On 20 June 1783, off Cuddalore on the Coromandel coast of India, the Bailli de Suffren's fifteen French ships of the line fought Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Hughes's eighteen British ships until nightfall. Neither side took a ship, but Hughes then sailed for Madras. Preliminary articles of peace had already been signed in Europe.
Battle of Cuddalore
20 June 1783 · 243 years ago
A siege by land and sea
Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore and France's ally in India, died in December 1782. In March 1783 the Marquis de Bussy joined Suffren at Trincomalee with troops, and Suffren landed them at Porto Novo on the Coromandel coast. Bussy took post at Cuddalore. Hyder's son Tipu was then fighting on the Malabar coast, and the Madras government, according to Beatson, saw a chance to drive the French out of the Carnatic.1
Major-General James Stuart marched south with the Madras army and camped south of Cuddalore by the sea. Supply ships anchored near the army, and Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Hughes's ships of the line covered them from farther south. On 13 June Stuart attacked the French lines in front of the town. That night the defenders withdrew behind its walls. In Mahan's words, everything now depended on the action of the fleets. W. J. Wilson's History of the Madras Army puts the British loss that day at 588 Europeans and 347 Indian soldiers killed and wounded; Robert Beatson gives very nearly a thousand killed, wounded and missing. Wilson and John L. Smith, Jr. give each side about 11,000 men, Wilson as a supposed figure and Smith as a reported one.2
Suffren comes to the rescue
Bussy held the supreme command by land and sea, but, in Mahan's account, did not order Suffren out of Trincomalee and told him not to sail unless he heard that the army was shut up in Cuddalore and blockaded by the British squadron. Mahan dates the letter's arrival to 10 June; the squadron sailed on the 11th. J. S. Roux, citing Trublet de Villejégu of the Flamand, has the admiral tell his captains: "L'armée sous les murs de Goudeloure est perdue si nous n'allons à son secours" ("The army under the walls of Cuddalore is lost if we do not go to its help", our translation).3
When the French appeared on 13 June, Hughes weighed from Porto Novo road and anchored again about five miles from the town. After several days of light, shifting winds Suffren anchored off Cuddalore on the evening of the 17th, at eight in Mahan's account, half past eight in Cunat's. Wilson and Smith put his arrival on the 16th. Then he took aboard 1,200 soldiers of the garrison to fill gaps at his guns.4
According to Beatson, by 8 June 1,125 men in Hughes's ships of the line were sick, 605 of them in the last stage of scurvy, and Hughes sent upwards of six hundred to the naval hospital at Madras in the San Carlos. Wilson writes of nearly 2,000 men in hospital.5
Line against line
On 20 June the wind held from the west and gave the French the weather gauge, and Hughes decided to accept battle. Suffren, whom Cunat and Roux call the Bailli, attacked with fifteen ships of the line against Hughes's eighteen. Both fleets formed line on the port tack. In Mahan's account the British were heading north, and the French bore down together and brought to on their windward beam, just within point-blank range. In Cunat and Roux, Suffren directed the fight from the frigate Cléopâtre, not from his flagship, the Héros; Roux explains that a royal order required commanders-in-chief to go aboard a frigate in battle.6
Beatson has the leading French ship open fire at four minutes past four in the afternoon, after a single ranging shot, and the British reply about twenty minutes later. Mahan and Cunat give a quarter past four. Cunat describes the 50-gun Flamand moving almost into the British line, where fire from the Exeter and the Inflexible killed her captain, Perrier de Salvert; Dupas de la Mancelière, captain of the Ajax, was also killed.7
The cannonade ended at nightfall: at seven, when the French hauled off, in Beatson's account, and at half past six in Mahan's. Neither side took a ship. Beatson records that several British ships, notably the Gibraltar and the Isis, were much damaged in hulls, masts and rigging.8
"Lof, Lof"
Charles Cunat, a former French naval officer who heard the story from a lieutenant of the Vengeur, writes that a shot cut a rope just above Suffren's hand as he held it on the Cléopâtre. Suffren stumbled, and when he ordered the helmsman to bear down closer still, the frigate's captain, Rosily, called "Lof, Lof" ("Luff, luff", our translation) instead. In Cunat's version Rosily asked him: "voulez-vous donc exposer inutilement votre vie et compromettre la gloire et les intérêts de la France?" ("do you mean, then, to expose your life uselessly and compromise the glory and the interests of France?", our translation). According to Cunat, Suffren held out his hand to the young captain and let himself be taken clear of the line, where his signals could be seen better.9
The cost
Mahan gives the British loss as 99 killed and 434 wounded. Beatson lists three lieutenants, one master and 94 men killed, and two lieutenants and 431 men wounded.10
For the French, Mahan gives 102 killed and 386 wounded. Cunat gives 200 killed and 386 wounded, and Roux writes that the squadron lost 200 men and had 386 wounded.11
"Here is our savior"
On the 22nd the fleets sighted each other again off Pondicherry, but there was no second battle. With his water almost gone and, in Beatson's words, "near a third of the crew of each ship" unable to come to quarters, Hughes sailed for Madras, where he anchored on the 25th.12
Suffren anchored off Cuddalore on the afternoon of the 23rd and landed the borrowed soldiers again. Wilson and the Annual Register for 1783, which Smith quotes, add about 2,400 men from the fleet. Cunat writes that Bussy, waiting with his staff, took Suffren by the hand and presented him to the officers with the words "Messieurs, voilà notre sauveur" ("Gentlemen, here is our savior", our translation).13
On 25 June the British commanding general before Cuddalore wrote, as Mahan quotes him, that his "mind was on the rack without a moment's rest since the departure of the fleet, considering the character of M. de Suffren, and the infinite superiority on the part of the French now that we are left to ourselves". The same day the garrison sallied against the British lines and was driven back. Its leader, the Chevalier de Damas, was taken prisoner. According to Wilson and Smith, so was a sergeant named Bernadotte, later King of Sweden. Wilson estimates the French loss in the sortie at 450.14
Peace under a flag of truce
At Madras Hughes received news, unofficial but in Beatson's word "authentic", that preliminary articles of peace had been signed and ratified. On 27 June he sent the Medea under a flag of truce with letters to Suffren and Bussy, and she reached Cuddalore on the 29th. Wilson dates the end of hostilities to 2 July, and Mahan to 8 July. Beatson says the Medea returned to Madras on 4 July with the French commanders' agreement to a cessation of hostilities by sea and land.15
Mahan called the battle the last of the naval war that began in 1778, fought five months after the preliminaries of peace were signed, and judged it a French victory tactically and strategically, because the weaker fleet held the field and decided the fate of Cuddalore. Smith calls it basically a draw, counted as a French victory because the British disengaged. When the official dispatches reached Suffren at Pondicherry two months later, he wrote, in the English that Mahan quotes: "God be praised for the peace! for it was clear that in India, though we had the means to impose the law, all would have been lost".16
Also on this day
Battle of Höchst
20 June 1622 · 404 years ago
In the Thirty Years' War, Tilly's Catholic League army caught Christian of Brunswick's Protestant army crossing the Main at Höchst, near Frankfurt. The retreat over a pontoon bridge became a panicked flight, many men drowned, and Tilly won easily.
1757: according to Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great raised the siege of Prague before sunrise on 20 June, after his defeat at Kolin; the King marched east, Marshal Keith with the baggage and artillery by Budin toward Leitmeritz. See our article on the Battle of Kolin.17
1866: Italy declared war on Austria. According to the Austrian official history, Colonel Bariola brought La Marmora's letter, dated at Cremona on 20 June, to the Austrian outposts before Mantua at 8 a.m.; it announced that hostilities would begin three days after its date. See our article on the Battle of Custoza.18
