Cash bonuses and pardoned felonies were still not enough to meet the manpower needs of a tiny nation beset by war in the furthest corners of the globe. Britain thus turned to a widely denounced tactic, impressment. In port towns from Portsmouth to Providence, press gangs used intimidation and violence to coerce civilian sailors into joining the ranks of the Royal Navy. Such gangs were accused of a variety of dirty tricks—from rounding up drunks to bodily kidnapping unsuspecting seamen—and their violence was frequently met with resistance and even riots, but the world was at war and the British navy needed men, whatever the means, whatever the price. Contrary to later views of imperial self-confidence, in the late eighteenth century Britons were deeply conscious of their country’s small size and limited resources, constantly fretting about whether they had sufficient numbers to administer an ever-growing empire. Chronically short of skilled sailors, the British government turned to what historians have called “the evil necessity,” coerced naval service. Gangs of sailors led by a naval officer, and often backed by local muscle, scoured port towns for skilled sailors, using threats and violence to force them into service until death came or peace was reached. This was not a temporary practice, but official imperial policy, and between 1688 and 1815 roughly half of the navy at any one time was made up of impressed sailors. In all, approximately 250,000 men were coerced into naval service over the course of the eighteenth century. With its far-flung theaters, the American War saw a massive expansion of naval impressment, and even the entirely unprecedented extension of the practice of impressment to the army. After 1778, local justices of the peace were given the authority to round up all “able bodied, idle and disorderly persons” for military service.26
Although the practice of army impressment was curtailed in 1780, the behavior and tactics of army recruiters remained the subject of much criticism. In contemporary records, East India Company recruiters were frequently referred to as “kidnappers” for their underhanded tactics toward the poor, the homeless, and the drunk. As late as 1789, a man accused of theft claimed as his defense that he had been “trepanned by the East India Company’s serjeant” and forced onto a ship. When he became ill on board, the unsympathetic sergeant abandoned him back onshore with no money, forcing him to steal to eat. Many of the poor men who made their way through the courts gave similar accounts of unscrupulous army recruiters. In one such instance in 1795 a constable was attacked by a mob of men who took him for an army recruiter come to kidnap drunk men to serve in India. As the war in America was going badly for the British, there was a desperate need for more and more soldiers. It was reported that some agricultural and industrial laborers were so terrified at the growing prospect of impressment that they intentionally cut off their right thumb and forefinger, hoping that such mutilation would save them from forced military service.27
Eliza Fay must have felt something akin to the sense of dread experienced by the hundreds of men pressed or pardoned into service in British India. While she had chosen to go out to India of her own volition, as she stood on the deck of the Nathalia in the driving November rain she could not have been at all sure when or if her captivity in Calicut would end. She was now at the mercy of Haidar Ali and his allies, something she had not dreamt was possible only days prior. She could not fathom that “any power on this Continent, however independent, would have dared to treat English subjects with such cruelty.” In the 1770s it seems that many powers across the world were taking a stand for independence with little regard for the feelings of “English subjects.”28
Unlike many of the reluctant redcoats, however, Eliza’s tribulations were only temporary. She and her husband had been escorted through the churning surf to the beach where they were immediately surrounded by “all the mob of Calicut, who seemed to take pleasure in the beholding the distress of white people, those constant objects of their envy and detestation.” Whether the crowd was truly basking in the Schadenfreude of the spectacle or merely curious is unclear, but the Fays went unmolested on their way to meet the Governor of Calicut, Sardar Ali Khan, a brother-in-law of Haidar Ali. The governor seemed uninterested in the sodden couple as he smoked his hookah, only stopping to order them to be detained in the now deserted British factory where they spent an uncomfortable evening in the company of lizards, scorpions, and centipedes.
The Fays were shortly thereafter joined in captivity by their fellow English passengers who had been arrested after the blowhard Hare had, in a fit of patriotic feeling toward Ayers, told the turncoat the truth about the prisoners’ nationality. The prisoners were next moved from the British factory to the closer confines of the Calicut fort, where they constantly had to contend with standing water, rats, and bats. After a month of waiting in this damp and pestilential prison, all of the English people were given leave to depart Calicut by land. With salvation in sight, the Fays were delivered another cruel blow when they alone were denied the right to leave. And so, on December 5, the Fays bade farewell to the other passengers of the ill-stared Nathalia and began to contemplate the desperate nature of their situation.
With hopes of being granted free passage out of Calicut fading by the day, and fears of violence at the hands of their captors growing, Anthony Fay began to take steps to procure their escape. The Fays first sought the assistance of a local man named Isaac, a wealthy Jewish merchant who held many contracts and much sway with Haidar Ali and Sardar Ali Khan. Eliza came to see Isaac as a father figure and sent a loving description of him to her friends in England. “Isaac is a fine venerable old man,” Eliza wrote, “about eighty-five with a long white beard; his complexion by no means dark, and his countenance benign yet majestic; I could look at him till I almost fancied that he resembled the Patriarch whose name he bears.” Isaac’s intercession failed to secure their immediate release, but he was able to secure funds for the Fays from the British Governor of Tellicherry (modern Thalassery), a city recently seized from the French, 40 miles north of Calicut. With the newly acquired money, Anthony approached a Portuguese friar who promised to obtained false papers to aid the Fays’ escape. The false pass listed the Fays as two Frenchmen traveling to Mahe, and so with a boatman bribed and with Anthony disguised in sailor’s dress and Eliza in a man’s nankeen jacket, striped trousers and cap, the couple waited for the signal to depart. For days they waited in ready expectation for their flight from Calicut, but as it transpired the friar was willing to take their money but unwilling to risk actually aiding them in their escape.29
A “very melancholy Christmas-day” and New Year passed and the Fays remained confined in Calicut with only the company of Isaac and the much-loathed Captain Ayers. Eliza’s fears for their safety were continually heightened by the conduct of Ayres. According to Eliza:
The visits we receive from Ayers are terrible trials for one who loathes dissimulation as I do. This wretch has once or twice mentioned a cow that annoyed him by entering the little garden, or paddock, in which it appears his house is placed; this morning he entered the factory with his scimitar in his hand unsheathed and bloody and with an expression of diabolical joy informed me that he had just caught the animal . . . You cannot imagine how sweetly the sword did the business; my very heart shuddered with horror . . . I doubt not he would murder me with as much pleasure as he killed the cow30
Salvation came at last in February 1780. After the Fays had spent three terrifying months in captivity, Isaac finally succeeded in procuring their release. The merchant had intervened with Sardar Ali Khan and obtained for the couple a pass to travel by one of his own ships to Cochin and freedom. On February 18, Eliza and Anthony Fay began the last leg of their original journey to Bengal and the burgeoning bureaucracy of the ever-expanding British Empire. Isaac surely deserved the touching tribute to him Eliza gave to posterity.
To him we are indebted for the inestimable gift of liberty. No words can I find adequate to the expression of my gratitude. In whatever part of the world and under whatever circumstances my lot may be cast; whether we shall have the
happiness to reach in safety the place to which all our hopes and wishes tend, or are doomed to experience again the anxieties and sufferings of captivity; whether I shall pass the remainder of my days in the sunshine of prosperity, or exposed to the chilling blasts of adversity; the name of Isaac the Jew will ever be associated with the happiest recollections of my life; and while my heart continues to beat, and warm blood animates my mortal frame, no distance of time or space can efface from my mind, the grateful remembrance of what we owe this most worthy of men.31
Eliza could scarcely have realized just how fortunate she was to escape from Malabar in the early months of 1780, just as the war between Britain, France, and Mysore was heating up. Just a few months after the Fays’ flight from Calicut, Haidar Ali invaded the Carnatic with a massive force of perhaps 80,000 men. Haidar had designs on Madras, the most important British possession in southern India and a constant thorn in the side of Mysore’s expansionist ambitions. In response to the threat posed by the large Mysorean force, Colonel William Ballie was sent from his post at Guntur to join the forces of Sir Hector Munro at Conjeveram, near Madras, to create a strong unified front against Haidar’s invasion. Haidar knew that his odds of success would drop precipitously if the two British forces in the area managed to combine, so he sent Tipu—already a gifted commander and tactician in his own right—to intercept Baillie.
The two forces met at Pollilur on September 10, 1780 with disastrous consequences for the British. Their defeat was near total, the first major setback for British forces since their defeats by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in Child’s War in the late seventeenth century. Baillie’s force had entered the battle with about 4,000 men. When the fighting ended, there were only about 200 British soldiers and 50 officers, including Colonel Baillie himself, left to take prisoner. The prisoners were marched to the Mysorean capital of Srirangapattam where they would spend the duration of the war with a growing number of other British prisoners of war. Not far from where Baillie and his men were imprisoned, Tipu would commission a massive painting of his triumph at Pollilur depicting British soldiers being cut down by Tipu’s triumphant cavalry.
With one British army already in tatters, and Hector Munro hesitant to leave the environs of Madras, Sir Eyre Coote, the hero of the Seven Years’ War in India, was sent from Calcutta with reinforcements. Coote had more luck than Baillie, winning victories over Haidar at Porto Novo, Sholinghur, and at Pollilur, but none were decisive. Less than a year later, Madras received the unwelcome news that the American War had expanded ever further: the Dutch Republic had declared war on Britain in aid of America and France. The Dutch bridgehead in India had been in almost terminal decline for decades, but they still held possessions on the Coromandel Coast and the beleaguered British could ill afford to fight yet another enemy in India. Nonetheless, Lord George Macartney, recently arrived from a posting in Grenada and now in command of Madras, welcomed the opportunity to drive both French and Dutch competition off the Coromandel Coast and into the Bengal Sea. In November, the British succeeded in capturing the Dutch Indian capital at Negapatam with the critical aid of the navy.
British gains in Coromandel, however, were quickly threatened by the arrival of the French navy under Admiral Bailli de Suffren in early 1782. The subsequent naval battles between de Suffren and British Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Hughes, and siege of Vandavasi by a combined French-Mysore force, were inconclusive, but with their Madras forces under heavy pressure from the French, Dutch, and Mysore, the British decided it was prudent to open up a second front, thus removing some of Mysore’s troops from Coromandel. Troops were therefore sent from British Bombay to Tellicherry on the south-western coast, from where they were to invade Malabar. Haidar responded by sending Tipu with an army to oppose the British and defend Malabar. True to form, Tipu had the Bombay army on the ropes when in December 1782, everything changed.32
1. Eyewitness to the shockwaves of the American Revolution, Ignatius Sancho was one of many Britons who felt that the world was spinning out of control. The war brought rampant fears of invasion, revolution, treason, terrorism, and disorder to British shores, precipitating an authoritarian reaction in British politics and criminal justice.
2. Initially a protest against wartime concessions granted to Catholics, the Gordon Riots of 1780 quickly transformed into a week-long assault on symbols of the new penal regime. The burning of Newgate Prison, a well-known symbol of law and order, horrified many Britons and encouraged a growing movement for more stringent legal reform.
3. Britain’s precarious position both domestically and internationally provided an opportunity for Ireland ’s Patriot movement. Originally formed as a means of protecting Ireland from American raids and French invasion, the Irish Volunteers (shown here parading in Dublin) used the threat of force to pressure Britain into imperial concessions, including an independent Irish Parliament.
4. The gains secured by the Irish Patriot movement were short-lived. The American War exposed fault-lines between Protestants and Catholics and reformers and revolutionaries. This would stall further reform and increase sectarian violence, culminating in a failed rebellion in 1798 and union with Britain in 1800, parodied here by James Gillray.
5. Young Captain Horatio Nelson in 1781 with Fort San Juan in the background. The scene of Nelson’s first heroics, the British attempt to divide the Spanish Empire by seizing Central America proved a disaster. Spain’s efforts to maintain its far-flung possessions, however, would prove costly.
6. As indigenous Andeans chafed at Spanish reforms designed to pay for war with Britain, Inca genealogies became increasingly popular. Tupac Amaru II, who led an uprising against Spain in 1780, consulted a genealogist to solidify his claim as heir to the Inca. His rebellion failed, but it helped sow the seeds of later independence movements.
7. The American War gave cover to Austria and Russia’s eastern ambitions and allowed Catherine the Great to seize Crimea as part of a crucial step in her construction of a maritime empire. As this contemporary cartoon suggests, the Ottomans, abandoned by Britain and France, held the contest’s worst hand.
8. The view of Calcutta and the Hooghly River that greeted Eliza Fay in 1780. Fay and her husband had unwittingly sailed into trouble when they arrived in South India the year before, where the ferociously anti-British kingdom of Mysore had allied with France and opened the Indian theater of the American War.
9. Dean Mahomet was one of the thousands of Indian sepoys recruited into the army of the British East India Company in the eighteenth century. Like many Indians, Mahomet saw British service as a pathway to success not terribly different from that followed by his ancestors in the service of the Mughals.
10. The loser at Yorktown, after the war Cornwallis became a proponent of British expansion in India as governor-general. With French finances in tatters, Mysore was left alone to face a resurgent East India Company. Cornwallis’s 1792 victory over Tipu Sultan confirmed that the American War had tipped the balance of power in India.
11–12. With American ports now closed to the convict trade, in 1788 Britain sent its first fleet of convicts to colonize the recently explored Botany Bay. Bennelong, a kidnapped Eora man, became the most important indigenous informant in the early days of British settlement in Australia. The site of Bennelong’s house is now dominated by the Sydney Opera House.
13–14. In desperation, several British commanders offered freedom to American slaves who joined the fight against the colonies. Thousands of enslaved people escaped to British lines during the war, and many fought valiantly against their enslavers. After the war, more than a thousand black loyalists would re-settle in the new colony of Sierra Leone.
15–16. Hoping to loosen the tightly controlled China trade at Canton, after the war Britain sent its first diplomatic mission to China in 1792. George Macartney’s ill-fated embassy would mark a sea-change in British attitudes towards China, helping to rationalize an aggressive policy in the nineteenth century.
Haidar Ali had b
een ill for some time, but still, his death on December 7 came as an inconvenient surprise to a kingdom embroiled in war. Attempts were made to keep the great ruler’s death a secret for as long as possible while the succession to the throne was ironed out. Tipu Sultan was the eldest and most powerful of Haidar’s sons, but as Haidar’s rule had been built on conquest rather than inheritance, there was no guarantee that he would succeed to the throne. Still in the field when he heard the news, Tipu rushed to Chittoor to successfully secure his claim. In Haidar Ali the British had found a determined enemy, but in his son and heir, they would find something much more dangerous: an ambitious, expansionist, forward-thinking ruler with an implacable hatred of the British and a grim determination to see their influence in India brought to a bloody end.
Britain’s territorial gains in India had come slowly, over the course of decades, but Tipu Sultan was fooled by neither the slow place of British imperial expansion nor the Brits’ protestations that they only had commercial ambitions. In a letter to the Nizam of Hyderabad, Tipu had warned his neighbor, “Know you not the customs of the English? Wherever they fix their talons they contrive little by little to work themselves into the whole management of affairs.”33 Certain of the danger posed by the British, Tipu himself fully embraced Mysore’s anti-British image. Once on the throne, he did everything he could to encourage his reputation as Britain’s unflinching adversary, defiantly proclaiming that he “would rather live a day as a tiger than a lifetime as a sheep.” He commissioned a life-sized automaton of a tiger ravaging a British soldier and paintings depicting his and his father’s victories over the British. One observer reported that his capital at Sriringapatam “was ornamented with paintings, such as, elephants whirling Europeans in the air—tigers seizing whole battalions of English Sepoys—five or six English officers supplicating for mercy at the feet of one of his troopers—and companies flying frightened at the charge of ten or twenty of his horse.” Everywhere, and in every medium imaginable, Tipu presented Mysore as a vigorous, vengeful predator and the British as cowardly, weak, and ineffectual.34
To Begin the World Over Again Page 33
