Hello, could you extend some information on Orccha? Thanks.

Anil : Soon...

Hello, This watercolour is interesting because is drawn facing due north. It is the only drawing that I have found that shows the Hornwork built by the British between 1797 and about 1799. The artists back is to the original Portuguese fort wall. The Portuguese had not been able to find freshwater inside the fort, but had built a well just outside the walls. During one of the sieges between April 1507 and the 27th August the Portuguese had nearly lost because the locals cut them off from the water in the well. They were only saved by a man called Fernandez who managed to tunnel to the well. When the Dutch captured Cannanore in the 1660's they built the outer wall that can be seen in the centre of the picture. This was done to include the well. However it brought the fort too close to the hill. Cannon's on the hill at the top of the picture could fire clean over the walls. By the 1770's the Dutch decided to abandon the fort, selling it to the Ali Rajah family. The British under General Abercrombie captured the Fort from the Beebee, head of the Ali Rajah family on the 16th December 1790, by capturing the overlooking hills called Fort Avary and Carlee. I cannot locate Avary, but I think Carlee is the hill called Cadalay in earlier accounts of previous actions at Cannanore. In order to make the fort suitable to resist armies like Tipu's the British decided to build yet another wall further out, so that they could keep enemy cannon's far enough back that they could not hit the inner walls. This outer work, called a Hornwork has been pulled down at some point after 1817, so this is as far as I know the only picture of it. It shows up and earthy bumps on the ground outside the fort, and on Google Earth, although not very clearly. If you look above the arch on the right of the picture, I think you can see the inside of this British defensive wall. The fascinating thing is that it appears unfinished. About 3 weeks ago I found quite by chance while looking for something else an account of the construction of this hornwork. The work was very poorly supervised by Col Sartorius. A committee was sent to report on the work and found it to have been badly executed. There were supposed to be 750 men working on it, but only 365 men were there. The money sent to pay the labourers was in Pagodas, which was much to large a value of coin. The Indian accountant had been paying the EIC money out to groups of workers, who got a coin per group, and they couldn't spend it because it was too big to change, thereupon the accountant changed it to smaller denominations and at an very poor exchange rate so the labourers wandered off to build private houses where they got better wages from EIC officials whose properties were being built than the EIC was prepared to pay itself. In 1797 Walter Ewer criticised the huge expense of building this new fort wall, and thought it would have been better spent on other things. This picture is interesting because it suggests that this outer wall may have been abandoned and was never actually finished. Which may explain why it was demolished and is no longer anything more than bumps in the waste ground outside the fort. There is a picture of the Dutch bastion shown in the painting from the other side that I took in 2006 in the following blog http://malabardays.blogspot.com/2007/10/cannanore-kannur-day-7.html Nick Balmer

amazing!!what our ancestors did to keep the enemy out!i work in a hospital adjacent to tippu's fort a constant reminder of the past....part of our daily routine & the barriers &strongholds of the mind!!!!who is the enemy?where is the enemy???????