A Qajar Persian copy of a British painting of the assault.
Wellesley as Lieutenant Colonel, aged c. 26, in the 33rd Regiment. Portrait by John Hoppner.
Wellesley had first examined the city and its fortifications
from the south-east of the island on the afternoon of the 3rd. Even from five
miles away the place was impressive. On the downstream side of the city the
twin white minarets of the Mosque rose slender and tall against a clear blue
sky. To the west the single, bulkier tower of the Hindoo Temple of Vishnu was
equally magnificent. From afar the whole island was beautiful, a white jewel in
a lush green setting. On the afternoon of the 4th Wellesley came close enough
to make out the defences around the city. The walls were chiefly made of solid
granite well cut and mortared with some occasional brick. The place was large
and obviously strong. Through his telescope Wellesley counted nearly a hundred
guns on the south face and in the south cavaliers alone. But the design was of
the Eastern type; the defenders could not deliver flanking fire against an
assaulting column, save imperfectly from cavaliers.
Colonel Wellesley already knew Harris’s siege plan. The
combined armies were to march past the island on the south side of the Cauvery,
turn north and then approach Seringapatam from the west. If all went well, the
British would establish a secure fortified camp and then deliver an assault
across the South Cauvery against the city itself which occupied the western tip
of the island. There was to be no siege in the sense of cutting off the place
from the surrounding country; the island was too large and the Mysore armies
too powerful and mobile. The selection of the point of attack had already been
made tentatively, though it was to remain a well-kept secret. Anywhere on the
west or north faces, however, would have the advantage that a single attack
could be immediately decisive. If an assault was to be made on the south or
east, the British armies would first have to gain a foothold on the island.
Tipoo’s army was known to have established a line of earthworks entirely
surrounding the area.
On the night of 4 April Harris sent a probing force under
Baird, the brigade commander of the day, to see what lay in the area of the
permanent British camp and between it and Seringapatam. This thrust was not
opposed and at first progressed well in a bright moonlit night. This force
crossed an aqueduct that was to play an important part in the siege and got
into a wooded area … where the entire force lost its collective sense of
direction and very nearly retreated north-east towards Seringapatam. The
mistake was rectified by an officer under Baird’s command who later became an
astronomer and a surveyor of note and who could tell direction by the stars.
Some Mysore cavalry that blundered into Baird’s column was severely handled.
On the 5th the combined armies completed their long march.
Since crossing the border the main British force had covered 153·5 miles
(measured by the perambulator) in thirty-one days (twenty-three of them
marching days). Harris had managed to negotiate a lot of difficult terrain in
the presence of a numerically superior enemy whose cavalry was probably the
best in India. Losses in men, material and even in animals had been remarkably
small considering the vast mass of baggage and the enormous siege train. In
spite of pilfering on the way, Harris still had, for instance, 36,395 18-pound
shot which required more than 6,000 bullocks.
The area which Harris had chosen, apparently months before,
for his enormous semi-fortified camp was south of the Cauvery and west of the
island; it was covered by the river to the north and by broken ground to the
west. The C-in-C placed the Nizam’s army, now completely controlled by Colonel
Wellesley, on the south. Thus Wellesley would be responsible for the long
unprotected southern flank. He did what he could to establish a line of posts
on the afternoon of the 5th.
Harris had shown the enemy the general direction from which
he would attack. The ‘siege’ would obviously resolve itself into a race between
British operations and the breaking of the monsoon. Tipoo or his French
advisers would surely realize that anything they could do to hold Harris back,
like defending the line of the aqueduct, would win time. Harris had been using
the ‘brigade commander of the day’ for special services and would continue to
use him regardless of who he happened to be. The appointment alternated between
six officers in his army; as the joint camp was established, Wellesley was to
be a seventh, although he would continue in ‘advisory’ command of the Nizam’s
contingent. He was to follow Baird in this rotation.
Early in the afternoon of the 5th Harris ordered Wellesley
to deliver a sunset and night attack to clear the village of Sultanpetah, the
aqueduct and ‘Sultanpetah Tope’. The last of these objectives was not precisely
defined, but more of this presently. Colonel Wellesley was to use his King’s
33rd supported by two of his EIC battalions, apparently the 1/11 and 2/11
Madras Native Infantry.
Lieutenant-Colonel Shawe with the King’s 12th supported by
the 1/1 and the 2/3 Madras Native Infantry was to advance in a similar
direction towards the same aqueduct, but from Harris’s camp rather than from
the Hyderabad position. Shawe’s objective was also the aqueduct and a village
contained within a loop of it.
When Baird had penetrated this area the night before, most
of Tipoo’s army was in trenches south-east of the capital still waiting to be
attacked there. But early on the 5th they withdrew to the island and then moved
south-west as far as the aqueduct from which they were firing rockets into the
British camp during the afternoon.
The orders to Wellesley and Shawe seem simple, but they were
not. No one then had a precise knowledge of the area into which the two
commands were to penetrate. At that time the aqueduct originated miles to the
west at Kanambaddy; in April 1799 it was about fifteen yards wide and as much
as six feet deep. The aqueduct, or nullah as Wellesley called it, remains
confusing because it is located on top of high ground, not at the bottom of a
valley. There are still incredibly small rice fields and a system of tiny
canals leading outward and down from the aqueduct on both sides.
Sultanpetah, the village, was south by south-west of
Seringapatam. It is marked definitely on some contemporary plans but not on
all. In his Diary Harris refers to it as a ruined village only. By inference
Sultanpetah Tope, although not marked on any contemporary map, is the wooded
area north-west of the village which is shown on most diagrams. At the risk of
confusing everyone, I should add that later on during the siege the tope in
question was known as the Engineer’s Tope. A careful investigation of this area
today is inconclusive. I have found no village or ruins where Sultanpetah once
stood. The Tope is gone also and there is hardly a tree anywhere around the
aqueduct.
Wellesley appears to have been on his horse establishing the
eastern end of his line of posts when he received his orders for the attack. He
did not know precisely what he was to do and hastened to ask Harris for
clarification. He said, ‘I do not know where you mean… do me the favour to meet
me in front of the lines… when you get possession of the nullah you have the
tope.’ There is no record of Harris complying with this request, but Wellesley
could not protest further. He knew all about subordinates who created
unnecessary problems about details. At sundown he moved east from his camp with
the 33rd in column supported by two of his EIC battalions. He personally rode
at the head of this force and ran into hostile rocket fire as he approached the
aqueduct. The 33rd went up to the watercourse with fixed bayonets and forced
the enemy to retreat down the other side. There was some fighting, but
casualties were light. Wellesley had his section of the aqueduct, but it was
clear now that the Sultanpetah Tope was on the Seringapatam side of the
embanked nullah.
Wellesley led forward the flank companies of the 33rd, with
the battalion companies at first close behind under Major Shee, a contentious
and alcoholic officer. It was dark as pitch below the aqueduct in the tope, but
the Europeans may have been silhouetted against the skyline for they received a
straggling but heavy fire. There was nothing to do but press on even though the
immediate surroundings could not have been worse. Wellesley and his soldiers
ran into tiny canals, dykes, trees and clumps of bamboo. They had no guides and
no idea what their area looked like in daylight because the aqueduct was higher
than the country on either side of it.
On the other hand, Tipoo’s rocket boys and musket men knew
the ground and could probably see better. British pupils were being contracted
by Mysore rockets which came arching through the blackness towards them. The
light infantry of Mysore would have been at a hopeless disadvantage against the
33rd in daylight, but here they were formidable. They delivered at least one
savage hand-to-hand attack and killed Lieutenant Fitzgerald with a bayonet
thrust; eight men from the Grenadier company were captured, but perhaps not all
at the same time. The flank companies of the 33rd were blundering around in
darkness and became separated from the rest of the battalion. Major Shee pulled
back his battalion companies across the aqueduct although he may have
penetrated entirely across the tope and recrossed the aqueduct at another
place. The Sepoys in support never got into action at all. We really have no
idea exactly what happened; I believe that Wellesley was never sure about it
himself. Shee and five battalion companies finally reappeared about a mile to
the north and joined Shawe. Captain Francis Ralph West and some of his
Grenadier company were so badly lost that they went south into Wellesley’s main
picket in the village of Sultanpetah.
For a while at least, Wellesley wandered about either alone
or in the company of a young engineer officer, Colin Mackenzie. The colonel had
been hit on the knee by a bullet, but was not badly wounded. Somehow he, or
they, found the way back to the aqueduct and re-crossed. Once reoriented,
Wellesley learnt as much as possible about his own attack and the one made by
Shawe. This officer and the King’s 12th had gone forward supported by two EIC
battalions at about the same time as Wellesley and the 33rd and much in the
same way. Shawe took his village without firing a shot and probably carried a
section of the aqueduct as well, although contemporary records do not agree.
Shawe’s two supporting EIC battalions, however, appear to
have run into perhaps imaginary trouble from the start; they probably received
hostile rocket fire from long range, fired back and then each mistook each
other for the enemy. The 2/3 Madras, temporarily under Major Colin Campbell,
‘paid no attention to orders’ and with their shooting killed their commanding
officer. The 1/1 Madras under Lieutenant-Colonel David Campbell did not do much
better. Neither battalion could be controlled, though Shawe tried and failed,
after which he returned to his own regiment. Major Shee with his five battalion
companies of the King’s 33rd came up during the night with Shawe and the King’s
12th about 10 o’clock. Shee’s part of the 33rd then apparently took unopposed
possession of a part of the aqueduct south-west of Shawe’s village and held it
for the rest of the night.
Once Wellesley had the information about Shawe, Shee and
most of the survivors of his own flank companies – Lieutenant Fitzgerald,
although mortally wounded, was carried back by some of his grenadiers – he
found his horse and rode to Harris’s headquarters to report his lack of
success. He reached headquarters about midnight, when Harris had neither
retired nor fallen asleep at his dining table. Harris recorded that the young
colonel ‘came to my tent in a good deal of agitation to say that he had not
carried the tope’.
The entire Sultanpetah Tope affair has been magnified out of
all proportion because it was the only action in which the Duke of Wellington
ever suffered a military reverse. Even at the time there were camp rumours;
Wellesley had not yet risen above professional jealousy. The victor of Waterloo
was later to defend his conduct at Sultanpetah Tope more vigorously, perhaps,
than was necessary. The whole thing was regrettable but relatively small; the
total casualties, including the eight prisoners, did not reach twenty-five.
I resist the obvious temptation to blame Harris more than
his subordinate. The line of the aqueduct is all that was militarily important.
To send the 33rd blundering down the other side in darkness just does not seem
to make sense, least of all after one has climbed about among postage-stamp
rice fields and Japanese garden canals by daylight in the same area 170 years
later. Neither at this time nor later did Wellesley try to shift his
responsibility to anyone else, but he did decide ‘never to attack an enemy who
is prepared and strongly posted, and whose posts have not been reconnoitred by
daylight’. Actually, he was not to undertake many more night operations during
his military career. What is more important, Wellesley would never again get
personally so far forward in an attack that he lost control of his force as a
whole. That night he probably fought with his own sword for one of the few
times in his career. He may have found the experience exhilarating because
almost certainly he handled the weapon well. But a man who fights cannot think
to maximum advantage.
On the morning of 6 April Harris had a clear idea of what
had occurred the night before because of Wellesley’s midnight visit. On the
evenings of 4 and 5 April the British had failed to get and hold the area
between their camp and Seringapatam, or even any considerable part of it.
Harris told Barry Close to lay on another attack to carry the entire aqueduct
and Sultanpetah Tope. A fresh King’s infantry battalion was to be used, the
Scotch Brigade, supported by two new EIC units and four 12-pounder brass field
guns. Wellesley was again to have command. Cotton with his King’s 25th Dragoons
and the 2nd Native Cavalry was in support on the open right flank. Wallace with
the grenadier company of the King’s 74th Foot and four companies of Sepoys were
to go forward on the north next to the newly established post of Shawe.
Close was a remarkably good adjutant-general and immediately
dispatched the necessary orders to most of the units involved. Unfortunately
there was a delay in sending off an order to Wellesley. The assaulting column
was ready to move out and the preliminary artillery fire had already begun. But
Wellesley had not yet arrived. Harris probably considered giving the command to
Baird who was on hand as a spectator and perhaps also because the Scotch
Brigade was one of Baird’s three battalions. The C-in-C, however, either did
not give it, or if he did, countermanded the order before Baird moved out.
Suddenly a cloud of dust was seen approaching: Wellesley had Diomed in a full
gallop. He had just received his orders.
The daylight attack then went off without a hitch. The sight
of the British troops assembling and the preliminary artillery fire – in India
12-pounder field guns often used shell – caused the enemy to begin their
retreat. Wellesley took the entire aqueduct and the Sultanpetah Tope area
without the loss of a man.
It should be mentioned that there exists another version of
this incident in the continuing Baird–Wellesley confrontation. Baird married an
heiress who after his death hired a biographer to set down her own view of her
husband. Mr Hook, who is now known to be the author, says that Wellesley was
late – as he was – and that Harris ordered Baird to take over the attack. Baird
is said to have refused, however, out of kindness for Wellesley’s feelings
after his unpleasant experience of the night before. No soldier, least of all
Baird who was particularly noted for his fiery personal courage, would act like
this under any circumstances. Everyone expected a tough fight in the tope and
if Baird had been ordered to go in, he would have gone claymore in hand.
Harris’s army now occupied the irregular line of the
aqueduct and the part of the ground between this line and Seringapatam. After
less than 48 hours the British were in a strong position and would soon make it
stronger. The village taken by Shawe on the night of the 5th was made the key
to a sort of ‘first line’ of siege works. Shawe’s post became the forward
command post of the British army and was thereafter occupied by the brigade
commander of the day. A battery of two iron 12-pounders was established behind the
bank of the nullah or aqueduct at this point. They had a fine field of fire
which included various enemy positions west of the South Cauvery; Shawe’s post
was about 1,500 yards from the north-west corner of the Seringapatam
fortifications.
After the daylight attack of 6 April Wellesley had more time
for his own string of posts which extended from Sultanpetah in a flat arc about
eleven miles long to the Cauvery; they were held by more than half his entire
force of infantry, cavalry and artillery.
Even before the aqueduct and Sultanpetah Tope were carried
Harris sent Floyd with a mixed force of cavalry, infantry and artillery to
fetch in Stuart and his Bombay army. This army consisted of the King’s 19th
Dragoons, the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Native Cavalry, the King’s 73rd Foot, the 1st,
2nd, and 3rd Bengal Volunteers and twenty field guns. Floyd and Stuart met at
Periapatam on the 10th and moved towards Seringapatam. Throughout this movement
Floyd’s army was observed by masses of enemy cavalry waiting for an opportunity
to do damage to the British units, but none was presented. At precisely 7.30
p.m. on the 13th, Floyd fired two guns in succession. According to a code
established before Floyd left the British camp at Seringapatam this signal
meant: ‘I am one day’s march away.’ Exactly ten minutes later, Harris replied
with two guns also fired in succession which meant: ‘Message received and
understood.’ The next morning Harris took the King’s 25th Dragoons, the 2nd
Native Cavalry and some Mogul mounted units under Meer Allum and marched
towards Floyd and Stuart to prevent any last-minute effort by Tipoo to defeat
the British armies in detail. All arrived safely in camp at sundown on the
14th.
After a day of rest Stuart and his Bombay army were ordered
to the north side of the Cauvery. They crossed well to the west of
Seringapa-tam Island and then marched back eastward on the north side of the
river. On the 16th their camp was established to the west of Seringapa-tam
Island, but Stuart pushed forward patrols towards what he knew to be his future
combat area. Harris now controlled both banks of the river west of
Seringapatam. Batteries could be mounted south of the Cauvery without fear of
enfilade fire from the north side. The time between 6 April and 16 April had
been spent in moving solidly into the main camp area, properly storing the
siege train and assembling siege materials. On the 17th the British armies
delivered sharp attacks both north and south of the river.
Let us first consider the southern attack. Here the
situation remained essentially as it was on the afternoon of the 6th. EIC
Colonel William Gent, Harris’s able chief engineer, had fortified the village
between the aqueduct and the Cauvery that had been taken by Wallace, Shawe’s
post, the line of the aqueduct, a post in front of the Engineer’s Tope (the old
Sultanpetah Tope), and Sultanpetah itself. The enemy had moved forward in
strength, however, and still occupied a third branch of the Cauvery, known as
the Little Cauvery.
At sunset on the 17th Major Macdonald led the 2/12 Madras
Native Infantry out from Shawe’s post and carried the north-south stretch of
the Little Cauvery. He struck by surprise and so swiftly that the issue was
never in doubt. The Little Cauvery here was virtually a natural parallel for
500 yards. It became known as Macdonald’s Post and was situated only 1,000
yards from the main defences of Seringapatam.
At about the same time Stuart, aided by the King’s 74th and
one EIC battalion from Harris’s army, attacked on the north side of the river
and took possession of a ruined village and the old redoubt at Agra, or
Agrarum. The Bombay army worked all night to throw up trenches around the whole
position and to erect a battery according to a 1792 survey to enfilade the west
face of the Seringapatam defences. The labour for the battery was mostly
wasted, however, because daylight revealed it to be too far west.
Before continuing with the siege, we should briefly consider
what at the time appeared to be an extremely serious shortage of food. An
accurate check of all grain, biscuit and meat available showed only enough to
provide half rations for all fighting men for twenty-three days. Only a few
days before the army was thought to have enough for full rations for
forty-three days. In spite of some captures and supplies brought by Stuart and
Floyd, the food supply had shrunk by thousands of bullock loads, and rice in
particular appears to have been stolen in large quantities. Harris found
himself in the position of having to capture Seringapatam quickly or give up
the attempt as Cornwallis had done in 1791. On 22 April, however, the food
situation was better; there was enough until the middle of May.1 Floyd had
already gone off with a second force similar, but not identical to the one he
had taken to bring back Stuart. He was moving to Cauveryporam to bring back
Read and Brown with the supplies they had collected.
The siege operations were being carried on by EIC Colonel William
Gent and his engineers, ably and unselfishly supported by George Harris. The
engineers were professionals with many years’ experience in India. There was an
ample siege train, a great number of Indian pioneers organized into four units,
some European pioneers (who were more effective with their greater size and
strength) and working parties from infantry units. The siege was carried
forward on scientific principles by men who had all they required, but who
realized that they could take no liberties with the opposition since the enemy
had Frenchmen who knew as much as they did. Their progress from step to step
was based on efficiency and security. Speed was secondary.
Macdonald’s capture of the South Cauvery on the night of the
17th had been improved. It was now connected with Shawe’s Post by a sap, or
covered way. An effort was made to establish a battery at the southern end of
Macdonald’s position, but Tipoo had established a fortified position in the
ruins of a powder mill on the bank of the Cauvery 300 yards in front of
Macdonald’s new line. The powder mill fort was taken by Sherbrooke (acting
major-general of the day) in a well delivered sunset attack by artillery,
pioneers, the King’s 73rd and a battalion of Bengal Sepoys. Casualties appear
to have been the almost unbelievable total of one man killed and four wounded
in the assaulting force to 250 killed among the defenders. As sometimes
happened in India, British audacity temporarily paralysed the enemy.
Lieutenant-Colonels Monypenny and St John of the 73rd and Gardiner of the EIC
Bengal Army distinguished themselves. During the night of the 20th the
engineers, pioneers and infantry working parties constructed a battery near the
powder mill and a parallel from behind it to the Little Cauvery. The battery
was armed with six 18-pounders, the best artillery of the time, early on the
morning of the 21st.
North of the stream Stuart was improving his position.
Shortly before sunset on the 22nd a new battery was laid out precisely in line
with the west face of the Seringapatam defences, but this activity led to a
considerable enemy reaction. First, heavy fire was brought on the British
position; later it was attacked in force with Lally’s old Corps of Frenchmen in
the lead. Stuart repulsed this assault with heavy losses to the enemy and
completed a new, properly located battery the next night.
Work now progressed steadily and securely on both sides of
the Cauvery. During the night of the 25th a four-gun battery was constructed at
the southern end of the diagonal trench extending from the rear of the powder
mill battery towards the Little Cauvery. Early the following morning it opened
against Tipoo’s cannon in the two round towers and the single square tower half
way down the western defences of Seringapatam. The range was nearly 900 yards,
but the four British 18-pounders were astonishingly effective. The enemy guns
were silenced – actually they were in part removed – ‘in half an hour’. By noon
of the 26th all the guns on the walls of Seringapatam and most of those in the
elevated calivers and bastions that could fire effectively at the British
batteries either north and south of the river had been silenced. Stuart’s
batteries north of the river and the powder mill battery had blasted an old and
a new bastion at the north-west corner of the main wall; the shots that were
too high passed down the north and west wall clearing away men, guns and
anything else in the area.
However, in the vital section south-west of the South
Cauvery there remained a line of entrenchments, including some brick and stone
outworks at the high-water margin of the river. They were connected with the
main defences by the Periapatam bridge and protected for most of their length
by a ‘water course’ which branched north from the Little Cauvery before the
latter stream turned south to form Macdonald’s Post. This ‘water course’ once
provided power for the powder mill and, in combination with the Periapatam
bridge, water to fill the outer ditch or moat around Seringapatam. There were
also some additional works at the southern end of this line of outer
fortifications and to cover the ‘Stone Bridge’ across the Little Cauvery.
