y before sent missionaries to Tranquebar and taught
Zinzendorf and the Moravians the divine law of the kingdom; encouraged
by a Governor, Colonel Bie, who was himself a disciple of Schwartz. To
complete this catalogue of special providences we may add that, if
Fuller had delayed only a little longer, even Serampore would have been
found shut against the missionaries. For the year after, when
Napoleon's acts had driven us to war with Denmark, a detachment of
British troops, under Lord Minto's son, took possession of
Fredericksnagore, as Serampore was officially called, and of the Danish
East India Company's ship there, without opposition.

The district or county of Hoogli and Howrah, opposite Calcutta and
Barrackpore, of which Serampore is the central port, swarms with a
population, chiefly Hindoo but partly Mussulman, unmatched for density
in any other part of the world. If, after years of a decimating fever,
each of its 1701 square miles still supports nearly a thousand human
beings or double the proportion of Belgium, we cannot believe that it
was much less dense at the beginning of the century. From Howrah, the
Surrey side of Calcutta, up to Hoogli the county town, the high ridge
of mud between the river and the old channel of the Ganges to the west,
has attracted the wealthiest and most intellectually active of all the
Bengalees. Hence it was here that Portuguese and Dutch, French and
English, and Danish planted their early factories. The last to obtain
a site of twenty acres from the moribund Mussulman Government at
Moorshedabad was Denmark, two years before Plassey. In the half
century the hut of the first Governor sent from Tranquebar had grown
into the "beautiful little town" which delighted the first Baptist
missionaries. Its inhabitants, under only British administration since
1845, now number 45,000. Then they were much fewer, but then even more
than now the town was a centre of the Vishnoo-worship of Jagganath,
second only to that of Pooree in all India. Not far off, and now
connected with the port by railway, is the foul shrine of Tarakeswar,
which attracts thousands of pilgrims, many of them widows, who measure
the road with their prostrate bodies dripping from the bath.
Commercially Serampore sometimes distanced Calcutta itself, for all the
foreign European trade was centred in it during the American and French
wars, and the English civilians used its investments as the best means
of remitting t