The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c16.40

c16.40

From our brief survey of the naval history of the Marathas it will be apparent that during the one hundred and five years of its existence the Maratha navy made no progress either in the art of navigation or in the method of warfare. McCluer visited the principal ports of the coast in 1787 and 1788 and has left a brief account of the Maratha ships and their method of attack: ‘They send’, he tells us, ‘2 large ketches, with a number of gallivats to cruize; each gallivat carrying 80 or 90 men armed with lances, musquets, and stones. One large carriage-gun is lashed down in their prows to the beams with strong ropes, so I suppose when the gun fires the vessel recoils with it.’⁵ Compare with this the accounts of Angria’s ships and the method of attack left by Captain Anselm and Benjamin Hall fifty-three years previously, and they will be seen to tally in every detail. The ships were similarly manned, similarly armed and similarly manoeuvred for a century and half while immense improvement was being effected in naval engineering and naval strategy in the west. The Marathas knew and acknowledged the superiority of the Europeans at sea; they considered the naval superiority of the western nations as a possible source of danger; but they made no effort to learn, to improve, or to invent. In 1679 Daulat Khan’s fleet of sixty sail fled before a single English man-of-war; in 1739 a single Portuguese frigate defeated Sambhaji Angria’s squadron of seventeen veessls; in 1752, again, a single Portuguese ship beat back an Angrian fleet of twenty-one, while in 1767 an unequal combat between sixty Maratha men-of-war and five Portuguese vessels ended in the discomfiture of the numerically superior fleet. While European sailors traversed the oceans and the seas of the world the Marathas preferred to hug the coast; while the European captain was armed with the best artillery of the age, the Maratha still retained his lance and spear, bow and arrow, and even that pre-historic weapon, an unhewn stone. In war as well as in civilization there must be progress or decline; as the Maratha sailor did not, or could not, go forward, he was gradually relegated to the background. This fate was inevitable; for nature planned the survival of the fittest, and in war the strongest is the fittest, and the strongest must survive. In primitive times mere physical strength sufficed for battle; but in the eighteenth century war had already become scientific and a constant intellectual effort was required to maintain military and naval efficiency. The Maratha soldier and the Maratha sailor were both temperamentally conservative. They clung steadfastly to the ways of their forefathers, and in consequence sank into hopeless decrepitude.