Out of this repulse (necessary in order to enable Dupleix--despite the promise without which Labourdonnais had refused to budge--to carry through his treacherous intention of repudiating the negotiations, refusing ransom, and holding Madras for the French) arose much. The Nawâb, disgusted, broke with Dupleix and assisted the English at Fort St David, a smaller factory some miles further down the coast. Here the appearance of the undisciplined troops just as the French, imagining themselves secure of victory, were refreshing themselves in a garden, produced such a scare that the victors were across the river again, and on their way back to Pondicherry before they could be rallied. Dupleix, greatly enraged at his failure, and knowing to a nicety how to deal with natives, now commenced to make the Nawâb of Arcot's life a burden to him by reason of petty raids, until, wearied out, he once more threw the weight of his support into the French scale. It cannot have been a clean business; it certainly was not an edifying spectacle to see two civilised European communities vieing with one another in their efforts to secure an Oriental potentate, but this much may be said in English extenuation--the French began it. The case of the English along the Coast of Coromandel now seemed quite desperate. They had lost their only ally, and though an attack by boat on Cuddalore had been repulsed--once more by the aid of Neptune, who always seems favourable to Britain, and who on this occasion swamped half the enemy in the Coromandel Coast, and sent them dripping, half-drowned, with wet powder and soaked magazines, back to sea--they could not hope to avert the renewed assault on Fort St David, which took place in 1747. But this game of French and English was a series of surprises, a perfect melodrama of dramatic coincidences; for no sooner were the French once more comfortably ensconced in the old garden than--Hey presto!--sails appeared to sea-ward, and in less than no time--hardly long enough for Monsieur's hurried escape--there was a British fleet at anchor in the roads! It reads like some tale of adventure in which a "God-out-of-a-machine" always appears in the nick of time to save the hero. But so it was, though it must be confessed that beyond a display of _force majeure_ the British fleet did nothing. In truth a more incapable fleet never floated. It seems to have spent a whole year in sailing about the Bay of Bengal looking for the French fleet, and when it caught a glimpse of the enemy, promptly changing its _rôle_ from hound to hare, and running away itself.