CHAP. Il.
THE
CHRISTIANS,
90 TINNEVELLY
proportion to the excursions we make, after the manner of hunters. My time is spent in running all over the district.” By 1666 the mission had got seriously to work and congregations are found existing all over the district, at places as far apart as Tenkasi, Marandai, Palamcotta, Pannikulam, Kayattar, Perunkulam, Punnavanam and Kamandyakkanpatti. It was a period however of great political commotions, and in 1676 were added the horrors of a famine. “How can religion,” writes Father Britto in 1683, “become securely established in a land whose population is unstable as the waves of the sea, shifting like the sands of the desert, in.a country where it wants only a war, an epidemic, a famine, a political change, a foreign invasion, to destroy one-half of its inhabitants and to change almost its whole population? ”
In 1683 Father John de Britto succeeded to the charge of the Madura Mission and in the following year, after visiting almost every part of the Tinnevelly district, ordered the establishment of a permanent residence at Kamanayakkanpatti instead of Mullipadi. It was during this visit that the first steps were taken in that important movement by which Christianity ultimately spread so widely amongst the Shanans. Father de Britto who had penetrated as far south as Vadakkankulam (Nangunéri taluk) was called back unexpectedly to Kumbakonam. A congregation, however, of Shandans appears definitely to have been formed by 1685 at Vadakkankulam ; and, under Father Borghese, the first resident missionary of Kamanayakkanpatti, the work of conversion amongst that caste, whose members now constitute nearly one-half of the Roman Catholic population of the district, progressed rapidly in the south of the taluk of Nangunéri and in south Travancore. “By its numbers and its wealth,” wrote Father Calini in 1716, stationed at Vadakkankulam, which had two years previously becomea residence, “the Shanan caste is in comparison with all other castes admirably adapted to Christianity. In fact the Shandns could easily observe the Christian practices. The nature of their life, the necessity of climbing palmyras, preserves them from laziness, the fountain of all disorders. Besides, they are gifted with an excellent disposition, most inclined to religious matters.”
Meanwhile the Fishery Coast remained under the control of the Bishop of Cochin. In a letter of 1604 we read of six principal residences occupied by Jesuit Priests, and of the seacoast villages the “ Catalogus ” reports : ‘ Omnes hi Vici instar magnarum urbium Sunt, Et omnes Christianis incoluntur’ The chief place of the coast was still Tuticorin; but here, as
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