Plan of Madras and of the Fort of St. George, taken by the French the 24th September

1746

Copper engraving on paper

Print size: 7.75 x 11.25 in (19.5 x 28.5 cm)
Sheet size: 8 x 12 in (20.5 x 30.5 cm)

Madras Taken—Bellin’s Definitive Plan of Fort St George and the French Conquest of 1746

This 1746 plan of Madras and Fort St George, engraved by Jacques-Nicolas Bellin after the pioneering English survey attributed to John Rocque, stands among the most important early cartographic documents of colonial Madras—an artefact that maps not only the physical city but also the geopolitical crisis that brought Anglo-French rivalry decisively onto Indian soil. Issued during the opening phase of the Carnatic Wars, the plan captures the fortified port at the precise moment of its dramatic French conquest and embodies the emerging European struggle for military and political ascendancy in the subcontinent.

The historical timing is critical. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) marked the beginning of sustained imperial conflict between Britain and France in India, transforming commercial competition into armed intervention. Major hostilities reached Madras with the arrival of a French naval squadron under Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais, who landed troops near the city on 21 September 1746 and laid siege to the Company’s principal Coromandel settlement. The present English-language version of the plan documents this assault in striking detail: French warships are shown offshore—labelled The Bourbon, The Achilles, and The Phenix—while the fortifications, bombardment positions, camps, and defensive geometry of Fort St George are rendered with exceptional clarity. The title and the extensive 35-point numbered key, printed in English along the left margin, reinforce the map’s immediate strategic and documentary function.

Fort St George dominates the composition, its bastions, curtain walls, sea-facing batteries, ravelins, warehouses, and internal administrative buildings carefully delineated. The plan reveals the fort not merely as a defensive structure but as the bureaucratic and mercantile nucleus of early British power in South India—housing the Governor’s quarters, council spaces, stores, barracks, and ecclesiastical infrastructure that underpinned Company governance.

Beyond the walls, Bellin’s engraving preserves one of the most valuable surviving images of Madras’s early urban geography: the division between White Town, the ordered European quarter adjacent to the fort, and Black Town, the densely inhabited mercantile settlement to the north, home to Tamil and Telugu traders, weavers, interpreters, porters, Armenians, and other diasporic communities essential to the port’s commercial life. Bellin’s portrayal of Black Town is of particular historical consequence, recording the city before the demolitions and clearance operations that followed the later French siege of 1758–59 and the subsequent British reconstruction.

Equally significant is the coastal delineation. Madras’s exposed roadstead—lacking a natural deep-water harbour and vulnerable to surf, sandbanks, and cyclonic weather—posed constant logistical challenges. Bellin integrates hydrography and urbanism with the precision expected of France’s Dépôt de la Marine, producing a plan that is simultaneously a city map and a naval intelligence instrument.

The siege itself ended in British capitulation after an unrelenting bombardment, and Madras remained under French occupation until the close of hostilities, when it was exchanged for the British conquest of Louisbourg in North America under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Among the defenders was a young Robert Clive, who made his name by escaping French captivity and carrying news of the city’s fall to Fort St David—an episode that prefigured his later career as Governor of Bengal and a foundational architect of Company rule in India.

As a cartographic object, the Rocque–Bellin plan occupies a central place in the history of European mapping of India: Rocque supplied the empirical foundation, and Bellin the scientific refinement and international circulation. Its rarity, aesthetic clarity, and direct association with the first major Anglo-French seizure of a Company city make it one of the most sought-after early plans of Madras—indispensable to any advanced collection of Indian urban cartography or colonial military history.

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