Skulls, Sails and a Dutch Fort: The Story of Pulicat and Fort Geldria

About 60 kilometres north of Chennai, past the salt pans and shrimp farms of the Thiruvallur coast, lies a quiet fishing town called Pazhaverkadu — better known by its older name, Pulicat. Today it is a place of narrow lanes, mending nets and a wide silver lagoon. Four centuries ago it was one of the most important trading posts of the Dutch East India Company on the whole Coromandel coast, guarded by a bastioned fort called Geldria.

A Dutch foothold on the Coromandel coast

The Dutch East India Company — the VOC — reached Pulicat in the first decade of the 1600s, drawn by the fine painted and printed cottons of the Coromandel coast, which were currency in the spice trade of the East Indies. With the consent of the local ruling house, the Company fortified its factory here, and by about 1613 it had raised a stone fort named Geldria, after the Dutch province of Gelderland (Guelders). For much of the 17th century Pulicat served as the headquarters, or Governorate seat, of the Dutch on the Coromandel coast, before the administrative centre later shifted south to Nagapattinam.

From this fort the Company ran a web of trade in textiles, and — less comfortably to modern eyes — in enslaved people and in gunpowder saltpetre. The fort itself, a four-bastioned work, has largely vanished; what survives at Fort Geldria and the Dutch cemetery is more trace than monument — foundations, fragments and the memory of a once-formidable stronghold.

Skulls, crossbones and a forgotten cemetery

The most evocative survival of the Dutch centuries is the old cemetery on the edge of the town. Behind a gateway lie rows of heavy stone slabs and monuments, many carved with skulls and crossbones and winged hourglasses — the memento mori imagery of Reformation-era Europe, a blunt reminder that death spares no one. The inscriptions, worn but still legible in places, are in Dutch, and record Company servants and their families who died far from home in the tropical heat. It is one of the more atmospheric colonial burial grounds in South India, and the reason the skull-carved tombstones are the town’s most photographed sight.

Pazhaverkadu: the town the Dutch left behind

When the Dutch power on the coast faded, Pulicat passed, like the rest of the Dutch possessions in India, to the British in the early 19th century under the Anglo-Dutch settlement of 1824. The Company town slowly became an ordinary fishing town again. Walk through Pazhaverkadu heritage town today and you find a working port of fishing hamlets, an old lighthouse point, a scatter of colonial-era buildings and churches, and lanes that still follow their old lines. It is unpolished and lived-in rather than restored — which is much of its charm.

India’s second-largest lagoon

What truly dominates Pulicat is water. The lagoon that gives the town its name is commonly described as the second-largest brackish-water lagoon in India, after Odisha’s Chilika. It straddles the border of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, sheltered from the Bay of Bengal by the long barrier island of Sriharikota — the same island that carries India’s satellite launch centre. The shallow, salty water is a nursery for prawns and fish, worked by fishermen in wooden boats with lateen sails, and in the cooler months it fills with birds.

From roughly October to March the lagoon becomes a wetland of international importance. Greater flamingos wade the shallows in pink drifts, alongside pelicans, painted storks, herons and thousands of migratory ducks and waders. The Tamil Nadu shore is protected as the Pulicat Lake bird sanctuary, and the winter flamingo gatherings are the reason serious birdwatchers make the trip north from Chennai.

Visiting

Pulicat makes an easy day trip from Chennai — around 60 km by road, best driven early to catch the birds and the light. Come between October and March for the migratory season and the flamingos; the summer months are hot and quiet. Combine the Dutch cemetery and fort traces with a boat ride on the lagoon, and allow time to simply wander the fishing lanes of Pazhaverkadu. For the wider colonial-fort context, see the guide to the /india/tamil-nadu/guides/forts-of-tamil-nadu , and for timing your trip around the seasons, the /india/tamil-nadu/guides/best-time-to-visit-tamil-nadu . Boats are run by local fishermen; agree a price before setting off, and carry water, a hat and binoculars.