Harris High School in Royapettah was founded by theChurch Missionary Society in 1856, for the education of Mohammedanboys, and was named after Lord Harris, who was Governor of Madras atthe time; and the Hindu High School, in Triplicane, was founded in1857. Doveton College, Vepery, for Anglo-Indian boys was opened in1855. It owes its existence to a wealthy Eurasian, Captain JohnDoveton, who obtained his Captaincy in the service of the Nizam ofHyderabad, and who left a large sum of money to an earlierinstitution, the Parental Academy, which was afterwards called DovetonCollege in the deceased officer's honour. Within later yearsphilanthropic and enterprising Indians have done much for education, and numerous schools both for boys and for girls have been establishedby their efforts. 

An educational building of curious interest is the office of theDirector of Public Instruction, in Nungumbaukam. It is commonly knownas the 'Old College'. In the masonry of a large arch at the entrance, as well as on another arch within, quaint designs have beenintroduced--mysterious faces, and flags, and strange geometricalfigures. The house was the property of a wealthy Armenian merchantnamed Moorat, who died more than a hundred years ago; and it may besupposed that the quaint designs were after the nature of familymemorials. In the early part of last century the Armenian merchant'sson sold the building to Government, who used it as a 'College forJunior Civilians. ' Hence the designation 'Old College'; but the namedoes not mean that it was a building in which young civilians weretrained, but means that it was a building in which there were'colleagues' in residence, or, in other words, that, the 'GeneralTable' having been dissolved, the 'College' was a mess-house forjunior civilians. Later, its large hall was for many years arecognized assembly-room for amateur concerts, amateur dramaticentertainments, and other occasions of social reunion. The quaintdevices on the gates are still preserved, and the name of the old'College' still survives; but the associations have gone. Not even asa ghost does the long-robed Armenian merchant tread the floors; thejunior civilians, with their ancient pranks and their antiquatedjests, have departed; in the great hall the lilt of the song and thefrenzy of the fiddles for the dance and the amateur mouthings of thedrama are heard no more. A multitude of turbanned clerks are pouringforth the blue-black ink from their pens; schoolmasters haunt theportals to press their claims for educational grants for their ownparticular schools; and the click of a chorus of typewriters is theonly music that is borne upon the breeze. 

I have told the story of the schools. It is creditable to Madras; forgreat things have been done since that first little 'public school'was opened in the Fort. 

CHAPTER XIV

HERE AND THERE

Before closing the story of Madras, it will be well to speak, at leastvery briefly, of some of the prominent landmarks of the city that wehave not yet described. 

Of churches, we should mention St. George's Cathedral. It was openedin 1816, not as a cathedral but as an ordinary church; for Madras thenwas not a diocese by itself, but was a part of the immense diocese ofCalcutta. The new church was regarded as a necessity; for a great many'garden houses' had sprung up in and about the Mount Road, in the areathat was called the 'Choultry Plain, ' and the Directors of the Companyagreed with representations from Madras that it was undesirable thatEnglish residents within the bounds should be able to stay away fromthe Church-services on Sunday with the reasonable excuse that thenearest Anglican church--St. Mary's in the Fort--was too far away fromtheir houses for them to be expected to attend. So the new church wasbuilt; and some twenty years later, when Dr. Corrie, Archdeacon ofCalcutta, was consecrated first Bishop of Madras, the church became'the Cathedral Church of St. George. ' St. George's Cathedral is astately building, with a spire 139 feet high, and it stands inspacious grounds. The total cost was more than two lakhs of rupees;but nobody had to be asked to subscribe, for the money was availablefrom a peculiar source. It was an age in which State lotteries were invogue; Madras had followed the fashion with a series of officiallotteries, and a 'Lottery Fund' had been created from the profits, sothat there was always a good supply of cash available forextraordinary expenses, such as mending the roads or entertainingdistinguished visitors. It was from the Lottery Fund that the cost ofbuilding St. George's was met. 

[Illustration: ST. GEORGE'S CATHEDRAL. ]

St. Andrew's Church--most commonly known as 'The Kirk'--was plannedwhile St. George's was being built; and it is remarkable that it wasnot projected sooner than it was. Scotchmen in Madras, as in otherparts of India, apart from Scottish soldiers, have been many; and thenames of a number of Madras roads and houses--such as Anderson Road, Graeme's Road, Davidson Street, Brodie Castle, Leith Castle, Mackay'sGardens--are reminders of the fact that not a few of the Scots ofMadras have been influential; and at the time when a second Anglicanchurch was being built in the city it was suggested to the Directorsof the Company in England that the numerous residents who weremembers of the Church of Scotland ought to have a church too. TheDirectors, who realized no doubt the desirability of being agreeableto the many Scots in Madras, one of whom at the time was the Governorhimself, Mr. Hugh Elliot, consented to the suggestion, and in 1815they sent out a notification that a Presbyterian church was to bebuilt not only at Madras but also in each of the other Presidencycities at the Company's expense, and that the Company would maintain aPresbyterian chaplain at each. The Directors laid down no instructionsas to what was to be the maximum cost of each kirk, but it wasunpretentious buildings that they had in mind. At Bombay a large kirkwas built for less than half a lakh of rupees, but for the kirk atMadras the Madras Government submitted a bill for nearly Rs. 2¼lakhs--some Rs. 10, 000 more than the total cost of St. George'sCathedral, and the Directors were indignant. The Kirk, however, hadbeen built; and it is one of the handsome churches of Madras. [5] It isa domed building, with a tall steeple over the Grecian façade; andsome of its critics have said that the combination of dome and steeplegives the edifice a strangely camel-backed appearance; but, howeverthat may be, the dome adds beauty to the interior. When the Church wasopened, it was found that the dome evoked disturbing echoes, and alarge additional expense had to be incurred to exorcise the wanderingvoices. The steeple reaches a height of 166½ feet, which is 27½feet higher than that of St. George's. 

[Illustration: ST. ANDREW'S (THE "KIRK"). ]

[Footnote 5: Major de Haviland, of the Madras Engineers, built St. George's on a plan designed by Major Caldwell, his senior in theservice. Major de Haviland both designed the Kirk and built it, and hedevoted himself to his work and was very proud of his creation, whichwas nevertheless much criticized by unfriendly critics. ]

The Roman Catholic Cathedral at Mylapore has been described on page61. A sketch of the handsome building is given on the next page. 

The High Court, a red Saracenic structure that spreads itself out overa large area between Georgetown and the Fort, is a modern building. Itwas opened within the memory of elderly lawyers of Madras, some ofwhom used themselves to practise in the big building which is now theCollector's Office, opposite the gate of the Port Trust premises, andwhich was for many years the habitation of the Supreme Court atMadras. The present High Court is a mighty monument to the developmentof 'The Law' in Madras. In the early days of Fort St. George theCompany administered its own justice to its own people, and the courtwas held in a building in the Fort. Punishments in those far-offtimes, judicial or otherwise, were usually severe; and the Recordsshow that even a civil servant of junior rank who gave trouble wasliable to be awarded some such penalty as to sit for an hour or moreon a sharp-backed 'wooden horse, ' with or without weights attached tothe delinquent's feet. In the town that grew up outside the Fort, justice as between natives of the soil was administered by an Indian_adikhari_, who represented the lord of the soil. As the Company'sinfluence and authority increased, various courts of law werecreated--and the Records show that there were certainly crimes enoughto justify their creation. A large number of the criminal trials inthe earlier years of Madras were in respect of thefts of children, tosell them as slaves, especially to Dutch merchants along the coast, where the victims were not likely to be traced. Slavery was arecognized condition of life in old Madras, as indeed it was in thewhole of Europe; and in the Council-book of Fort St. George there isstill to be seen an Order, dated September 29, 1687, "that Mr. Fraserdo buy forty young Sound Slaves for the Rt. Hon'ble Company, " who wereto be made to work as boatmen in the Company's fleet of surf-boats. Itwas in reference to a slave that the first case of trial by jury washeld in Madras, in 1665, and it was a _cause célèbre_. The prisonerwas a Mrs. Dawes, who was accused of having murdered a slave girl inher service. The Governor himself, who, like a doge of Venice, wasboth ruler and judge, was on the bench, and the twelve jurymen gave aunanimous verdict that Mrs. Dawes was 'guilty of the murther, but notin mannere and forme, ' by which they seem to have meant that thecircumstances of the case exonerated her from the capital charge. Being pressed to give a verdict 'without exception or limitation, 'they brought in a unanimous verdict of 'not guilty, ' whereupon theGovernor felt that, although the woman had been guilty of a crime, hehad no help for it but to set her free. He thereupon wrote to theDirectors in England, expressing his disapproval of 'such anunexpected verdict, ' and notifying that in his ignorance of the lawand its formalities he was by no means confident that he had done theright thing; and the end of it was that the Governor, presumably withthe Directors' approval, created two justices, on whom was thereafterto fall the responsibility of hearing all such serious cases. Changeupon change! and to-day the Madras High Court, with the various othercourts in different parts of the city, is a very visible symbol of theserious reality of the administration of justice. 

[Illustration: ST. THOME CATHEDRAL. ]

The story of the origin of the principal literary and scientificinstitutions in Madras is interesting. In the olden times, when therewere no literary or scientific magazines by which an 'exile in theEast' could keep himself in touch with the developments of geniusthroughout the world, people in India with literary or scientifictastes had to be content to gratify their tastes with localresearches, and to depend upon one another for any interchange ofideas. This meant that old-time literary and scientific societies inIndia were naturally more enthusiastic than most such societies inIndia are now. Madras indeed has been particularly fortunate in hertime in having had residents who were earnest in cultured pursuits, and whose work survives, directly or indirectly, at the present day. 

For example, it was an old-time Madras Civilian, with a hobby forastronomy and with a private observatory of his own, that created alocal interest in the science and is thereby to be regarded as theoriginator of the Madras Observatory--the first British Observatory inthe East, a famous institution in olden days, which secured for Madrasthe honour--which is still hers--of setting the standard of timethroughout the whole of India. The Madras Civilian was Mr. WilliamPetrie, an extraordinarily versatile genius, who entered the serviceas a young man and rose to be a member of the Government, yet managedto find time for very serious astronomical pursuits in his house atNungambaukam. Going home to England on long furlough, Mr. Petrieallowed the Madras Government to acquire his instruments; and in 1791, when he came back to Madras, the Madras Observatory was built, withMr. Petrie as adviser. 

Another enthusiastic scientist in Madras in the same period was Dr. James Anderson, who, after many years of work in the Company's medicalservice, settled down at Madras as 'Physician-General, ' on a salary of£2, 500 a year, and devoted himself and a large part of his handsomesalary to botanical pursuits. He acquired in Nungambaukam more than ahundred acres of land, which included what are now the grounds of thehouses that go by the names of Pycroft's Gardens and Tulloch'sGardens; and for nearly a quarter of a century, until his death, Dr. Anderson utilized his leisure in the creation and development of auseful and ornamental botanical garden. He was most enthusiastic overhis hobby, and he was continually carrying out botanical andagricultural experiments, of medical or commercial or industrialvalue. His grounds were open to the public, and 'Dr. Anderson'sBotanical Gardens' became famous, and were a place of popular resort. Dr. Anderson died at the age of seventy-two; and in St. George'sCathedral his memory is graced with a fine statue that was carved bythe most eminent sculptor, Sir Francis Chantrey, and for which hismedical brethren in the Madras Service subscribed. How many yearsafter his death his gardens continued to exist it might be difficultto say, but they must have suffered badly from the want of the ardentbotanist's enthusiastic care. But the botanic spirit that Dr. Andersonhad started remained alive in Madras; for in 1835, when, to the regretof many, his gardens had been split up into building-sites for twoprivate residences, there was still a sufficient number of botanicallyinclined people in the city to found the Agri-Horticultural Society ofMadras, a still-energetic body whose beautiful gardens at Teynampetdeserve to be more generally appreciated by the public than they are. 

The Madras Literary Society was founded a good many years ago. Itswork now is that of a circulating library; but in earlier times it wasespecially a 'literary society, ' and its meetings, at which lectureswere delivered or papers were read and discussed, were crowdedgatherings of the leading Europeans in the city. The original LiterarySociety included scientific researches within its scope, andscientific members used to discourse learnedly on scientific subjectsof topical interest, such as 'The Land-Crabs of Madras, ' or'Prehistoric Tombs in the Salem District, ' or 'Gold in the Wynaad ofMalabar. ' The name of the Society remains, but the literary andscientific meetings are no more. The last lecture, if memory failsnot, was delivered in the nineties, and the audience was not largeenough or enthusiastic enough to denote that lectures were any longerin demand. As a 'Literary Society and Auxiliary of the Royal AsiaticSociety, ' the institution has outlived its requirement; but it has avaluable store of more than 50, 000 books, new and old, on allsubjects, and it is continually adding to the number; and, as acirculating library of a high standard, it fulfils an excellentliterary purpose. 

The Madras Museum is a magnificent institution. It is to the MadrasLiterary Society that it owes its being; and the Literary Society didMadras splendid service in the initiation thereof. This was in 1851, when the Literary Society presented its fine collection of geologicalspecimens to the Madras Government as the nucleus of the rich andvaried store of treasures that the Madras Museum now displays. TheGovernment lodged the geological specimens in the 'Collector'sCutcherry'--a house which forms a part--the oldest part--of the Museumbuildings of to-day. Before the Government acquired the house in 1830for a Cutcherry, the house had been private property, and, under thename of the 'Pantheon, ' it had been for many years the predecessor ofthe Old College as the 'Assembly Rooms', wherein Madras Society hadits balls, its plays, and its big dinners. The name of the oldbuilding still survives in the Pantheon Road, in which the Museum issituated. 

A high circular building on the Marina always attracts a stranger'sattention. It has a curious and interesting history. It is commonlycalled 'The Ice-House, ' and the name suggests its original purpose. Anumber of years ago, when ice-factories had not been started and whenin Madras the luxury of the 'cool drink' was unknown, somebodyconceived the idea of importing ship-loads of blocks of ice fromAmerica. The idea was developed, and about the year 1840 a commercialscheme took shape. A large circular building was erected close to thesea-beach as a reservoir for the imported ice, which sailing-shipsbrought in huge blocks from the western world; and for a number ofyears the scheme was a commercial success. The ice was sold at fourannas a pound, and many people in Madras remember the time when it wasthe only ice that was to be had, and large quantities of it were sold. With the eventual institution of ice-factories, which could supply iceat a much cheaper rate, the enterprise came to an end, and for aconsiderable time the ice-reservoir was out of use. Then somebodybought it, and put windows into the walls, and turned it into aresidence; and meanwhile, as a result of the construction of theharbour, the sea receded a long way down the Ice-house shore. As aresidence, however, a house of so strange a shape was not in request;and eventually some benevolent Hindus turned it into a free hostel forany preacher or religious teacher of repute, whatever his creed, whomight be temporarily staying in Madras, especially if he felt that hehad a message to deliver to the city. But the reputable prophets whoavailed themselves of the proffered hospitality were few; and the'Ice-house' had a deserted look. A few years ago the Madras Governmentacquired it for the excellent purpose of a 'Brahman Widows' Home' forBrahman girl-widows at school. This is the purpose that it nowfulfils. From Ice-house to child-widows' home! It is a greattransformation--from a house whose chambers were stored with hardblocks of cold ice to a house whose chambers are aglow with the warmthof young life! There is room to hope that in course of time theChild-widows' Home will have outlived its purpose--in the time whengentler ideals will prevail, and the sorrows of child-widows will haveceased, and the institution will no longer be a need. 

CHAPTER XV

'NO MEAN CITY'

It is less than three hundred years since Mr. Francis Day, seeking alikely spot for a trading settlement, surveyed the desolate sea-beachnear the mouth of the Cooum, and decided that the settlement should bethere. A few scattered huts on the shore and a few catamarans out atsea were the only signs of human life, and the breakers that sportedon the beach were the only manifestations of activity. But the yearshave gone by--wild times and quiet times, years of war and years ofpeaceful progress--and the scene has changed, and great is thetransformation. In place of the scattered huts there are hugebuildings on the beach, and behind them is a great and ever greatercity. The catamarans have not disappeared, but great ships pass to andfro in the offing or lie within the shelter of the harbour walls. Thelittle 'Factory' in the Fort, within which the Company transacted itsmercantile business, has gone; but elsewhere in its stead there arebig offices of numerous commercial firms; and, moreover, there arelarge 'factories' of the modern kind, such as are denoted by tallchimneys and the perpetual roar of whirring wheels. 

The growth of Madras is a remarkable testimony to British enterprise, energy, and perseverance, and also to Indian appreciation of thenew-comers and of their methods; and it is a matter of satisfactionthat many illustrious Indians have played an energetic and conspicuouspart in the development of the city and the promotion of its welfare. In many respects the conditions were altogether unfavorable for thefoundation of a maritime city. There was no natural harbour, and thebreakers beat continually on the shore; and the so-called river was oflittle practical use. The nearest Indian towns were a good many milesaway, and the Portuguese merchants in the neighbouring settlement ofMylapore were commercial rivals, who might have been supposed to haveabsorbed all the trade that was to be had. Yet Madras is now a largecity, with more than half a million inhabitants; and its commerce andits industries have been so successful that its population is stillincreasing rapidly. Houses are being built everywhere, yet the demandincreases. Not only are the suburbs being extended, but moreover thegardens of existing houses are being everywhere divided, so as toprovide further building-sites; and two houses or more now standwithin grounds that were formerly occupied by only one. 

But it is well for Madras that, except in respect of some of itsstreets and particular localities, it is not a crowded city, and thatthere is therefore room for such additions. Madras has been called the'City of Distances, ' and it still deserves the name; for within itslimits there are some magnificent spaces, and in the garden of many aprivate house the resident can sit of an evening and imagine himselfin a rural retreat, far from the madding crowd. 

Like all cities, Madras has its drab--very drab!--quarters and itsmean--very mean!--and straggling streets. Madras was not laid out onany definite plan. Like ancient Rome, it had in the beginning toattract outsiders to come and live there, and outsiders had to begiven much license to do things their own way, and the city wasallowed to grow just as it would; and in respect of many of its partsthere is much room for criticism. But Madras is a fine citynevertheless, with a number of stately buildings, both public andprivate, and with great possibilities; and its 'Marina' can truly becalled magnificent. 

But the greatest charm of Madras lies in its history. It was here thatthe foundations of the Indian Empire may be said to have been laid. The history of Madras is not a story of aggressive warfare. Thesettlers were gentle merchants, whose weapon was not the sword but thepen, and whose only desire it was to be left alone to carry on theirbusiness in peace. But the rising city was a continual mark for thehostility of commercial and political rivals, both European andIndian. It was a storm-centre, and the storms were often fierce; andthe merchants were often compelled to meet force with force. Moreover, the merchants were men, and their doings therefore were by no meansalways without reproach; but, with due allowance for human weakness, the history of Madras is a history of which Madras may be proud. Thecity has grown from strength to strength, and in its story there ismuch inspiration. This little book has merely told the story in part;but it will have served its purpose if it has in any way helped thereader to realize that the story of Madras is the story of no meancity. 

INDEX

_The figures refer to the pages_

Admiralty House, 85

Agri-Horticultural Society, 108

Aix-la-Chapelle (Treaty), 28, 39

Amir Mahal, 67

Anderson, Dr. J. , 107

Anderson, Rev. J. , 95

Appar, 61

Arcot, Siege of, 64

Arcot, Prince of, 67

Armagaum, 2, 5, 9

Armenians, 19, 20

Armenian street, 19, 59

Assumption Church, 56

Aurangzeb, 39, 64

Bantam, 8

Bentinck (Governor-General), 94

Biden House, 86

Black Town (Old), 19, 22, 25, 26, 29

Black Town (New), 29, 31, 32

Bound Hedge, The, 41

Bourchier (Governor), 76

Brahman Widows' Home, 109, 110

Carew (R. C. Bishop), 95

Carnatic, The, 63

Cassa Verona, 39

Chandragiri (Rajah), 6, 7, 63, 64

Chepauk, 22

Chepauk Palace, 22, 63-68

China, 22

China Bazaar, 22

Chintadripet, 23

Christian College, 87, 95

Clive (Governor), 76, 77

Clive, Robert, 17, 28, 64, 81

Cochrane's Canal, 35

Cogan, Andrew, 7, 9

Convent Schools, 97, 98

Cooum River, 6, 9, 12

Coral trade, 20

Corrie, Bishop, 101

Corporation of Madras, 90

Cyclone, 78, 79

Dalhousie (Governor-General), 67, 98

Danish Lutheran Mission, 92

Da-ud Khan, 13, 14, 22

Day, Francis, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 111

De Haviland, Major, 104 (Note)

Diamond trade, 20

Doveton College, 98, 99

Dupleix, 27, 39

DuPre, Mr. , 31, 32

Dutch, The, 2, 5, 13, 39, 56

Egmore, 1, 21, 31, (acquisition), 35, 41, (the Egmore Fort), 43-46

Elliot, Hugh (Governor), 103

Elphinstone Park, 38

Engineering College, 87

'English Burying Place', 51, 52

Ephraim, Father, 57-59, 88, 89

'Factory, ' The, 12, 69, 71

'Female Boarding School', 93

Flag (E. India Co. ), 81

Fort St. George, 12-19, 27, 30

French, The, 14, 15, 26, 27-31, 50

'Garden-Houses', 70

Gentoos (Telugus), 19, 89

Georgetown, 29

Georgetown Convent, 97

Goa, 1, 58

Golconda, King of, 13, 22, 35, 39, 64

Government House, Madras, 74-77

Government House, Guindy, 77

Gyfford (Governor), 72

Haidar Ali, 15, 22, 31-33, 40, 65

Harbour, The, 79

Harris High School, 99

Hastings, Warren, 65, 78

High Court, 104

Hindu High School, 99

Holmes, John, 92, 93

Hyderabad, Nizam of, 64

Hynmers, Joseph, 53

Ice-House, The, 109

Jews in Madras, 20, 21, 25

Kuppam, 1

Labourdonnais, 27

Lally, 30, 31, 40, 50, 75

Langhorn (Governor), 58

Law College, 87

Literary Society, 108

Little Mount, 60, 61

Luz Church, The, 62

Macartney (Governor), 66

Macaulay, 94

Madras Literary Society, 108

Madre-de-Deus Church, 62

Male Asylum, 43, 44, 91

Manucci, 9 (Note)

Marina, The, 79, 87

Marmalong Bridge, 20

Mastan, 62

Masulipatam, 2, 7

Medical College, 87, 94

Miller, Rev. Dr. , 95

Mohammed Ali (_See_ 'Walajah'), 64

Mohammedans, 21, 22

Mohammedan College, 87

'Moors', 21, 24

Murray, Mrs. , 93

Museum, The, 108, 109

Mylapore, 1, 5, 6, 38, 61 (_See_ also San Thomé)

Nattukottai Chetties, 21

Naval Hospital Road, 85

Nungumbaukam, 37, 41

Observatory, The, 107

'Old College', The, 99, 100

Orde, Ralph, 89, 90

Pachaiyappa's College, 87, 96, 97

Parthasarathy Temple, 1

Petrie, W. , 107

Peyton, Capt. , 27

Peyalvar, 61

Pitt (Governor), 73

Pondicherry, 15, 20, 21, 60

Poonamallee (Naik), 6, 7

Popham's Broadway, 9 (Note)

Portuguese, The, 1, 2, 5, 6, 39, 56, 58, 112

'Portuguese Burying Place', 59

Pottinger, Sir H. , 96

Powney Family, The, 53

Presentation Nuns, 97

Presidency College, 87, 95, 96

Pulicat, 2

Pursewaukam, 35, 41

Queen Mary's College for Women, 87

Rajah Mahal (Chandragiri), 7

Royapettah, 22

St. Andrew's (The 'Kirk'), 103, 104

St. Andrew's Church (R. C. ), 58, 59

St. Gabriel's High School, 95

St. George's Cathedral, 101

St. Mary's Cathedral (R. C. ), 59, 60

St. Mary's Charity School, 91

St. Mary's Church (Fort), 17, 47-55

St. Mary's High School, 95

St. Matthias's Church, 20

St. Patrick's Orphanage, 88

St. Thomas's Mount, 61, 62

San Thomé, 13, 31, 32, (acquisition), 38-40, (redoubt), 43, Cathedral, 61, 104 (_See_ also 'Mylapore')

Saunders (Governor), 73

Sea-Gate, 80

Senate House, 87, 96

Slavery in Madras, 106

S. P. C. K. , 91

Teachers' College, 98

Thomas, St. , 38, 60, 61

Tipu Sultan, 31, 43, 65, 66, 75

Tiruvalluvar, 61

Tondiarpet, 35

Trincomalee, 27

Triplicane, 1, 21, 22, 32, (acquisition), 35

Triplicane River, 6, 8 (_See_ 'Cooum')

Triplicane Temple, 1

Umdat-ul-Umara, 66

University of Madras, 66

Uscan, Peter, 19, 20

Vepery, 1, (acquisition), 37-88

Vepery Convent School, 98

Walajah (Nawab), 22, 64-66

Wall Tax Road, 33

Warner, Rev. P. , 58, 89

Washermanpet, 24

Weavers' Street, 23

White Town, 19, 25, 27

Widows' Home, The, 109

Yale (Governor), 16, 23, 35, 53, 57, 90

 * * * * *