69 
Indo-Danish Coins. 
(By T. M. RANGA CHARI, b.a., and T. DESIKA CHARI, b.a.) 
Following the footsteps of other European nations, the 
Danes, impelled by a spirit of commercial enterprise, sought, 
in the beginning of the seventeenth century, to establish 
settlements in India. In 1612, an association, called the 
Danish East India Company, was formed at Copenhagen, 
which fitted out an expedition to the Coromandel Coast. 
Their first ship, the Oeresund,^ arrived in India in 1618 
or 1619, and the captain of the vessel, Rodant or Roelant 
Crape, who had visited the court of Tan j ore before, in order 
the sooner to effect a landing, is said to have wrecked his ship 
off Tranquebar. Thence he contrived to reach Tanjore, and 
the company obtained from the Naik Eajah of that princi- 
palit}' a little seaport town, eighteen miles north of Nega- 
patam, known as Tranquebar. A fort, called Dansborg, was 
soon after built, and a factory established. Shortly after this 
(1624) the settlement became the property of the Danish 
king, to whom the Company owed money. 
The next Danish settlement of note was Serampore, a 
town on the right bank of the Hoogly, which acquired some 
celebrity, as being the spot where the Baptist Missionaries, 
foremost among whom were Carey, Ward and Marshman 
first established themselves, making it the centre of their 
christianizing efforts in India. ^ ' It is,' says Heber, ' a 
handsome place, kept beautifully clean and looking more like 
a European town than Calcutta or any other of the neigh- 
bouring cantonments.' ' Serampore was for some time the 
- See Fenger's History of the Tranquebar Mission (1863). 
* Hunter's Gazetteer of ludia. 
