The American Connection

The American Revolution and the Second Anglo-Mysore War were the same war seen from two sides of the world. France entered the American war in 1778; Britain went to war with France, and then with the Dutch; and in 1780 Haidar Ali swept into the Carnatic with French support and destroyed a British force at Pollilur. Every soldier, ship and pound sterling committed to India was one not available in North America.

American newspapers followed it. To a Philadelphia reader in 1781, Haidar Ali was not an exotic figure but a co-belligerent — a distant ruler tying down British armies at the far end of the world while Washington fought them at the near end.

In 1782 Pennsylvania fitted out a merchant vessel as a state warship and named her the Hyder Ally, after him. She carried sixteen light guns and was given to a twenty-three-year-old captain, Joshua Barney, to protect shipping in Delaware Bay. To find a crew, Barney used a recruiting poem written by Philip Freneau — later known as the poet of the American Revolution.

On 8 April 1782 the Hyder Ally met HMS General Monk, a heavier and better-armed Royal Navy sloop. Barney won by a trick: he gave his helmsman orders by the rule of the contrary — every command to be obeyed in reverse — so that the order the British could overhear was the opposite of the manoeuvre he made. The General Monk fouled her rigging on the American ship and was raked at close range until she struck. The action lasted about half an hour.

It was one of the most celebrated American naval victories of the Revolution, and it was won by a ship named for the ruler of Mysore.

Freneau then wrote the victory up: Song on Captain Barney's Victory over the Ship General Monk. Set to a tune, it became a popular song in the new republic — the sort of thing sung in taverns rather than read in drawing rooms.

That is the detail worth sitting with. In the years after 1782, Americans celebrating their own war of independence sang a song about a ship called the Hyder Ally — carrying, in the name of an American folk ballad, the name of Tipu Sultan's father.

The connection runs to the very end of the war. On 20 June 1783, off the Coromandel coast near Cuddalore, a British fleet under Admiral Hughes fought a French fleet under the Bailli de Suffren, while ashore a Franco-Mysorean force under Bussy and Sayed Sahib faced the British siege lines.

Peace had already been signed in Europe. The news had not yet reached India. Suffren drove the British fleet off and landed reinforcements; Bussy was planning a fresh assault when a ship arrived with word that the war was over. By 2 July both sides had agreed to stop.

The final action of the American Revolutionary War was therefore fought in India, with the army of Mysore in the line — five months after Haidar Ali's death, under the command of his son.

The traffic went both ways. The British general who surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1781, Lord Cornwallis, was made Governor-General of India five years later and took half of Mysore in 1792. The young colonel who commanded at Mallavelly in 1799, Arthur Wellesley, would defeat Napoleon sixteen years later. The wars of the late eighteenth century were fought by a small number of people who kept meeting each other on different continents, and Mysore is where several of those careers turn.