A DEADLY WAR

Nineteen miles from The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel is the little town of Balana. Of the many attempts made to invade Kandy from 1574 to 1815, nine were to prove almost, but not quite, overwhelming. In 1574, and 1581 the kingdom was invaded by the rival king of Sithawaka, Rajasinghe I - but his forces failed to hold the territory. Three later attempts by the Portuguese resulted in their armies being destroyed with tremendous loss of life. Two major attempts by the Dutch in 1764 and 1765 were also repulsed, as were one of the two British attempts. The last, in 1815 succeeded more because of bribery than military prowess.

Each invasion ultimately failed to capture the kingdom, through bits of territory were annexed. At times, the invading armies even got through to the centre of the city of Kandy itself, often only to find it abandoned just as surely as Napoleon had found Moscow abandoned in 1812. Mountain forts, especially Balana, acted like World War II pillboxes, built as much to deter the very thought of invasion as to present formidable defences against any invasions that actually occurred.

The Balana pass, on the southern edge of the Alagalla Mountains was the second of two critical entry points into the kingdom, the other being at Galagedera. “Balana” is the Sinhala word for” look-out,” and look out it did, commanding from its perch 2000 feet about sea level, a perfect view of the entire territory that any enemy would have to cross.

Balana foiled a Portuguese invasion in 1593 but just a few years later, in 1603 another attempt was made. The Portuguese observer Queyroz wrote “the new fortalice of Balana stood on a lofty hill upon a rock on its topmost peak; and it was more strong by position than by art, with four bastions and one single gate; and for its defence within and without there was an arrayal of 8,000 men with two lines of stockade which protected them with its raised ground, and a gate at the foot of the rock and below one of the bastions which commanded the ascent by a narrow, rugged, steep, and long path cut in the Hill.”

Three days of bitter fighting eventually led to its capitulation, the Portuguese conducting a special Thanksgiving service in the fort, but it was a very short victory. Within days the Portuguese had fled, their long retreat back to Colombo beset by guerrilla fighting. But by 1616, by the accent of Senerat, one of the few notable inept Kandyan monarchs, Balana was reoccupied by the Portuguese - and improved with a drawbridge over a moat, the addition of a large water tank for sieges and the clearing of trees to a distance of a musket shot.

And it was here, around Balana, at the Battle of Gannoruwa, that the imperial ambitions of the Portuguese finally met their grim finale. The largely mercenary army of Diogo de Melo de Castro, the Portuguese Captain General, had marched up from Colombo a third time to try, in 1638, to capture the Kandyan kingdom of Rajasinghe II.

The king, sitting with deceptive and majestic leisureliness under the shade of a great tree, conducted the battle with razor sharp stratagems. Weakened by mass desertions, just 33 Portuguese soldiers survived of the 4,000 that made up the army, almost all of them reduced to heads piled up before the victorious king.

Just 20 years later, the king, in an alliance with the Dutch, managed to drive the Portuguese from the island once and for all. This proved to be a mixed blessing as his dubious alliance merely saddled him with a new colonial occupier, the Dutch – who were to prove much more professional and ruthless as they went about their colonial mission. Ruins of the fort remain even to this day, most especially the foundations opf the higher buildings in their quadrangular layout of 3 circular bastions. Parts of the lower fort are lost in the jungle - its many ramparts, ditches, and buildings.