For some time, there was a pause in the hostilities.

Tippoo remained with his army near Pondicherry, carrying on negotiations with the French governor, and arranging for the despatch of an envoy to France, with a request that the Republic would furnish him with six thousand French troops.

While he was thus wasting his time, General Meadows was slowly moving, with the army, towards an encampment formed at Vellout, some eighteen miles west of Madras.
On the 14th of December, a messenger arrived with the news that Lord Cornwallis had arrived from Calcutta, two days before, with considerable reinforcements, and that he was about to assume the supreme command of the army.

The news caused unbounded satisfaction.
By the extreme dilatoriness of his movements, and especially by the manner in which he had allowed Tippoo to pass him near Caveripatam, when he might easily have attacked him, while his army was still struggling through the pass, General Meadows had disgusted his troops.
He had frittered away, without striking a single blow, the finest army that the British had, up to that time, ever put into the field in India; and had enabled Tippoo, unmolested, to spread destruction over a large extent of country.
The only countervailing success that had been gained, by the British, was a brilliant victory won by Colonel Hartley, who was in command of a Bombay force, consisting of a European regiment and two battalions of Sepoys.

With these, he engaged Hossein Ali, who had been left by Tippoo in Malabar, with a force of 9000 men, when the sultan first retreated before General Meadows' advance.