October Solo Mission AAR. Aye eye spy.

[Bligh]

Preamble.
Historical background.



While Bonaparte was scheming for the conquest of India, the British ascendancy there was confirmed, and the British dominion extended by the Governor-General, Lord Mornington, better known as the Marquess Wellesley, the elder brother of the still more famous Duke of Wellington. The rule of Sir John Shore, the successor of Cornwallis, had been deficient in firmness, and the native powers, especially Mysore, were developing hopes of overthrowing the British, when Mornington arrived in India just as Bonaparte was preparing to sail for Egypt. Tippu, the Bhonsla, and Sindhia all had forces under French officers; and Tippu at least was in active correspondence with the French commandant at Mauritius.




Tippu's father had usurped the sovereignty of Mysore not forty years before, and Tippu himself was a fanatical Mohammedan ruling by the sword over subjects who were for the most part Hindus. The inevitability of the forthcoming war with Tippu was emphatically a war with a dynasty, not with a state; and it was necessitated by the plain fact that Tippu was in alliance with France for the purpose of destroying the British power and threatening Madras.





Mornington acted promptly. He applied immediate pressure to the Nizam of Hydrabad, who dismissed his French officers and accepted in place of the force which had been maintained a British contingent - that is to say, a sepoy army with British officers - theoretically for the defence of his dominions against the aggression of native powers; for the maintenance of which force he ceded territory, a system known as that of "subsidiary alliances." Similar pressure was brought to bear upon Sindhia, and then Mornington proceeded against Tippu. All that was now required was inside information about Tippu's intentions as regards the use of his army and its dispositions.
It was these factors which found HEIC Nottingham at anchor in a small bay on the coast of Mysore and with Captain David McBride anxiously awaiting the arrival of Mornington's secret agent.




Bligh.