In all there were only 1400. One of their first acts was to cut their commissary to pieces. Among the officers of the king's artillery was Jean Baptiste Louis Romée de l'Isle, the celebrated crystallographer, who was then secretary to a corps of engineers. The quantity of military stores delivered over by Lally to Coote is almost incredible.
There were 671 brass and iron cannon and mortars; 438 mortar-beds and carriages; 84,041 shot and shell, round, double-headed, and grape; 230,580 lbs. of powder; 538,137 rounds of cartridge for arquebuses, muskets, carbines, pistols, and gingals; 910 pairs of pistols; 12,580 other firearms; 4895 swords, bayonets and sabres; 1200 poleaxes, and every other warlike munition in proportion. Tidings of the fall of Pondicherry occasioned the utmost joy in Britain; and on Sunday, the 2nd August, there were prayers and thanksgiving in all the English churches.
On that day Lally arrived at Fort St. George a prisoner of parole. He had begged to be sent to Cudalore that he might have the attendance of French as well as British surgeons; but the Governor of Madras insisted upon his removal to that place, whither he conveyed him in his own palanquin.
A regiment of Highlanders garrisoned Pondicherry, and as Lally had destroyed many of the British fortifications, Colonel—afterwards Sir Eyre—Coote retaliated by blowing up the works and hurling the glacis into the ditch. The plunder acquired amounted to 2,000,000l. sterling. The quantity of lead discovered in the stores was immense. Lally found means to convey his own cash and Valuables (200,000 pagodas of eight shillings each) out of the garrison, but he was deprived of it by Coote's orders.
The plunder of the magnificent palace was a subject for regret to the officers who beheld it. It had been built by M. Dupleix, a former resident, at the cost of one million. On the same day that Lally surrendered, his Scottish compatriot, M. Law, on whose assistance he had for a time mainly relied, was defeated by Major Carnac.
M. Law was a nephew of the famous financial projector, John Law, of Lauriston, near Edinburgh, who, in 1720, was Premier of France, and Comptroller-General of Finance—the same whose desperate schemes brought the kingdom to the verge of bankruptcy. M. Law had made himself useful to the Schah Zaddah, son of the late Mogul, in supporting the young prince's hereditary claims, and enforcing his authority on the provinces of the empire. With 200 Frenchmen (principally fugitives from Lally's outposts) he persuaded the schah to turn his arms against Bengal; and accordingly the young and rash prince entered that rich and fertile province at the head of 80,000 Indians, whose operations were directed by Law, and certain chevaliers his friends. In the eye of the British (who had then become the arbiters of Oriental thrones), the presence of the Scottish refugee and his followers was more prejudicial to the title of Zaddah than any other objection, and they joined the Subah of Bengal to oppose his progress. A battle ensued at Guya, when Major Carnac, with 500 British, 2500 sepoys, and 20,000 blacks, cut the vast force of the young prince to pieces, and took prisoner M. Law, with sixty French officers.
Soon after the fall of Pondicherry, the French settlement of Mahé, on the coast of Malabar, was reduced by Major Hector Munro, of the 89th Highlanders, who captured there 200 pieces of cannon, and thus the whole commerce of the mighty peninsula of India, from the point of the Carnatic to the banks of the Ganges, fell under the dominion of Britain, together with the extensive trade of the vast and wealthy provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orixa.
On the 3rd February, the nabob made his triumphal entry into Pondicherry, seated in a wooden castle on the back of a gigantic elephant, accompanied by twelve of his wives, escorted by British troops and by his own guards armed with lances, bows, and matchlocks.