Rameshwaram, Tirumalai-Tirupati, Kilvelur, Kanchipuram, Jagannath in Odisha or Vaijayanti in Bengal." Furthermore, he described the splendor of the famous temple of Tenavarai at its zenith as similar in its greatness on the island to Koneswaram and how idolatrous navigators would descry Koneswaram from the sea. In a 1613 written letter by Jesuit fray Manuel Barradas, Koneswaram is described as a "... massive structure, a singular work of art. It is of great height, constructed with wonderful skill in blackish granite, on a rock projecting into the sea, and occupies a large space on the summit." King Ethirimana Cinkam had resisted a call by D. Hieronymo de Azevedo the previous year to aid the latter in building a fortress in Trincomalee. The enterprise was abandoned. With the defeat of King Cankili II, all of the territory of the kingdom of Jaffna, comprising Trincomalee and Batticaloa, was assigned to the "spiritual cures of the Franciscans." This decision was taken by the bishop of Cochin, fray Dom Sebastião de S. Pedro. By the end of 1619, a small Danish fleet had arrived at Trincomalee; in May 1620, the Danes occupied Koneswaram temple and began works for the fortification of the peninsula before being defeated. Seventeenth-century destruction The shrine was attacked and destroyed on 14 April 1622, the Tamil New Years Day, by the Portuguese general Constantino de Sá de Noronha (who called it the Temple of a Thousand Pillars). Eleven brass lamps had been lit in the shrine and the main statues were taken out to town during the ther procession in the festive period, during which time Portuguese soldiers entered the temple dressed as Iyer priests and began robbing it. In an act of religious zeal, the temple was then levered over the edge into the sea. Fleeing priests buried some of the temple's statues in the surrounding area, and all remaining priests, pilgrims and employees were massacred. The final monument of the temple complex was destroyed two years later in 1624. Temple stones and its carved pillars were used to construct Fort Fredrick to strengthen the colonists' influence over the eastern seaboard of the island against other invading European armies, including the Dutch navy during the Dutch–Portuguese Wars. A new church and village were built in and around the fort. An extensive campaign of destruction of five hundred Hindu shrines, the Saraswathi Mahal Library and forced conversion in the Tamil country