Poor Tipu
Several weeks ago, I realized that I had never written a post about Tipu Sultan here on the Margins and I promised to rectify that shortly. This is me keeping that promise.
Tipu Sultan, the self-proclaimed "Tiger of Mysore", played an important role in my development as a historian. When I first heard his story in Eleanor Zelliot's class on the history of "modern" India,* I was under the influence of heavy-duty cold medicine. I do not do well with cold medicine. I choked up as Eleanor told the story of Mysore's defeat at hands of the British. By the end of the class I was near tears.
"Poor Tipu" became a catch phrase for me and my roommate and fellow South Asian history major. An in-joke with a strong strain of truth. We tend to see Tipu Sultan through the filter of the British Empire. Tipu Sultan's story forced me to see another side of the empire that had long-fascinated me. I'm still fascinated by empires in general and the British Empire in particularly, but I try to remember there is always another side to the story.
Which brings us to Tipu Sultan.
Seen in retrospect, it is easy to forget how precarious Britain's position in India was in the eighteenth century. The British East India Company was only one of several regional powers that competed to fill the power vacuum left by the disintegrating Moghul empire. One of the most powerful of the Company's rivals was the Muslim state of Mysore in south-central India.
When the dynasty's founder, Haider Ali, seized Mysore from its Hindu ruler in 1761, the British saw the new kingdom as a buffer against the powerful Nizam of Hyderabad. They soon changed their minds. Haider Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, adopted two goals that put them in immediate conflict with the East India Company: aggressive territorial expansion and diplomatic ties with post-revolution France.
Mysore and the East India Company went to war four times between 1761 and 1799.
The East India Company's rivalry with Mysore took on new urgency in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt with the avowed intention of driving the British out of India. The possibility that France would attempt to reclaim a base in India seemed all too likely. British India buzzed with rumors that the French had joined forces with the Tiger of Mysore.
In February, 1799, those rumors were seemingly confirmed. British agents in Madras claimed to have intercepted a letter from Bonaparte to Tipu Sultan. In it, Britain's number one enemy offered aid to his Indian counterpart, "Citoyen Tipou": "You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea with an innumerable and invincible Army, full of the desire of delivering you from the Iron yoke of England." Scholars have long doubted the authenticity of the letter. Genuine or not, it provided the trigger that Richard Wellesley, the East India Company's Governor-General, had been waiting for.
Forty thousand East India Company and Crown troops invaded Mysore on March 5th. The armies moved quickly across Mysore in a two-pronged pincer attack from the British strongholds of Madras in the east and Bombay in the west. Their goal was Tipu Sultan's capital, the fortified island citadel of Seringapatam.
On May 4, 1799, the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War came to an end when Major-General David Baird (1757-1829) led the final British assault on Seringapatam. According to his biographer, Theodore Hook, Baird volunteered to lead the assault in order to "pay off old scores". Volunteer or not, Baird was a sentimental favorite for the job. Twenty years earlier, he had spent four years as a captive of Tipu Sultan following the British defeat at Pollilur in 1780.
Once British cannons opened a breach in Seringapatam's outer wall, Baird's force crossed the surrounding river under a barrage of musket fire, fought their way into the gap, and took the ramparts. The main body of British and Indian forces followed. Two and a half hours later, Seringapatam was under British control.
That evening, Baird played the central role in an event that captured the British imagination. Acting on reports that Tipu Sultan had been killed in the assault, Baird sought out the Indian ruler's body under a pile of corpses in a gateway that had been a focus of the Mysore defense. Major Alexander Beatson, official historian of the campaign, summed up the moment as seen through Victorian eyes:
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"He who had left the palace in the morning a powerful imperious Sultaun [sic], full of vast ambitious projects, was brought back a lump of clay, abandoned by the whole world, his kingdom overthrown, his capital taken and his palace occupied by the very man, Major-General Baird, who,,,had been..in irons, in a prison scarce three hundred yards from the spot where the corpse of the Sultaun now lay."</p>
By any standard, Baird's "old scores" had been paid in full.
*In the world of history departments, "modern" India begins with the Moghuls, slightly before the period known as Early Modern Europe. Historical periodization is an artificial construct that obscures as much as it reveals.
What’s in a Name?
Dear Marginalia: I could use a little help from you. Some virtual brainstorming.
I'm getting organized to start a newsletter.* The plan is that it will be a way to share-- well--news. When there isn't news to share, I'll write about research and writing, etc. And maybe give you a peak at what's on the to-be-read pile. I'm planning on sending it out twice a month, with an occasional extra for breaking news.**
I have a plan. What I don't have is a name for the newsletter. The best I've been able to come up with its Notes from the Margins. Which is vague at best and misleading at worst. Not to mention lame.
Any suggestions would be welcome. If you don't think an online newsletter needs a name, that would be helpful to know, also.
In the meantime, stay posted for info on how to sign up for the first edition. Which probably won't have any actual news.
*No, it won't replace the blog.
**Hey, I can dream.
Supper at Sea in the Age of Sail
This summer I've had the pleasure of working with Fen Truitt. Fen is a student at Trinity College in Dublin. She's interested in art, architecture, literature, music, hiking, and history--just for starters. In short, she fits in well here on the Margins, as you'll see in the guest blog post below. (Please note that the drawing is not an eighteenth century-cartoon, as I originally assumed. It's Fen's own work. This may be the only time you see original art here.)
Fen, take it away:
Supper at Sea — or; — the Food that Fights Back. An entirely wholly authentic nineteenth-century depiction of seamen attempting to break hardtack.*
The success of the Royal Navy in the ‘age of sail’ relied on scrupulous organization. Along with most things naval, the victualling system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was subject to rigorous discipline and regulation. On board, the purser had charge of provisions related to the basic welfare of the men. He inspected and recorded the status of victuals daily. Reporting directly to the purser, the steward(1) issued the standard food from the bread room to “mess cooks”, who readied it and sent it on to the ship’s cook in the gallery. After the food was cooked, the mess cook retrieved it and served it to his mess, typically composed of 4 to 6 men. They drank watered-down rum known as grog(2),“small” (diluted) beer, or wine.
Here is what the food of a typical day at sea would consist of:(3)
Breakfast: 8 am — oatmeal gruel, sometimes sweetened
Dinner: 12pm — for the entire ship, save the bare minimum of hands on deck for the watch
pork or beef with either oatmeal, peas, or other vegetables, grog
Supper: 4pm — ship’s biscuit with butter or cheese, grog
Ships typically departed from a port with around five months worth of food. As sailors were at sea for increasingly longer periods, due to the expansion of the empire and frequent battles with France, ships would then be supplied by provisioning vessels.
In addition to ensuring there was sufficient food and drink to go around, Captains worried about their crew contracting scurvy. Caused by vitamin deficiencies — predominately vitamin C — the infamous disease became apparent two to three months after setting sail. A scurvy-ridden sailor would first become fatigued and irritable, before more dire symptoms set in — including, among other things, breathing troubles, tooth loss, swollen rotting gums and skin, and heightened sensitivity in hearing, smell and taste leading to emotional disturbances. Ferdinand Magellan’s 1520 expedition, after 99 days without fresh food, lost more than 80% of the crew to scurvy while crossing what would become known as the Pacific ocean. The Royal Navy finally effectively rid itself of scurvy at the turn of the nineteenth century, after much agonising trial-in-error (the secret was limes and lemons!), involving sauerkraut, malt, and many other ineffective ‘remedies’. Scurvy also effected poor labourers on shore, but it was particularly dangerous to sailors, as they were less likely to have access to fresh foods while confined to what became wooden prisons of disease.
Despite scurvy, sustenance for seamen was generally of a higher quality than that available to their landlubber counterparts. Both the average farm worker and seaman required 4,500 - 5,000 calories a day, and although the English diet had been slowly changing from what had been largely a meat and bread-based regime(4), protein-filled, calorie-rich regular meals were more than the less-than-rich shore man could hope for(5). Although the diet on board was fairly unvarying, ships would take advantage of the nearest friendly port’s local cuisine, continuously seeking fresh produce to prevent scurvy.
Just like on shore, the more well-off you were, the better you ate. The commander of the ship had his own personal stores to dip into, as he was expected to hold feasts for his officers. High-ranking officers could also bring aboard some small personal provisions. There was a lot available in packaged form, especially after canning was invented in the early 1800s. A wealthy seaman could bring aboard such things as almonds, allspice, pepper, candy, capers, cayenne, chilli, vinegar, cloves, celery seeds, cinnamon, currants, curry powder, French olives, raisins, rice, side bacon, sugar leaves, tarragon, vinegar, Turkish coffee, truffles, and vermicelli.(6)
And finally, as the British Royal Navy, which largely created the empire, was obviously based on the labor of individuals who were sustained primarily by hardtack, one could argue that the British Empire was founded on hardtack. Or not — either way, hardtack certainly played some kind of role in helping the Royal Navy become and stay the most powerful navy in the world until the Second World War. So I tried out baking & eating some:
Homemade ship's biscuit
Known as ‘ship’s biscuits’, or just simply ‘bread’, hardtack is made of flour, salt and water, cooked two to four times, until it is pretty much immortal. I cooked mine twice, for a half hour at 300ºF. It is impossible to break with your teeth, or indeed your hands (my brother was infuriated at being defeated by such a humble biscuit), so you must find a way of snapping it and kind of gnawing at the edges. Food that certainly fights back.
I leave you to ponder this 200-year-old ship’s biscuit currently residing at the British museum, still hale & hearty.
*Okay, well, I tried.
1Since the steward lived next to the bread room (which contained flour), he was often nicknamed “Jack-of-the-Dust”, later “Jack Dusty”.
2Apparently, grog got its name from Admiral Edward Vernon, who standardised the issuing of watered-down rum in 1740. He wore a “grogram” coat, and was accordingly nicknamed “old grogram”.
3Nelson’s Men O’ War: The Illustrated Story of Life in Nelson’s Navy, Peter Goodwin
4And people were thankfully reconsidering the medieval belief that raw fruits and vegetables were the carriers of plague.
5Meanwhile, the people faring best were those with the means to take advantage of the developing Industrial Revolution, with its faster transportation facilitating importation of various fresh goods. The poor ate a lot of bread.
6Nelson’s Men O’ War: The Illustrated Story of Life in Nelson’s Navy, Peter Goodwin