EARLY YEARS
villages, the English merchants became firmly established, and their "mud-walled and thatched" houses of a quarter of a century before had made way for brick-built terraced houses, surrounded by gardens. The three villages had grown into a thriving town containing a population of some ten or twelve hundred Europeans and a hundred thousand natives. A church had been built "by the pious charity of merchants residing there, and the Christian benevolence of seafaring men whose affairs call them to trade there." This church, which in compliment to the queen was dedicated to St. Anne, stood on the site now occupied by the western end of the Bengal Secretariat Buildings, and adjoined the main gate of the Fort, which faced "the Avenue," now Dalhousie Square North. The Avenue was a raised road which ran eastward from the Fort, through the marshy lands along the line of Bow Bazar Street, and gave access to the salt-water lakes and the ghats, where boats laden with firewood and jungle produce landed their cargoes for the use of the growing settlement.
Captain Hamilton, a trading seaman who visited India in the early years of the eighteenth century, published in 1727 "a new account of the East Indies," in which he gave an entertaining description of Calcutta at that period, full of little
23
