CHAPTER I

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

Three hundred years ago, Madras, under the name of 'Madraspatnam' was
a tiny rural village on the Coromandel Coast. Scattered about in the
neighbourhood there were other rural villages, such as Egmore, Vepery,
and Triplicane, which are crowded districts in the great city of
Madras to-day. In Triplicane there was an ancient temple, a centre of
pilgrimage, dating, like many village temples in India, from very
distant times; this was the Parthasarathy temple, which is the
'Triplicane Temple' still. A little fishing village called Kuppam,
lying directly on the seashore, sent out, even as Kuppam does now, its
bold fishermen in their rickety catamarans in perilous pursuit of the
spoils of the sea. There was one small town in the neighbourhood,
namely, the Portuguese settlement at Mylapore, where the tall facades
of the several churches, peeping over the trees, formed a land-mark
for the Portuguese ships that occasionally cast anchor in the roads.

Such was the scene in 1639, the year in which our story of Madras begins.
The Portuguese had already been in India for nearly a century and a half;
and under their early and able viceroys they had made themselves powerful.
The stately city of Goa was the capital of their Indian dominions, and they
had settlements at Cochin, Calicut, Mylapore, and elsewhere. But the
influence of the Portuguese was now on the wane. For nearly a century they
had been the only European power in India and the Eastern seas; but
merchants in other European countries had marked with jealous eyes the rich
profits that the Portuguese derived from their Eastern traffic, and
competitors appeared in the field. First came the Dutch, who in India
established themselves at Pulicat, some twenty-five miles north of
Mylapore. Holland had lately thrown off the yoke of Spain, and was full of
new-born vigour; and Dutch trade in the East--chiefly in the East India
Islands--was pushed with a rancorous energy that roused the vain
indignation of the decadent Portuguese. Six years later, in 1600, came the
English. The English traders were employees of the newly-established East
India Company, and were sent out to do business for the Company in the
East; and they had to face the opposition of the Dutch as well as of the
Portuguese. Their earliest enterprise was in the East India Islands, and it
was eleven years before they gained their first footing in India, at
Masulipatam. Here they e