and about eighteen hundred native infantry. General Baird commanded the storming-party, and the command of the reserve in the advanced works was confined to Colonel Wellesley. The assault was to take place at one o'clock, during the extreme heat of the day; when, according to their usual custom, the enemy's troops were expected to be sunk in indolence and repose.
That the capture of Seringapatam should, to a certain extent, have been achieved by the agency of Baird, appears a striking act of retributive providence. He who was to lead on that resistless soldiery, by whose bayonets the life and throne of Tippoo were to be extinguished, had pined nearly four years in hopeless captivity, the tenant of a dungeon, in that capital which in a few hours he was to enter as a conqueror. In the melancholy slaughter of Colonel Baillie and his troops by Hyder Ali, on the 10th of September, 1780, Baird, then a captain, was desperately wounded, made prisoner, hurried to Seringapatam, and there subjected to treatment that, even at a period remote from the event, cannot be heard without producing in the reader a thrill of disgust and horror. Of the many who had shared his captivity, few remained to narrate their sufferings. Disease, starvation, poison, and the bowstring had ended their miserable lives; but a providential ordinance willed it that Baird should survive, and, after disease had failed to rob him of life, or temptation deprive him of his honour,[1] he was destined to lead that band of vengeance by whom a tyrant was exterminated, and the power of Mysore prostrated to the dust!
Meanwhile, the Sultan, as the term of his life and empire approached, instead of employing the usual means of deliverance from this extreme peril, occupied himself only in superstitious and delusive modes of prying into
- ↑ "During this period, Hyder sent some of his principal officers to induce the English to enter his service. He offered them three times as much pay as they received in our army, and as many horses, palanquins, and wives as they chose." – Hook's "Life of Sir David Baird."
