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Updated: April 30, 2025
In India the political conditions of the peninsula necessarily indicated the eastern, or Coromandel, coast as the scene of operations. Trincomalee, in the adjacent island of Ceylon, though unhealthy, offered an excellent and defensible harbor, and thus acquired first-rate strategic importance, all the other anchorages on the coast being mere open roadsteads.
At Trincomalee the sea receded three times and returned with singular force, at one period leaving part of the shore suddenly bare, with fish struggling in the mud.
Then the importance of Trincomalee as a naval station will be realized, while Colombo, as a fortified depot, will be shown as second only to Malta and Gibraltar. Trincomalee, it should be remembered, is four hundred miles nearer to Calcutta than Colombo.
Tippoo being engaged on the other side of the peninsula and Bussy displaying little vigor, while Hughes was in superior force off the coast, the affairs of the French on shore went from bad to worse. Suffren, having but fifteen ships to eighteen English, was unwilling to go to leeward of Trincomalee, lest it should fall before he could return to it.
"My hand in the fire, he told you that yarn about the girl who was drowned off Trincomalee. Of course, I knew it. The old boy's wits are turned on that subject. He WILL have it that the body hasn't decomposed in all this time. Good seaman enough, and a first-class navigator, but he's soft in that one spot."
Toward sundown Hughes hauled off to the northward, abandoning the hope of regaining Trincomalee, but with the satisfaction of having inflicted this severe retaliation upon his successful opponent. That firmness of mind which was not the least of Suffren's qualities was severely tried soon after the action off Trincomalee.
I do not say that any religion should be put down by force, but I do say that the example of Christian men and the preaching of Christian ministers ought, and would, by this time, have influenced the votaries of Brahma and Siva, had they been brought to bear on them in a place where, as in Trincomalee, the religion of the country differs from both of them.
In short, though of strategic value from its strength and position, the port was deficient in resources. Opposed to Trincomalee there was an alternative in Achem, a harbor on the other side of the Bay of Bengal, at the west end of the island of Sumatra.
In addition to these handicaps of circumstance Suffren soon discovered that he had to deal with incorrigible slackness and insubordination in his captains. In spite of everything, however, Suffren achieved an amazing degree of success. He succeeded in living off the prizes taken from the British, and he took from them the port of Trincomalee for a base.
From time to time I heard some vague account of his doings; of his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee, and finally of the mission which he had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland.
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