Eliott remained Gibraltar’s governor until his death, but with the siege lifted, he made several trips home. The king elevated him to a peerage: Lord Heathfield, baron of Gibraltar. He is buried near his English estate. The plate on his coffin was melted down from a gun recovered from a floating battery.49
Gibraltar completed Howe’s rehabilitation. He became first lord of the Admiralty after the war, but because he was charged to downsize the navy, he made enemies. Still, after Rodney died in 1792, Howe succeeded him as vice admiral of England. When war with the French resumed, he won a major victory off Ushant in 1794, dubbed the “Glorious First of June.” Although semi-retired in 1797, he helped end a mutiny over wages by offering concessions and a royal pardon. It was Howe’s last official act. He died two years later.
Drinkwater’s journal of the Gibraltar siege, published in 1785, became a best-seller. He founded the Garrison Library, which remains open to the public to this day. He later followed O’Hara to fight the French in Toulon and ultimately retired as a colonel. He died in England in 1844.
PART SEVEN
The Battle for India
37. Hyder Ali: “The Most Formidable Enemy”
WHEN CHARLES CORNWALLIS, O’HARA’S SUPERIOR AT YORKTOWN, returned to Britain, the government saw him as a talented victim of circumstances. Twice, in 1782 and 1784, he turned down offers to be British India’s governor because he believed civil authority without corresponding military command was doomed to fail. In 1786, the government agreed to his demand.
That the British continued to have any Indian presence was in question during the revolution’s last eighteen months.
A European feeding frenzy to grab a share of Indian trade—or monopolize it—began when the Portuguese reached its western coast in 1498. Four years later, they built their first fort. The French, British, Dutch, and Danish followed, and even Swedes, Flemish, Austrians, and Prussians attempted to establish posts. Within India, invaders, dynasties, and empires fought each other when they weren’t allied with each other. European wars and hostilities spilled into India, and each nation sought native allies, who, like Native American nations, played the European parties against each other for their own self-interests and survival.
Pondicherry (now Puducherry), on India’s southeastern coast, was typical. It changed hands at least thirteen times over the centuries until the French were pressured to cede it to an independent India in 1954.
Private East India companies, chartered by their governments, led the European advance, but not even their monopoly status guaranteed financial success. The French government took over its company’s assets in the 1760s. The Dutch East India Company gave way to its government in the 1790s. During the revolution, the British Parliament’s attempts to reform the British East India Company resulted in a confusing structure that caused conflicts between the government and company, and within the company. Adam Smith, the economist, reflected many MPs’ views: The company is corrupt, “the plunderers of India . . . so perfectly indifferent about the happiness or misery of their subjects, the improvement or waste of their dominions, the glory or disgrace of their administration.”1
The company divided its rule into three semi-autonomous “presidencies”: Fort William in Bengal’s Calcutta (Kolkata today) in the northeast; Bombay (Mumbai) on the western Malabar Coast, 2,400 miles from Bengal by ship; and Fort St. George in Madras (Chennai) on the southeastern Coromandel Coast, 900 miles to Calcutta, 1,500 to Bombay.
The king appointed a governor general to represent the national interest over the three presidencies. The government allowed the company to make treaties with non-Christian nations; sometimes, the company’s army imposed the treaties. Native and European mercenaries, along with the British army and navy, complemented the company’s army. Often, British military commanders and company administrators and their councils argued over mutually exclusive interests.
India produced wealth: cotton, tea, coffee, indigo, saltpeter (used to make gunpowder), spices, diamonds, gold, and silver. But it also was a difficult land. Famine, caused by ceaseless wars and drought, was common, as were floods. Like the Caribbean’s hurricane season, India’s seasons affected military operations: Heavy monsoon rains occurred from June through September; high monsoon winds arrived in October and stayed through December.
In Madras, Europeans “seem to be chiefly employed in avoiding the excessive heat of the climate, and, indeed, it is not to be wondered at for, to me, it feels intolerable,” a British captain said. As with the Caribbean and American South, India also took its toll in the form of tropical diseases. (In 2001, malaria alone affected 15 million Indians.)2
For ships supplying and defending the European settlements, scurvy and typhus were ever-present. “Their crews were packed together like sardines in humid, confined, and filthy spaces below decks, fed a wretched diet lacking fresh vegetables, fruits, and meats; and denied adequate quantities of water for drinking and bathing.”3
Adding to the challenges was the lack of harbors where ships could be overhauled. Even Madras was inadequate for the British navy; its ships sailed to Bombay or Calcutta for major refitting. Between Madras and the Dutch settlement at Negapatam (Nagapattinam) 200 miles to the south, the coastline was smooth, and few towns could handle European ships: Dutch Sadras, French Pondicherry, and Danish Tranquebar (Tharangambadi). The tip of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) lay sixty-five miles to the south of Negapatam. Only after sailing another 150 miles to the southeast did ships arrive at Trincomalee, one of the world’s largest natural harbors, and a key military objective.4
On July 7, 1778, British governor general Warren Hastings, 46, based in Calcutta, received the four-month-old news that the French had entered the American war. He was an India veteran of twenty-eight years, who “in the face of overwhelming danger . . . showed a master spirit fitted to grapple with every emergency, and equally capable of saving or creating an empire,” an admirer said.5
Hastings immediately ordered government, company, and native troops to attack French positions. By September, they had expelled the French from the Bengal region and taken France’s main port at Pondicherry, south of Madras. The only remaining French posts were on the western Malabar Coast.
Now, Hastings erred. He made an enemy of a powerful general, Hyder Ali of the Mysore kingdom. Mysore was the size of modern Pennsylvania and South Carolina combined. Militarily, it dominated southern India from the Malabar to within fifty to one hundred miles of Madras on the eastern Coromandel Coast.
American rebels might not have heard of Hyder in 1778, but they honored him in 1782: Joshua Barney sailed the Hyder Ally to his Delaware Bay battle. Hyder was born in Mysore between 1716 and 1728; most historians guess 1721. His father, a military man, died when Hyder was 5, and he and his older brother were raised by a cousin with influence in the Mysorean court. He rose to prominence as a volunteer in his brother’s cavalry unit. Within a couple of years, he had his own command, and in 1755, became military governor of a frontier fort. There, he organized his own army, gaining loyalty by sharing plunder equally with his men, but insisting on accurate records backed up by auditors. He didn’t tolerate corruption.6
Hyder also worked with French advisors to gain modern military technology, supplies, and tactics. “He was attentive and exact in observing everything that passed in the French camp,” an officer said. When Mysore’s ruler died in 1759, Hyder assumed all power, but allowed a puppet prince to remain on the throne. Within three more years, he built a dockyard and navy.7
For the rest of his life, he was at war, fighting rival nations, rebellions, or British-led or inspired invasions. The still-definitive history of southern India, written by British colonel Mark Wilks, who had served in the company’s army during the war, has more than five pages of Hyder references in its index. Most refer to military events: “Besieges Nunjeraj . . . Undertakes to conquer Bâramahâl . . . Defeats an English detachment . . . Defeat of, by Kundè Row . . . Takes Balipoor by assault . . . Retreat of, t
o Seringapatam . . . Recovery of Malabar . . . His narrow escape from Afghans . . . His dreadful devastations . . . Surrender of Colonel Baille to . . .”8
The British knew him well. From 1767 to 1769, they fought him in the First Anglo-Mysore War—and lost. With his army camped five miles from a feeble Madras, he dictated the peace treaty: It included a mutual defense clause that Hyder intended to invoke if attacked by enemies.9
He was, said a nineteenth-century biographer and British commissioner to Mysore, “a bold, an original, and an enterprising commander, skillful in tactics and fertile in resources, full of energy and never desponding in defeat.” A British military engineer saw that “Hyder possessed great courage and abilities, which have appeared both in his military and civil capacity, and which should have taught the servants of the British East India Company to have endeavored to make him their friend, and not to have provoked him to become their enemy.”10
His greatest opponent, General Eyre Coote, talked about him in a way that eighteenth-century Englishmen rarely spoke of native Indians: “Hyder had taken every measure which could occur to the most experienced general to distress us and to render himself formidable; and his conduct in his civil capacity had been supported by a degree of political address unequalled by any power that had yet appeared in Indostan.” Even when Coote forced Hyder to retreat, “There was no consternation on his part, no trophies on ours.”11
Although Hyder’s relationship with his French allies had its ups and downs, the French conceded that they couldn’t win British India without him. “Hyder Ali is the only Indian power who can assist the French advantageously in their projects. His forces are considerable; he has a martial character, the abilities of a general, and most important, his interests harmonize perfectly with ours, being the ruin and debasement of English power in India,” one general reported.12
By 1769, when a company official met him, Hyder “had no eyebrows nor, indeed, a single hair left on any part of his face,” and an attendant plucked any hairs that grew out. Hyder explained that he didn’t want anyone in Mysore who looked like him. He was about five feet six, with a “rather thick” lower lip. When not fighting in uniform, he wore a simple white robe with a turban.13
To Europeans, “his manners, voice, and deportment were most soft and ingratiating whenever he wished to please or affected to be gracious and benign, but he was terrible and often ferocious in his anger.” Former prisoners accused him of torture, starvation diets, and even forced circumcision. For those caught before his army, “miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function; fathers torn from children, husbands from wives; enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into a captivity in an unknown and hostile land.” He was “as vindictive and merciless as he was active and powerful. Thousands of unresisting and innocent natives were murdered in cold blood.”14
But there was another side to him. He created a meritocracy. “What religion people profess, or whether they profess any at all, that is perfectly indifferent to him. He has none himself and leaves everyone to his choice,” a British army chaplain said. “He cared not one jot what faith his officials followed so long as they obeyed his orders,” a later British official wrote.15
Hyder was an innovator. Unlike other Indian leaders who hired mercenaries, Hyder centralized his army’s recruiting and training. He broke tradition by building a large cavalry the British conceded was tactically superior to theirs. And he used advanced weapons the Europeans didn’t have: Long-range rockets launched from bamboo tubes lined with iron. Pointed horizontally at an enemy, they did “great damage, particularly amongst cavalry and ammunition tumbrils,” a British officer said. Hyder would “readily adopt whatever European improvements appeared most essential to secure his government, to extend his empire, and to render his name immortal.” George Macartney, the company’s Madras governor, explained to London about the military challenge: “The Indians have less terror of our arms; we, less contempt for their opposition.”16
To Edmund Burke, Hyder and his allies were “the declared enemy of the human species.” Another MP later compared Hyder to Napoleon, “the most formidable enemy with whom we had to contend in the East.”17
In 1771, a neighboring kingdom invaded Mysore. Hyder asked for British help under the mutual-defense terms of the treaty they had signed two years before. The British refused. Hyder complained to a company envoy that they “had broken their solemn engagements and promise, but that nevertheless he was willing to live in peace with them.”18
He kept his word. When Hastings and the British seized French posts in 1778, Hyder remained neutral, despite French requests for help. But then, Hyder learned that the British were considering an attack on Mahé, a French port on the Malabar. Although the French occupied Mahé, the town wasn’t French territory: It was Mysorean, and it was a conduit for French supplies to Hyder. Hyder explicitly warned the British to avoid Mahé. “Should the English create a disturbance in the French factory [post] of Mahé, he would punish them by devastating the whole country from Madura [Madurai] to Madras. He would totally efface them from the face of the Earth,” a translator said.19
He sent another warning on March 19, 1779, that he would consider an attack on Mahé a hostile act. That same day, the French peacefully surrendered Mahé to a British army outside its gates. The company tried to smooth relations with Hyder by sending him an envoy. Hyder replied, “I was convinced that the King of England and the company were one, and that there would not be the smallest deviation from the treaties made by the company, but I now think otherwise from your proceedings.”20
That winter, Hyder joined a coalition of other native states united against the British. Hastings reported to London of “a war, actual or impending, in every quarter and with every power.”21
38. Coote and Hughes to the Rescue
HYDER AND HIS ARMY OF 90,000 INFANTRY AND CAVALRY, including a few French officers, attacked the Madras presidency’s posts defended by 11,000 men. By the end of October 1780, he had defeated a company-and-mercenary army, killed or captured nearly 3,800 men, and threatened Madras.1
Hastings ordered his Calcutta commander, Lieutenant General Eyre Coote, 54, south to Madras to stiffen up the British defense, which was down to 1,600 regulars (although reinforcements were on the way), plus assorted mercenaries.2
Coote was the fourth son of an Irish minister, a distant cousin of a seventeenth-century New York governor. He entered the infantry as an ensign in 1744 at the relatively old age of eighteen. Two years later, he fought in a losing battle against Scottish rebels. Accused of cowardice when he fled from the battle, Coote was convicted of a minor offense; the jury concluded that he ran away only to keep the regimental colors out of enemy hands.3
In 1754, Coote went to India to fight the French and their allies. Within five years, he was a lieutenant colonel commanding the Madras army. At the end of 1759, he and his British-native troops took several enemy posts, before the French besieged his position at Wandiwash (Vandavasi), seventy miles southwest of Madras. Two months later, he broke out and defeated the larger French force. The victory was a turning point. Working with the navy, Coote routed the French again in 1761 at their capital, Pondicherry. He returned to England the next year, bought an estate, and began serving in Parliament. When the new war against the French began, Britain promoted him to lieutenant general and commander-in-chief in Calcutta, where he arrived in spring 1779.4
“Age and sickness had impaired, in a certain degree, the physical strength and mental energy of this distinguished veteran,” said Wilks, who served under him. But even ill, Coote showed “a bodily frame of unusual vigor and activity, and mental energy always awake . . . restrained from excessive action by a patience and temper which never allowed the spirit of enterprise to outmarch the dictates of prudence.”5
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br /> Company officials recognized that his military abilities were a match for Hyder’s, but they detested him personally. Hastings complained, “My letters have been all friendly to him; his to me, all petulant and suspicious; I know not why or for what. I bear with him, and will bear, for I am lost if he abandons me.” Macartney, the Madras governor, also complained about Coote. “It is very difficult to keep on good terms with him. He is now no longer what he was. Soured by disappointment, grown old, impaired in health, jealous and fractious . . . , I court him like a mistress and humor him like a child.”6
Coote frequently threatened to resign. “He was of a fretful temper, and a love of gain had grown up side-by-side with his pursuit of glory,” said a military historian one generation removed. “He was strongly impressed with his own merits, and like many excellent officers, he was ever prone to deem himself slighted or neglected.”7
For his part, Coote made sure to inform Macartney and Hastings of their inability to properly supply him, his own failing health, and Hyder’s strategy:
“My state of health is very indifferent and being yesterday the whole day obliged to expose myself on horseback to an intense sun, is, at this present time, severely felt by me.”
His situation was “truly distressing . . . for the want of proper magazines, means of field subsistence, and carriage for it.
“Numbers have died by hunger and the inclemency of the weather. . . . In short, the scene exhibited was more like a field of battle than a line of march.
“Hyder always takes care to be certain that there is impeding or impossible ground between his army and ours. Thus, he is always sure of its being optional with him to draw off his guns in safety before our army can act offensively.”8
After Yorktown Page 34