The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c15.158

c15.158

The respite thus given to Tulaji enabled him to seek an ally. He applied for help to the Portuguese, who demanded a very heavy subsidy. Tulaji had no time to haggle and promptly paid a portion of the stipulated sum. On 5 November 1755, a treaty was concluded, by which the Viceroy undertook to send a reinforcement of five hundred men to Gheria.¹ A Portuguese detachment had already been despatched to the Angria’s headquarters when an angry protest from the Peshwa reached Goa.² The palmy days of Portuguese power in India had passed away and the Viceroy did not dare offend the mighty leader of the Maratha State. The reinforcement was, therefore, quickly recalled on a hollow excuse that deceived nobody, and Tulaji was left to his doom. He could not count even on his own servants, for we learn from a Maratha chronicle that Ramaji Mahadev had bribed most of them. This statement is corroborated by the little resistance that the garrison of Suvarnadurg offered. Clive and Watson found the capture of Gheria as easy as James had found the reduction of Suvarnadurg. Despairing of success, Tulaji left the fort, and the garrison, in the absence of their master, did not exert themselves to defend it. Edward Ives, an eye-witness, observes: ‘the fort was so strong both by art and nature at the time we attacked it, that it might have held out a long time against all our efforts, had it been defended with any tolerable degree of skill and resolution’.³ The victors found in the fort two hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, six mortars, an immense quantity of stores and ammunition, one hundred thousand pounds sterling in silver rupees and about thirty thousand more in valuable effects; but the great fleet which for sixty years had terrorised merchant vessels in the Arabian Sea was reduced to ashes either by the fire of Watson’s fleet, as the English reports state, or by its despairing master, as the Portuguese account suggests, before the garrison capitulated. The last days of Tulaji were spent as a prisoner of the Peshwa. After his death his sons managed to reach Bombay, but all trace of them was lost for a while. The Portuguese papers mention a Raghunath Angria, who was a captain in Hyder Ali’s fleet. On August 3, 1800, one Raghunath Angria who claimed to be a son of Tulaji, addressed a letter to the Bombay Government offering his services against the Peshwa. It will not be wrong to identify him with the captain of Hyder Ali’s fleet.¹