Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/216

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REV. ANDREW CANT.


of the officers he presented a handsome shawl ; and after they had returned to the fort, he sent major Campbell an additional present of a very fine horse, which the famishing garrison, such was the melancholy condition to which they were reduced, afterwards killed and ate.

By the assistance of occasional, but extremely inadequate, supplies of necessaries, which reached them from time to time by sea, the intrepid defenders of Mangalore held out till the 24th of January, 1784, by which time they were reduced to the most deplorable condition by disease and famine, when major Campbell determined on calling a council of war, to consider whether they should continue the defence, or capitulate. The council decided on the latter, and terms were accordingly submitted to Tippoo, who accepted them; and on the 30th January, the troops evacuated the fort, and embarked for Tillicherry, one of the British settlements on the coast of Malabar; after enduring, under all the disadvantageous circumstances already related, a siege of eight months, and sustaining a loss in killed and wounded, besides other casualties, of no less than seven hundred and forty-nine, nearly the half of the whole garrison.

Though thus eventually compelled to capitulate, the service performed by colonel Campbell, (a rank to which he was promoted, 19th February, 1783,) by the determined and protracted resistance he had made, was of the last importance to the British interests in India, inasmuch as it concentrated and occupied all Tippoo's forces for eight entire months, at a most critical period, and prevented him from attempting any hostile operations in any other part of the empire during all that time; and of the value of that service, the government of Bombay expressed itself deeply sensible; and there is no doubt that some especial marks of its favour and approbation would have followed this expression of its sentiments regarding the conduct of colonel Campbell, had he lived to receive them; but this was not permitted to him. He was not destined to enjoy the fame he had won, or to reap its reward. The fatigue he had undergone during the siege of Mangalore had undermined his constitution, and brought on an illness, which soon terminated fatally.

Under this affliction, he quitted the army on the 19th February, and proceeded to Bombay, where he arrived on the 13th March, past all hope of recovery; and on the 23rd of the same month, he expired, in the 31st year of his age. A monument was erected to his memory in the church at Bombay, by order of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, as a testimony at once to his merits, and of their gratitude for the important services he had rendered to the British interests in India.

CANT, Andrew, a Presbyterian preacher of great vigour and eloquence at the period of the Second Reformation. In 1638 he was minister of Pitsligo in Aberdeenshire. Unlike the generality of the clergy in that district of Scotland, he entered heartily into the national covenant for resisting the episcopalian encroachments of Charles I., and took an active part in the struggles of the time for civil and religious liberty. He was associated with the celebrated Alexander Henderson, David Dickson, the Earls of Montrose and Kinghorn, and Lord Cupar, in the commission appointed in July 1638, by the Tables, or deputies of the different classes of Covenanters, noblemen, gentlemen, burgesses, and ministers, to proceed to the north and endeavour to engage the inhabitants of the town and county of Aberdeen in the work of reformation. The doctors of divinity in the town had steadily resisted the progress of reforming principles, and were greatly incensed when they heard of this commission. They fulminated against it from the pulpit; and the town council, under their influence and example, enacted, by a plurality of votes, that none of the citizens should subscribe the covenant. The deputies arrived on the 20th of the month,