Meanwhile, in the north, General Lake stormed Aligarh, and drove Scindiah’s troops back to Delhi.  Disgusted at the incapacity and perfidy that surrounded him, Perron threw up his command; and another conflict near Delhi yielded that ancient seat of Empire to our trading Company.  In three months the results of the toil of Scindiah, the restless ambition of Holkar, the training of European officers, and the secret intrigues of Napoleon, were all swept to the winds.  Wellesley now annexed the land around Delhi and Agra, besides certain coast districts which cut off the Mahrattas from the sea, also stipulating for the complete exclusion of French agents from their States.  Perron was allowed to return to France; and the brusque reception accorded him from Bonaparte may serve to measure the height of the First Consul’s hopes, the depth of his disappointment, and his resentment against a man who was daunted by a single disaster.[212]

Meanwhile it was the lot of Decaen to witness, in inglorious inactivity, the overthrow of all his hopes.  Indeed, he barely escaped the capture which Wellesley designed for his whole force, as soon as he should hear of the outbreak of war in Europe; but by secret and skilful measures all the French ships, except one transport, escaped to their appointed rendezvous, the Ile de France.  Enraged by these events, Decaen and Linois determined to inflict every possible injury on their foes.  The latter soon swept from the eastern seas British merchantmen valued at a million sterling, while the general ceased not to send emissaries into India to encourage the millions of natives to shake off the yoke of “a few thousand English.”

These officers effected little, and some of them were handed over to the English authorities by the now obsequious potentates.  Decaen also endeavoured to carry out the First Consul’s design of occupying strategic points in the Indian Ocean.  In the autumn of 1803 he sent a fine cruiser to the Imaum of Muscat, to induce him to cede a station for commercial purposes at that port.  But Wellesley, forewarned by our agent at Bagdad, had made a firm alliance with the Imaum, who accordingly refused the request of the French captain.  The incident, however, supplies another link in the chain of evidence as to the completeness of Napoleon’s oriental policy, and yields another proof of the vigour of our great proconsul at Calcutta, by whose foresight our Indian Empire was preserved and strengthened.[213]

Bonaparte’s enterprises were by no means limited to well-known lands.  The unknown continent of the Southern Seas appealed to his imagination, which pictured its solitudes transformed by French energy into a second fatherland.  Australia, or New Holland, as it was then called, had long attracted the notice of French explorers, but the English penal settlements at and near Sydney formed the only European establishment on the great southern island at the dawn of the nineteenth century.