Durgarazpatnam

Durgarazpatnam was a small port on the Coromandel coast north of Pulicat, whose inhabitants were chiefly salt makers. The English knew it as Armagaon and established an East India Company factory here in 1626. A local account tells how English visitors landed a cannon and fired it westward, asking for the land over which the shot had passed. Gurava Naidu persuaded the raja of Venkatagiri, who owned the land, to permit them to build a fort at Chenva Kuppam.

The factory house had walls two storeys high in one part and a separate round bulwark, as the English official Streynsham Master later described it. The Company's stay was brief: in 1641 it abandoned Armagaon in favour of Fort St George farther south.