 Many Europeans later spoke of the Seven Pagodas following travelers to their colonies in India.The first to write of them was John Goldingham, an English astronomer living in Madras in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.He wrote an account of his visit and the legend in 1798, which was later collected by Mark William Carr in his 1869 book "Descriptive and Historical Papers Relating to the Seven Pagodas on the Coromandel Coast".