GAZETTEER.
The Dolphin's Nose is known to the natives as 'Blackmore's hill.' In 1801 Captain Thomas Blackmore, of the Artillery stationed at Vizagapatam, obtained a grant from the Company for 44 acres of land on the hill (on which,'some years before,' he had built a house) and also permission to 'occupy, enclose and embellish the declivity of the hill next the sea.' This house was perhaps the building of which the ruins still stand on the very top of the hill near the banyan tree. The remains of foundations by the neighbouring flagstaff seem to show that there was also once a battery there, and from this were perhaps taken the ten old cannon which have been used to anchor the guy-ropes of the flagstaff and ornament the doorway of the enclosure round it. It is stated 1[1] ' that there was once a light-house here, and that it was blown down in the cyclone of 1876 referred to on p. 154. Lower down the hill, on the side facing the town, are the ruins of a bungalow built, on land granted him by the Collector in 1856, by Mr. J. W. McMurray, Treasury Deputy Collector, who died in Vizagapatam in 1883 and is buried in the Regimental Lines cemetery. Below this is the so-called 'Dutch Battery' mentioned on p. 44. Near it, washed by the surf, is a cave which is fabulously supposed to run inland for miles. The sea is declared to have made great encroachments on the point of the Dolphin's Nose, and tradition says that the people of Yerráda, the village at its southern foot, used to be able to walk round the headland to Vizagapatam. They now come over its crest by the paved path which leads up there. The sea has undoubtedly encroached near the 'Dutch Battery' and it also threatened to eat away the sand in front of the sea-customs office, but was checked by the series of loose stone groins (still visible) which Sir Arthur (then Major) Cotton put down in 1844. The river between the Dolphin's Nose and the town is crossed by a passenger ferry at its mouth and also by a pontoon ferry higher up, on the road to Anakápalle. The latter replaces the Turner pontoon bridge referred to on p. 135.
The tidal swamp or backwater drained by the river is completely sheltered on the south by the Dolphin's Nose and the hills behind it, and on the other sides is also protected by lesser and more distant heights. Proposals to turn it into a harbour have consequently been long debated. Borings show that a deep navigable channel 100 yards wide could be cut through it without difficulty, and the chief problem is the removal of the sand bar at the mouth of the river, which, though periodically scoured out by floods, carries only from two to three feet of water at low tide at certain seasons of the year.
327
- ↑ 1 Manual of Administration, iii, 280.
