Siege of Seringapatam (1799)

The island fortress of Seringapatam, capital of the Kingdom of Mysore in southern India, was besieged by the British East India Company and its Indian allies from 5 April to 4 May 1799. When the walls were breached and the city stormed, Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, was killed fighting near one of its gates. The siege ended the last of the Anglo-Mysore Wars and brought Mysore under British paramountcy.

Tipu had already lost half his kingdom in the third war against the British, but probably still commanded up to 30,000 soldiers. A small French contingent of around 450 men under Brigadier Louis Chapuis also served him, sent by the government of revolutionary France. Against him General George Harris assembled a large allied army: over 26,000 Company troops, about 4,000 of them European and the rest Indian sepoys, joined by ten battalions and more than 16,000 horsemen from the Nizam of Hyderabad, over 50,000 men in all. The Maratha Empire was also allied with the British.

The allies reached Seringapatam on 5 April. The city stood on an island in the River Cauvery, which was then at its lowest and could be waded before the monsoon arrived. Tipu exchanged letters with the British but seemed to be stalling. The defenders stopped the besiegers from setting up a battery north of the river on 22 April, but by 1 May the British had pushed their southern batteries up to the wall, choosing a stretch of older and weaker rampart in the west. On 2 May the guns opened a breach in the outer wall. Accounts allege that Tipu's chief minister, Mir Sadiq, had been won over by the British.

The attack was timed for about one o'clock on 4 May, in the heat of the day, when the defenders were expected to be resting. Major General David Baird, who twenty years earlier had spent 44 months as Tipu's prisoner, led the storming force, with a reserve column under Arthur Wellesley; the plan for the breach is credited to the Governor-General, Richard Wellesley. According to some accounts, Mir Sadiq pulled the troops back from the breach just beforehand on the pretext of paying them. Led by two forlorn hopes totalling seventy-six men, the attackers waded the river in water about four feet deep and were on the ramparts within sixteen minutes. Two columns then fought along the inside of the walls in opposite directions until they joined up on the opposite side of the city. Chapuis and his officers were trapped and surrendered.

Rounding the north-west corner of the wall, the British met stiff resistance from a group led by a heavily built officer who kept firing hunting guns reloaded and handed to him by servants. After the city fell, officers searching in the dusk identified this man as Tipu himself. His body was found in a cramped passage near the Water Gate, with a bullet wound by the ear and three more in the body. British losses were about 1,400 killed or wounded; Mysorean dead are put at between 6,000 and 10,000.

The British returned the Wadiyar dynasty to the throne and crowned Krishnaraja Wodeyar III. Under a subsidiary alliance, Mysore kept its ruler but lost control of its foreign affairs to the Company. Chapuis spent two years on a prison hulk off Portsmouth. Trophies taken from the city included Tipu's Tiger, an automaton now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Much of the fortress, including the ramparts and the Water Gate, survives.

Our 1783 map shows Mysore in southern India, and the 1800 map shows the region just after its fall.