228 FIRST SETTLEMENTS ON THE MADRAS COAST for aught save a temporary refuge. Country cloths could not be bought in sufficient quantity. Most of our factors flitted back to Masulipatam in 1630, and Armagon was practically abandoned for a new settle- ment further south in 1639. Again the Company lost, in the end, the outlay on buildings and fortifications. The new settlement was Madras. In 1639 Francis Day, a member of the Masulipatam* council and Chief at Armagon, proposed to get free of the struggle with the Dutch by founding a factory to the south of their Pulicat settlement. He discovered the place he wanted, thirty miles down the coast from Pulicat, with a prac- ticable roadstead, and a friendly Portuguese colony on shore. The local Hindu chief welcomed the English and obtained for them from his inland raja (the de- scendant of the once great Hindu suzerains of Vijaya- nagar) a grant for a piece of land on the shore and the right to build a fort. The local chief piously directed that the new settlement should be called after his father, Chennappa, and to this day the natives know it by the name Chennapatanam; but the English called it Madras, probably from a Hindu shrine or legend of the place. Without waiting for permission from home, Day built an embrasured factory and christened it Fort St. George in honour of England. The Company, uneasy about the money already sunk in fortified factories on the Madras coast, viewed the new settlement as another hazardous experiment, but left the council at Surat to decide whether it should go forward. The Surat
