Page:A history of the military transactions of the British nation in Indostan.djvu/757

Book XIII. forts were delivered, the French garrison at Neliserum, which did not exceed 20 Europeans, submitted without resistance.

On the 5th of April, Captain Stephen Smith received a proposal from Captain Macgregor, who commanded in the great mountain of Gingee, that he would capitulate, if his garrison were allowed the honours of war, the rank and file to be sent to Europe by the first opportunity as prisoners liable to exchange, but the officers permitted to retire, with their arms, baggage and effects, to any of the neutral settlements on the coast, where they were to be subsisted according to their ranks at the expence of the English company, who were likewise to defray their passage to Europe. Three hundred of the English Sepoys had already died in the town, and in the mountain of St. George, from the peculiar inclemency of the air, which has always been deemd the most unhealthy in the Carnatic, insomuch that the French, who never until lately kept more than 100 Europeans here, had lost 1200 in the ten years during which it had been in their possession. Captain Smith, therefore, very readily accepted the terms, and in the afternoon the garrisons marched out of the two mountains. They were 12 officers, and 100 rank and file, Europeans, Coffrees, and Topasses, and 40 Lascars for the artillery, which were 30 pieces of cannon and some mortars. A passport and safeguard was allowed to a Moor of distinction, who had long resided in the great mountain.

This day terminated the long contested hostilities between the two rival European powers in Coromandel, and left not a single ensign of the French nation avowed by the authority of its government in any part of India; for the troops which had gone away to Mysore, were hereafter to be regarded as a band of military adventurers seeking fortune and subsistence. In Bengal they had not a single agent or representative, and their factories at Surat and Calicut were mere trading houses on sufferance. Thus after a war of 15 years, which commenced with the expedition of Delabourdonnais against Madrass in 1746, and had continued from that time with scarcely the intermission of one year, was retaliated the same measure of extirpation, which had been intended, and invariably pursued, by the French councils against the English commerce and power: for such, as is