the combined city Madras. Controversially, in an attempt to revise history and justify renaming the city as Chennai, the ruling party has purged the history of the early English Madras settlements. According to the new party history, instead of being named Madras, it was named Chennai, after a village called Chennapattanam, in honour of Damarla Chennapa Naick, father of Damerla Venkatadri Naick, who controlled the entire coastal country from Pulicat in the north to the Portuguese settlement of Santhome. However, it is widely recorded that while the official center of the present settlement was designated Fort St. George, the British applied the name Madras to a new large city which had grown up around the Fort including the "White Town" consisting principally of British settlers, and "Black Town" consisting of principally Catholic Europeans and allied Indian minorities. Early European settlers Modern Chennai had its origins as a colonial city and its initial growth was closely tied to its importance as an artificial harbour and trading center. When the Portuguese arrived in 1522, they built a port and named it São Tomé, after the Christian apostle Saint Thomas, who is believed to have preached there between the years 52 and 70. They reconstructed the ruined Nestorian church of Mylapore and renovated he tomb of Saint Thomas. The region then passed into the hands of the Dutch, who established themselves near Pulicat just north of the city in 1612. Both groups strived to grow their colonial populations and although their populations reached 10,000 people when the British arrived, they remained substantially outnumbered by the local Indian population. Arrival of the English By 1612, the Dutch established themselves in Pulicat to the north. In the 17th century, the English East India Company decided to build a factory on the east coast and in 1626 selected its site as Armagon (Dugarazpatnam), a village some 35 miles north of Pulicat. The calico cloth from the local area, which was in high demand, was of poor quality and not suitable for export to Europe. The English soon realized that the port Armagon was unsuitable for trade purposes. Francis Day, one of the officers of the company, who was then a Member of the Masulipatam Council and the Chief of the Armagon Factory, made a voyage of exploration in 1637 down the coast as far as Pondicherry with a view to choosing a site for a new