The board of directors wrote in 1688 to its Council at Fort St. George: "Induce by all meanes you can invent our souldiers (sic) to marry with Native women, because it will be impossible to get ordinary young women, as we have before directed, to pay their own passages although Gentlewomen sufficient do offer themselves." Until 1741, a special payment was made to each soldier who had his child baptised as a Protestant. The concern in London was that if the soldiers at Fort St. George lived with or married the many Portuguese women there the children would be brought up as Roman Catholics rather than Protestants.