westward over Malabar. More than once had his dread of the Maráthás tempted him to renew his overtures to the English at Madras. But the latter, full of their own quarrels and perplexities, gave little heed to the wooings of a neighbour whose friendship seemed to them more dangerous than his enmity.
When war with France broke out in 1778, Sir Thomas Rumbold, an old Bengal civilian, was Governor of Madras. In spite of Hastings' urgency, no serious attempt was made to conciliate the Sultan of Mysore. After the capture of Pondicherry in October, only one French settlement, Mahé on the western coast, remained in French hands. In March, 1779, that place also fell to our arms. Haidar's wrath at the capture of a sea-port which some of his own troops had helped to defend, was presently inflamed by the march of a British force through a strip of his own territory into the Guntúr Sarkár, the province which Basálat Jang, the Nizám's brother, had lately rented to the Company in return for the use of a British contingent strong enough to replace his French troops.
It appears that Rumbold himself had sought to conciliate Haidar by suspending the movement against Mahé. But Sir Eyre Coote, being then at Madras on his way to Calcutta, made use of his power as Commander-in-Chief to overrule the Governor's pleadings for delay[1]. Rumbold's dealings with Basálat Jang seem at first to have been sanctioned by Hastings himself. They were justified by the conduct of the
- ↑ Marshman's History of India, vol. i. Appendix.
