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There was nothing but necessity made the old settlers drop anchor here; a bend of the Silvery Cooum gave them slight protection inland, but there was nothing in the way of roads or shelter. The sandy coast is dead straight. They did not know the qualities of the surf at first.
Day found the landing so exciting that in his report to the Council at Masulipatam he wrote of 'the heavy and dangerous surf'. But after an inspection of the surroundings he was satisfied with the conditions; he considered that at the mouth of the Cooum river there was an advantageous site for a commercial settlement; and the local ruler, the Naik of Poonamallee, following the advice of the Portuguese authorities, encouraged him in the idea of an English settlement within the Poonamallee domain.
The 'sandy beach' has been waked from its longaeval placidity. Trains of bullock-carts are lumbering along new-made tracks, bringing stone and laterite and bricks and timber from various centres; and endless files of coolies, with baskets on their heads, are bringing sand from the summer-dry edges of the bed of the Cooum river.
'Manucci's Garden, where he lived, covered a large area which is now occupied by a number of the houses at the Law College end of Popham's Broadway, on the side that is nearest the sea. The garden was watered by a stream that used to flow where the Broadway tram-lines now hold their course. Old black Town is no more. the Fort was extended about 1750. To provide ground, the Cooum was diverted.
Francis Day, seeking a likely spot for a trading settlement, surveyed the desolate sea-beach near the mouth of the Cooum, and decided that the settlement should be there. A few scattered huts on the shore and a few catamarans out at sea were the only signs of human life, and the breakers that sported on the beach were the only manifestations of activity.
In Madras the bamboo and the palmyra grow in abundance, furnishing materials for the quick provision of cheap and commodious accommodation; and we can picture the pilgrim fathers of Madras camped in palmyra-thatched mat-sheds on the north bank of the Cooum river, near the bar, the while that the houses within the plan of the fort are being built.
According to accounts, Governor Bourchier and his Councillors were there when the raiders came, and they would assuredly have been caught had they not managed to make their escape in a boat that was conveniently tied up on the bank of the Cooum river. More than one Governor of Fort St. George has died at Government House, and it was there that Governor Pigot died in extraordinary circumstances.
This time it is not a walled garden like that of Lal Bagh; the Women's College is situated out from the city in a green and spacious suburb, where the little River Cooum wanders by its open spaces. The ten acres have much the air of an American college campus, the same sense of academic quiet, of detachment from the work-a-day world.
They escorted him in a splendid procession to the Company's Gardens, which were situated along the bank of the river Cooum, where the General Hospital and the Medical College now stand.
What is the good of having a country or a forest if you don't breed a good stock, be it either deer or people? Changed to airier rooms on our second evening here; got everything shifted in pretty short time. We thus lost a pretty view and, the smell of the river, "the Silvery Cooum."
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