page_title: Mysorean rockets
section_title: Use in Mysorean conflicts
hierarchical_section_title: Mysorean rockets / Use in Mysorean conflicts
caption_attribution_description: English: Letter from Commander Johan Gerard van Angelbeek, governor of Ceylon, from Cochin, to Mr. Decker, reporting on the battle between troops of Tipu Sultan and the prince of Travancore on 29 December 1789. Illustration show innovative use of cotton bales to clear the moat and fort walls along with use of rockets. Accession number = NL-HaNA, Aanw. 1st section ARA, 1.11.01.01, inv. No. 1276
context_page_description: Mysorean rockets were an Indian military weapon, the first iron-cased rockets successfully deployed for military use. The Mysorean army, under Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, used the rockets effectively against the British East India Company during the 1780s and 1790s. Their conflicts with the company exposed the British to this technology, which was then used to advance European rocketry with the development of the Congreve rocket in 1805.
context_section_description: Two rocket units were fielded by Tipu Sultan in 1792 during the Third Anglo-Mysore War, one of 120 men and the other of 131 men. Lt. Col. Knox was attacked by rockets near Srirangapatna on the night of 6 February 1792 while advancing towards the Kaveri River from the north. The Rocket Corps ultimately reached a strength of about 5,000 in Tipu Sultan's army. Mysore rockets were also used for ceremonial purposes. The Jacobin Club of Mysore sent a delegation to Tipu Sultan, and 500 rockets were launched as part of the gun salute.
  Rockets were again used on several occasions during the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. One of these involved Colonel Arthur Wellesley, later famous as the First Duke of Wellington. Wellesley was almost defeated by Tipu's Diwan Purnaiah at the Battle of Sultanpet Tope.
  Wellesley launched a fresh attack with a larger force the following day, and took the whole position without losing a single man. Rocketeers worked their way around to the rear of the British encampment on 22 April 1799, 12 days before the main battle, and fired a great number of rockets at the same moment to signal the beginning of an assault by 6,000 Indian infantry and a corps of Frenchmen, all directed by Mir Golam Hussain and Mohomed Hulleen Mir Mirans. The rockets had a range of about 1,000 yards. Some burst in the air like shells, while others (called ground rockets) would rise again on striking the ground and bound along in a serpentine motion until their force was spent. A young English officer named Bayly observed: "So pestered were we with the rocket boys that there was no moving without danger from the destructive missiles". He continued:
  The rockets and musketry from 20,000 of the enemy were incessant. No hail could be thicker. Every illumination of blue lights was accompanied by a shower of rockets, some of which entered the head of the column, passing through to the rear, causing death, wounds, and dreadful lacerations from the long bamboos of twenty or thirty feet, which are invariably attached to them.
  A British shot struck a magazine of rockets within Tipu Sultan's fort during the conclusive British attack on Srirangapattana on 2 May 1799, causing it to explode and send a towering cloud of black smoke with cascades of exploding white light rising up from the battlements. Baird led the final attack on the fort on the afternoon of 4 May and was again met by "furious musket and rocket fire", but this did not help much; the fort was taken in about an hour's time. Perhaps within another hour Tipu had been shot (the precise time of his death is not known), and the war was effectively over.
caption: Use of rockets in an assault by Mysorean troops on Travancore Line fortification (29 December 1789)
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