Conflict between Britain and Haidar Ali’s Mysore began in 1767, when the newly installed Nizam of Hyderabad, Nizam Ali Khan (Asaf Jah II), shifted Hyderabad’s alliance from the French (his predecessor, whom he deposed in 1762, had been a French puppet) to the British. Both the British and the nizam were alarmed by the growing strength and boldness of Mysore, and worried that Haidar Ali would soon turn his armies north and threaten Britain and Hyderabad’s interests in the Carnatic region. Not willing to risk the gains they had made during the Carnatic Wars, the new allies preemptively attacked Mysore, leading to the First Anglo-Mysore War (1767–9).
Haidar Ali once more distinguished himself in battle against the British and the struggle ended in a stalemate, with Britain and Mysore entering into a defensive alliance. According to the terms of the peace, the British were to come to the aid of Mysore in the event of a war with a third power. This was tested in practice in 1764, when the Maratha Empire invaded Mysore, and Britain neglected to fulfill its part of the bargain, earning it the eternal hatred of Haidar Ali and his son and successor Tipu Sultan. Betrayed by the British, Haidar Ali made a new alliance with France.
Arriving in India in November 1779, the passengers of the Nathalia likely had little clue that the Malabar Coast was a veritable cauldron of imperial contention. When France declared war on Britain in support of the American colonies in 1778, the conflict had rapidly spread to the Indian subcontinent. The British attacked and captured Pondicherry, the heart of the French presence in India, in October 1778, and quickly began to gobble up French ports and possessions. By 1779 the army of the British East India Company had fixed its sights on the port city of Mahe on the Malabar Coast, a mere 50 miles north of Calicut, where Eliza Fay was shortly to arrive. Mahe, a vital lynchpin in Mysore’s arms and munitions trade with the French, was crucial to Haidar Ali’s military strength; it was explicitly under his protection and defended by his own troops. When the British captured Mahe they committed a second unforgiveable affront, and open war between Mysore and the British became inevitable. It was into the epicenter of this building maelstrom that the Nathalia, a British ship, made landfall in a furiously aggrieved Haidar Ali’s territory in November 1779.
As they waited nervously for their ship to set sail for Bengal, Eliza Fay and her shipmates thus found themselves at the mercy of the global struggle that pitted Britain against the rebellious American colonies and their new allies, France and Mysore. After waiting for three days for fear that the unscrupulous Captain Chenu would abandon them if they went ashore, the tension on the ship was heightened by the arrival of a boat full of armed men who boarded the ship under the pretext of preparing the “Danish” ship for an expected attack by the British. Although the Fays were assured that they would be allowed to leave the ship freely with all of their possessions, when Eliza overheard some of the Sepoys discussing new orders to plunder the ship the terrified couple decided to barricade themselves in their cabin.14
At two o’clock in the morning the long-feared assault finally commenced. A party of armed men surrounded Fay’s cabin and demanded they be allowed to enter. As Fay remembered later:
I clung round my husband and begged for God’s sake that he would not admit them; for what could be expected from such wretches but the most shocking treatment. All this while there was such a noise without, of breaking and tearing, to come at their plunder, as convinced me that should we once lose sight of our little property, every thing was lost.15
The patience of the assailants quickly ran out. Scimitars were drawn and threats of torture and murder offered as inducements to surrender. In response, Anthony drew his sword and swore “that he would run the first man through the body, who should presume to enter his wife’s chamber.” Outside, the attackers began to chant, “incessantly calling, ‘ao, ao’” or “come, come.” With this chilling call ringing in her ears, Eliza began to dress in preparation for abandoning the cabin. Outside the Sepoys continued to chant, threatening her to make haste. With all thought of resistance finally abandoned, the door to the cabin was at last opened and the Fays came face to face with their captor. It must have come as quite a shock to look into the eyes of their enemy only to find an Englishman staring back. Criminal transportation and the revolution had once again marched in lockstep.16
The leader of the raiding party that seized the passengers of the Nathalia was, to the surprise of all, an Englishman. His name was Captain Ayers, a trusted commander in the forces of Britain’s long-time foe, Haidar Ali. Ayers had been born in London and as a boy had been apprenticed to a saddler. Although hardly an idle apprentice, the young Ayers’ industry was not focused on saddle-making, but rather on easier forms of employment “more suited to his active genius.” Out for some adventure and quick riches, Ayers became a highwayman, targeting and robbing the many coaches that rumbled along the rural roads in and out of London. He boasted that as a highwayman he had “preformed many notable exploits,” and that though he occasionally “got inclosed within the hard gripe of the Law” he was always able to escape unscathed. Flamboyant and daring criminals rarely had long careers in the eighteenth century, liable as they were to meet a bullet or the rope, and Ayers was no exception. He was caught and tried, and “the proofs ran so strong against him, that in spite of money and friends (which in his case were never wanting) he was Capitally convicted.”17
Some portion of Ayers’ luck held, however, and instead of execution the restless apprentice was sentenced to transportation to India as a soldier in the East India Company. In Bengal, Ayers quickly reverted to form and once more plied his trade as a “Gentleman Collector of the Highways.” After twice being arrested on suspicion of robbery in Calcutta, Ayers was transferred to Madras in hopes that a new locale would temper his criminal tendencies. The transfer did not, however, have the desired effect. Ayers found army pay to be insufficient to support his lifestyle and so decided to desert from the British forces in favor of those of Haidar Ali, where he saw an opportunity to replace the low-paid drudgery of the British forces with the rich rewards of a turncoat. After stealing two horses and various weapons, the British traitor made his way to the camp of Haidar Ali, where that brilliant and bellicose ruler of Mysore found immediate use for the ruthless Ayers. Assigned to the province of Calicut, Ayers was said to have quelled a rebellion by the inhabitants of the region by massacring those who dared to challenge his authority. As Eliza Fay learned, “the least punishment inflicted by him was cutting off the noses and ears of those miserable wretches, whose hard fate subjected them to his tyranny. In short a volume would not contain half the enormities perpetrated by this disgrace to human nature.”18
That Eliza Fay and her husband now found themselves at the mercy of such a villain was the direct result of the British practice and policy of criminal transportation, which saw criminals of various stripes shipped out across the sea to populate, labor, and fight in the far corners of the British Empire. Captain Ayers was without doubt one of the most ruthless and influential British deserters, but he was hardly unique. With low pay, harsh discipline, and little loyalty to the country that had banished them, British soldiers, especially those pressed into service, regularly exchanged a British commander for an Indian or French one. Among Haidar Ali’s troops stationed in Calicut alone there were at least two further British deserters. Eliza Fay encountered one solicitous turncoat who, on “seeing a country-woman in such distress,” offered to find her an umbrella to protect her from the drenching rain that so often soaked the Malabar Coast. Also among the Mysorean forces at Calicut were a Captain West and a Portuguese officer named Pereira, both of whom had abandoned their countries’ armies for service to Haidar Ali. Prisoner though he was, Anthony Fay himself was offered a commission as an officer by Sardar Ali Khan, Haidar Ali’s local commander, an offer he steadfastly refused.19
As surprising as these scenes might first appear, European mercenaries had been a fixture of the princely courts of India for centuries. When Vasco de Gama landed at Cali
cut in 1498 following his pioneering voyage around the African continent, he found Italian soldiers were already serving in the armies of the local rajas. Such service was clearly tempting, and when de Gama departed from Malabar he did so without two of his men, who had taken the opportunity to abscond and seek employment in the armies of India. So attractive was defection that by 1565 one Portuguese chronicler claimed as many as 2,000 Europeans were serving as mercenaries in native courts, with the number rising to 5,000 by the dawn of the seventeenth century. As the French and British expanded their interests in India, large numbers of their soldiers followed the Portuguese lead into the princely armies. The British tended to flock to the forces of the Mughal sultans and the Muslim rulers of the Deccan plateau in south-central India, where they joined “Firingi,” or foreign, regiments. Indeed, so many French and British soldiers flooded into the imperial capital of Delhi, that a special suburb, “Firingi Pura” or Foreigners Town, had to be built just to accommodate them. These men were required to convert to Islam and undergo circumcision, a heavy price that thousands were nonetheless willing to pay.20
Most of the Europeans who deserted to join Indian armies were marginal figures, who saw in the dazzling wealth of Indian courts the chance to make their fortunes. All sorts of European soldiers turned renegade, but gunners and cavalrymen, who possessed skills coveted by Indian rulers, were in the best position to find lucrative employment. The life of a European soldier was often wretched, with meager food, poor living conditions, and dismal wages. For such “scum of the earth,” to use the Duke of Wellington’s acid phrase, the appeal of service in Indian armies was readily apparent: higher wages, more regular pay, and better living conditions. Beyond mere monetary gain, Indian society also possessed a multitude of attractions for the weary, brutalized soldier. Some were attracted by the ubiquitous practice of concubinage and polygamy among the native elite, while others, used to the endless religious strife back home, found the religious freedom and syncretism offered by Indian society deeply appealing.
Before the more restrictive dictates that began to emerge in the aftermath of the American War, the lines between European and Indian society were more open and fluid, with soldiers and merchants in both Indian and European service assimilating to local customs, local dress, local languages, and local religions. Many took Indian wives or mistresses and fathered mixed-race children, living out their days in subcontinental contentment. Thomas Legge, an eighteenth-century Irish soldier of fortune from Ulster, became so enamored of Indian alchemy and mystic religion that he set himself up as a fakir, choosing to live naked in an abandoned tomb in the Thar desert of Rajasthan.21
George Thomas, another Irish soldier, assimilated with a touch more grandeur. Like so many in the late eighteenth century, Thomas did not choose to go to India, but had been taken by a press gang and forced into naval service. He chafed at the rough discipline and restricted opportunities on offer for a poor sailor, so when his ship anchored at Madras in 1781, he went rogue, deserted the navy, and made his way into the service of the wealthy Begum Samru, the ruler of the short-lived principality of Sardhana near Delhi and herself the widow of a mercenary captain from Luxembourg. Thomas was a dynamic and ambitious soldier and eventually created his own kingdom in Haryana, west of Delhi. From his capital at Hansi, Thomas, now styled Jehaz Sahib, minted coins, built a palace, and acquired a harem, until, in 1801, he was driven out of his self-made kingdom by a force led by another European mercenary, Pierre Cuillier-Perron, a French naval deserter who rose to become commander of the forces of Mahadaji Scindia, the Maratha ruler of Gwalior. So fully had the “rajah from Tipperary” assimilated that he dictated his memoirs in Persian, having largely forgotten his native tongue. His bi-racial son, Jan Thomas, would go on to have an illustrious career as an Urdu poet in Mughal Delhi.22
Given these temptations, it would have come as no surprise to the British authorities that deported criminals might once more turn to crime. But it must certainly have been a surprise to find, leading the war now waged against them in southern India, an English criminal whom the British themselves had transported to India. By 1779, the military crises spreading across the globe created a heightened need to look everywhere for men, to scour even the prisons for potential recruits, willing or not. As it transpired, it was also a time of fluid loyalties, a time when allegiances could easily be, and often were, cast aside and replaced by new ones. In America and in India, the lines between British and American, British and French, British and Indian, were as yet amorphous and unfixed, and while the colonies sought to win their independence and Britain to hold on to an empire, most individuals sought only to survive and profit.
The victories at Plassey and Buxar had solidified and formalized the British foothold in India, yet war continued to plague the subcontinent throughout the last quarter of the eighteenth century. While Patriots and Redcoats clashed on the streets of Boston and the fields of Lexington and Concord, equally momentous encounters were taking place in South Asia that would help to shape the British Empire just as surely as the events in North America. The victories of Clive and Coote in the 1750s and 1760s had expanded British dominion over large swaths of the old Mughal Empire. The magnificent empire of Babur, Akbar the Great, and Shah Jahan was rapidly becoming a shadow of its former glory, crumbling under its own weight and British rapacity. Trouble, however, now came from dynamic areas of the subcontinent that had long been free from the grasp of Mughal power. Disputes over territory and treaties with the Maratha Empire and the Kingdom of Mysore led to those states creating alliances with the French, and so when war with France broke out in 1778, war in southern India was not long in coming.
With wars erupting with Mysore in 1767 and 1780, in Rohilkhand in 1773, and with the Maratha Confederacy in 1775, and lasting on and off until the early nineteenth century, the East India Company was in desperate need of more soldiers to protect their interests and project their growing authority. Armed conflict with the American colonies, and eventually with France in 1778, however, left British manpower stretched paper-thin and made willing and able volunteers hard to come by. Unlike many other European nations, Britain had no formal system of conscription, as such a practice was deemed contrary to the rights and liberties of the British people. Thus, the first strategy to ensure a steady supply of recruits was through cash incentives.
The most effective measures taken to induce volunteers were the Recruiting Acts of 1778 and 1779. Passed in response to the deepening crisis in North America and the expected entrance of France into the war, these acts provided cash bonuses to volunteers in addition to regular army pay. The 1778 Act stipulated that volunteers were to receive a bonus of £3, a month’s wages for a craftsman of the period. In an attempt to sweeten the deal, the 1779 Recruiting Act upped the cash bonus to £3 and 3 shillings, and added a number of new benefits to veterans. Veterans, who could be discharged after five years if the war had ended, were given exemptions from normal statutory public services such as service on the highways, service as parish officers, and service in the militia. Furthermore, they were given the right to exercise any trade they wished in any place in Britain.23
The needs of the British army and the East India Company, however, far exceeded the number of men they were able to recruit through ordinary means. With willing men in short supply, crafty recruiters turned to more desperate measures. Starting in the 1770s, the army and East India Company turned to the courts for a ready, and captive, population of potential soldiers and sailors. With America closed as a dumping ground for convicts and with growing military needs, men convicted of capital offenses and eligible for transportation were offered the chance of serving in India or America instead of a criminal sentence.
The recruits gained in this way must have been of highly variable quality and indifferent commitment as the case of Captain Ayers readily attests. Yet, when faced with the alternatives of death or transportation to Australia, many convicts actively sought out and pleaded for a chance to serve
in India. Because many sentences of criminal transportation fail to list a destination, it is difficult to obtain a precise number of men transported as soldiers in East India Company service. Despite the patchy nature of the evidence, it seems as though this forced recruiting was relatively widespread. For instance, on one day in 1782 alone four separate men in four separate cases were sentenced to service with the East India Company army.24 The practice was common enough by 1775 that a soft-hearted private prosecutor could promise an apologetic defendant that “he would be as easy as he could; he would endeavor to send him for an East India soldier.” This method of punishment was thus well known among the general populace by the 1770s at the latest. However, East Indian army recruiting through transportation really began to expand in the 1780s, as the war against the colonies dragged on and the struggles with Mysore and the Marathas picked up steam.25
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