From Madras Boyd made his way on horseback to the Mahratta country, where his attractive personality and soldierly appearance so impressed the Peishwa that he gave the young American the command of a cavalry brigade of fifteen hundred men. Boyd was now in possession of the raw material for which he had hankered, and he forthwith proceeded to show his extraordinary skill in welding, tempering, and sharpening it. From daybreak until dark his camp resounded to the call of bugles, the words of command, and the clatter of galloping hoofs. He hammered his men into shape as a blacksmith hammers a bar of iron, until they combined the inflexible discipline of Prussian foot-guards with the mobility and endurance of Texas rangers. His chance to test the quality of his handiwork came in 1790, when Tippoo Sultan, failing in his attempt to bring on a renewal of the war between England and France, turned loose his hordes and overran the land. In the three years' war which followed, the British, under Lord Cornwallis, who was striving to regain in India the reputation he had lost at Yorktown, were aided by the Mahrattas and the Nizam, who were induced by fear and jealousy to join in the struggle against their powerful neighbor. Thus Opportunity knocked sharply on Boyd's door. Commanding a body of as fine horsemen as ever threw leg across saddle, his name quickly became a synonym for audacity and daring. Riding, wholly without support, into the very heart of Tippoo's dominions, he would strike a series of paralyzing blows, burn a dozen towns, capture or destroy immense stores of ammunition, exact a huge indemnity, and be back in his own territory again before any troops could be brought up to oppose him. Boyd's flying columns played no small part, indeed, in the campaign which ended in 1792 with the defeat of Tippoo—a defeat for which the Sultan had to pay by ceding half his dominions, paying an indemnity of three thousand lacs of rupees (one hundred million dollars), and giving his two sons as hostages for his future good behavior.
Boyd, meanwhile, had never let slip an opportunity for improving his knowledge of Hindustani and its kindred dialects or familiarizing himself with the complex conditions, racial, religious, and political, which prevailed in Hindustan. Realizing that the Mahratta power was on the wane, he resigned from the service of the Peishwa, and, bearing letters of the highest commendation from that ruler to the British envoy at the court of the Nizam, he turned his horse's head toward Hyderabad. In a letter to his father, written at this time, he says: "On my arrival I was presented to his Highness in form by the English consul. My reception was as favorable as my most sanguine wishes had anticipated. After the usual ceremony was over he presented me with the command of two kansolars of infantry, each of which consists of five hundred men." Continuing, he described in detail the army of the Nizam, which at that time consisted of one hundred and fifty thousand infantry, sixty thousand cavalry, and five hundred elephants, each of which bore a "castle" containing a nabob and his attendants. Can't you picture the scene when that letter, with its strange foreign postmarks, reached the old brick house in the quaint New England town; how the parents read and re-read that message from the son who was adventuring in foreign parts, and how the neighbors dropped in of evenings to hear the latest news of the boy they all knew, who was carving out a career with his sword half the world away? Success is, after all, a rather tasteless thing if there are no home folks to rejoice in it.
Fortuna, that capricious beauty whose favor so many brave men have sought in vain, seemed to have lost her heart to the stalwart American, for in 1799, when Tippoo and his savage soldiery once more broke loose and swept across the peninsula, leaving a trail of corpses and burning villages behind them, the Nizam, recalling the tales he had heard of Boyd's exploits as a cavalry leader, gave him the command of a division of ten thousand turbaned troopers. Nor did the fair goddess desert him even when he was captured by a body of Mysore horsemen, taken before Tippoo Sahib himself, and, upon his stoutly refusing to turn traitor to the Nizam, condemned to death by torture. And the torturers of the tyrant of Mysore bore a most evil reputation. Overpowering the sentries who were set to guard him, he succeeded in making his way, thanks to his fluency in Hindustani, through the enemy's lines, rejoining the Nizam's forces in time to take part in the storming of the Sultan's capital of Seringapatam, Tippoo being killed in a hand-to-hand struggle after a last stand at the city gates. Thus died, as he would have wished—with his boots on—the most dangerous adversary with whom Britain had to contend in the winning of her Eastern empire.
The death of Tippo-Sahib at the storming of Seringapatam.
From a painting by R. de Moraine.
Early in the nineteenth century Boyd, who, as the result of the generous rewards he had received from his royal employers, had by this time become possessed of considerable means, left the service of the Nizam, much against the wishes of that monarch, and organized an army of his own. Numerically, it wasn't much of an army, as armies go, having at no time exceeded two thousand men, but it was as businesslike a force as ever responded to a bugle. Boyd, whose reputation as a cavalry leader extended from Bengal to Malabar, had the horsemen of all India to draw from, and he recruited nothing but the best, the men with whom he filled his ranks being as hard as nails and as keen as razors. His second in command was an Irish soldier of fortune named William Tone, a brother of Wolf Tone, the famous rebel patriot.
As Boyd reckoned on counterbalancing the smallness of his force by its extreme mobility, he adopted the novel expedient of transporting his artillery on the backs of elephants, thus making it possible for the guns to keep pace with the cavalry even on his whirlwind raids, for an elephant, though burdened with a field-piece and half a dozen soldiers, can put mile after mile behind it at a swinging, ungainly gait which it will tax any horse to maintain. Military history presents no more fantastic picture than that of this sun-tanned Yankee adventurer spurring across an Indian countryside with a brigade of beturbaned lancers and a score or so of lumbering elephants, the muzzles of brass field-guns frowning from their howdahs, tearing along behind him. What a pity that the folk in Newburyport could not have seen him!
The entire outfit—elephants, horses, cannon, and weapons—was Boyd's personal property, and he rented it to those princes who had need of and were able to pay for its service precisely as a garage rents an automobile. The prices he obtained for it were enormous, and ere long he became a wealthy man. From one end of the country to the other he led his scarlet-coated mercenaries, selling their services in turn to his former employers, the Nizam and the Peishwa, and to the rulers of Gwalior and Indore. When a force was needed for a particularly desperate service or for a hopeless hope they sent for Boyd. And he always delivered the goods. Fighting was going on everywhere, and he never lacked employment. But he was far too discerning not to recognize the fact that the power of England was steadily, if slowly, increasing, and that her complete domination of India, which could not much longer be delayed, must inevitably put an end to independent soldiering as a profitable profession. In 1808, therefore, he sold his army, elephants and all, to Colonel Felose, a Neapolitan who had seen service under many flags, and with misted eyes and a choking throat for the last time rode along the lines of his faithful troopers. A few days later he set sail for Paris, for, with the Corsican's star high in the heavens, there seemed no better place for such a man to seek adventure and advancement. Disappointed in his hope of obtaining a commission under the Napoleonic eagles, he turned his face toward home, and in 1810, after an absence of more than twenty years, he felt the cobblestones of his native Newburyport beneath his feet once more.
Boyd's adventurous career under his own flag and in the service of his own people forms quite another though a scarcely less thrilling story. Trained and experienced officers being in those days few and far between, the government offered him the colonelcy of the 4th Regiment of Infantry, which he promptly accepted, displaying such energy in drilling his men that when his regiment marched through the streets of Boston on its way to Pittsburg the local papers commented editorially on the smartness of its appearance. When William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Territory of Indiana (which included the present States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin), realizing the imperative necessity of smashing the great Indian confederation which Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior-statesman, was so painstakingly building to oppose the white man's further progress westward, called for troops to do the business, Boyd put his men on flat-boats, floated them down to the falls of the Ohio, and marched them overland to Vincennes, his dusty, footsore column tramping into Harrison's stockaded headquarters almost before that veteran frontiersman had realized that they had started. Boyd was in direct command, under Harrison, of the little expeditionary force of nine hundred men throughout the whirlwind campaign which culminated on a drizzling November morning in 1811 on the banks of the Tippecanoe River. Tippecanoe was, I suppose, the only battle which our army ever fought in high hats, for the absurd uniform of the American infantry, discarded a few months later, consisted of blue, brass-buttoned tail-coats, skin-tight pantaloons, and "stovepipe" hats with red, white, and blue cockades. Though taken by surprise and outnumbered six to one, Boyd's soldiery showed the result of their training by standing like a stone wall against the onset of the whooping redskins, pouring in a volley of buckshot at close range which left the hordes of warriors wavering, undecided whether to come on or to retreat. At this psychological moment Boyd ordered up the squadron of dragoons which he had been holding in reserve for just such an opportunity. "Right into line!" he roared in the voice which had resounded over so many fields in far-off Hindustan. "Trot! Gallop! Charge! Hip, hip, here we go!" It was the charge of the cavalry, delivered with all the smashing suddenness with which a boxer delivers a solar-plexus blow, which did the business. The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming troopers in their brass helmets and streaming plumes of horsehair, broke and ran. Tippecanoe was won; Harrison was started on the road which was to end in the White House; the peril of Tecumseh's Indian confederation was ended forever, and the civilization of the West was advanced a quarter of a century.
