Page:A history of the military transactions of the British nation in Indostan.djvu/503

Book XI of which there is none in the fort but what is preserved in cisterns. His ideas of remaining here extended no farther than this advantage; although, by flinging up an entrenchment across the dry ground from one morass to the other, he might have stopped the English army, to which the force with him was equal, being 500 Europeans and 2000 Sepoys, without the army of observation, which he had not recalled; and, as soon as the English army appeared, he retreated by the causeway, into the fort. The troops of Anunderauze and of the Zemindar of Narsipore encamped in the pettah; the English on the sand to the north-east. The French, since they took possession of the Fort in 1751, had modernized the defences: the walls were mud faced with bricks as high as the parapet; and the three sides to the west, north, and east, contained 11 angular bastions of various shapes and sizes; before which were a palisaded berm, and a wet ditch; but no glacis. The front to the south along the sound, from reliance on that defence, was left open. The bastion next the N. w. fronted the causeway leading to the pettah: in this bastion was the gateway, and 120 yards of the causeway was converted into a caponiere, which terminated in a strong ravelin that scoured along the length of the causeway.

No regular approaches could be made to the fort, but by an army ten times stronger than Colonel Forde's; for hitherto black troops, howsoever numerous, were counted for nothing in the service of carrying on trenches. Colonel Forde therefore resolved to attack the fort from the sand-hills to the east, as the nearest shot; and by batteries detached from each other, without the communication of trenches, as little was to be feared from the sallies of the besieged. The ground had the advantage, although this circumstance would not have determined the choice, of being nearest to the disembarkation of the stores and heavy artillery from the Hardwicke, which, with the two sloops, were in the road.

Three batteries were erected; one in a fishing village near the inward point of the sand to the s. w. where it is bordered by the inlet of the sea to the south, and the west by a large creek in the morass coming from the north. Four hundred yards to the north of this battery