256 THE GOVERNOR -GENERALSHIP OF HASTINGS

He had himself made strenuous exertions to organize a naval armament; and in his present war against the English he was relying upon the arrival of a French squadron which was known to be fitting out at Bourbon Island with the design of breaking the communications between England and India. When this squadron ap- peared on the Coromandel coast, in 1781, Hyder Ali was employing himself in reducing the scattered posts of the English in the Kar- natic, which were wholly at his mercy; and if the French could have co-oper- ated, he would have taken the important town of Cud- dalore, which, indeed, sur- rendered to his son Tippu jj^ ^782 But the French admiral sailed back to Bourbon; Hyder Ali was pressed by Sir Eyre Coote, and at last brought to bay at Porto Novo, where he was crippled by a heavy defeat which restored the open country to the English. Thus it came to pass that when Suffren, than whom France has never had a better admiral, returned to the coast in 1782 with a much larger fleet, he was met by a strong though unequal force of English ships under Sir Edward Hughes, and he found Hyder comparatively disabled. All the possessions of the French and the Dutch had OF TIPPUS SWORD. Now in His Majesty's Collection at Windsor,