had a garrison of only 264 regulars, with a militia. force of 250 raised among the inhabitants, and 1,500 Bucksaries, or native matchlockmen, on whose arms, discipline, or faith there was no relying. Of the garrison only 170 were British; the rest being Portuguese, Topasses, and Armenians, and, to make the case more hopeless, says Orme, not ten of them had ever seen any actual military service, while but small engineering skill had been displayed upon Fort William. It stood near the Hooghley, and formed nearly a parallelogram, of which the longest sides, the east and west, were two hundred yards in length; the breadth on the south was one hundred and thirty yards; on the north only one hundred. The walls were four feet thick, and, forming the outer side of apartments, were perforated for windows; and the roofs of these formed the platform of the ramparts. At each of the four angles was a bastion mounted with ten guns; but two of those on the south were rendered ineffective by the erection of a line of warehouses, on the roofs of which were several three-pounders. The east gateway was armed with five guns, and a battery of heavy pieces, run through embrasures of solid masonry, was outside on the brink of the Hooghley, near the western wall. On the 15th of June the terrible nabob, after coming on with such haste that his troops perished daily of fatigue and sunstroke, reached the river, and transported his great army to the Calcutta side by means of an immense flotilla of boats. The drums beat; the regulars and militia got under arms; the natives fled with bales of rice on their heads, and 2,000 Portuguese, as Christians, were received into the fort, the outworks of which required a great force to defend, more than the garrison could spare. At noon the van of the nabob's army was within the bounds of the Company, and in a few minutes the firing commenced, and was continued till nightfall, when a young English ensign, who had served under Clive in the Carnatic, made a sortie, at the head of a mere platoon, drove the Bengalees like chaff before him, and spiked four pieces of cannon. On the following day the attack from the north was relinquished, and a mighty force of the besiegers poured into the town on the east side, where no defences existed. Conceiving that the fort could not be defended, but rather the approaches thereto, the garrison now, with equal haste and precipitation, threw up three successive batteries, armed with two eighteenpounders and field-pieces, at about 300 yards from the gates. 45 Elsewhere trenches were dug and breastworks thrown up, but on the 19th of June all these works were stormed in succession by the yelling hordes that attacked them. Without hope of aid or succour, the little handful of Britons defended them with stern valour, if without skill, and in the general consternation that followed their sudden capture, the Indian matchlockmen vanished, together with all the timid Armenians and Topasses, who worked the guns, and then our people gave themselves up to despair. As soon as darkness fell, nearly the whole of the European women were safely conveyed out of the fort, and embarked in certain craft that lay in the river to convey away persons and property. At midnight the besiegers advanced to the assault, but the mere roll of our drums scared them back. On the 20th, they rushed again to the attack, aided by artillery, and then it was resolved to abandon the place, as incapable of defence; but the greater part of the native boatmen had gone off, and the matter of embarkation, which would have been easy before, became a task of peril and difficulty now. The madness of great fear and total want of order prevailed. Men, women, and children, we are told, rushed with piteous cries to the water's edge, imploring to be embarked. The boats became crowded by more than they could carry. Many were overset or swamped, and their occupants drowned. If any reached the shore, they perished under the matchlock-balls and fire-arrows of the nabob's people. Among those who rushed from the fort to the river, were Mr. Drake, the governor, Minchin, the captain-commandant, and a Captain Grant, who escaped in the last boat, and thus were left, Mr. Holwell, one Englishwoman, and 190 men, chiefly British soldiers, to shift for themselves. Seeing two or three boats, after a time, returning, Mr. Holwell, whom those now remaining elected governor, in place of him who had deserted them, locked the water-gate of the fort, and carried off the keys to prevent further flight: a ship was still seen lying off the creek, where a work called Perring's Redoubt stood, and an officer went to her, in a boat, with orders to bring her down instantly to the fort, with a view that, at a proper moment, the whole garrison might embark and escape at once; but she struck upon a sandbank, and was abandoned by her crew. So, as this last hope departed, the wretched remnant of the toil-worn garrison found themselves attacked with greater vigour; but such is the valour that is sometimes born of the most desperate circumstances, that they resisted successfully all that day, and all the subsequent night. By order of Mr. Holwell, signals were constantly made by day with flags, and by night with fires, to recall the shipping from Govindpore back to the fort; but no other attention was paid to them, save when a native boatman was sent down the river to observe what was occurring. Nothing but imbecility on the part of commanders can account for this conduct in British seamen. "Never," says Orme, with reference to the subsequent horrors, "was such an opportunity of performing a heroic action so ignominiously neglected for a single sloop with fifteen brave men on board, might, in spite of all the efforts of the enemy, have carried away all who suffered in the dungeon." On the following day, the attack was pressed with still greater vigour. Then, some of our soldiers, perceiving how the effect of one well-directed dose of grape scattered the Indians by thousands, began to take heart anew, and urged a steady perseverance in the defence, but others, less sanguine, recommended an instant surrender to Surajah Dowlah, forgetting how little likely he was to yield them mercy. By letter, Mr. Holwell made an attempt to obtain a capitulation; but the attack still went furiously on. Covered by a fire of matchlocks that blazed from the walls of the adjacent houses, a strong column of the enemy began to escalade the northern curtain of the fort; but were hurled back with terrible loss, though twenty-five of the little garrison were killed, and fully fifty, more or less, wounded in the effort. It was at this time, when under the blazing sun of an Indian summer, the whole place was filled with dust, gunpowder smoke, and ringing with moans, groans, and shrieks of anguish from those who writhed under undressed wounds in which the flies were battening, that some of the survivors broke open the arrack store-room, and swallowing the ardent spirit as if it were water, became fatuously stupid or raving mad. At two in the afternoon, a flag of truce came towards the fort, and, while Mr. Holwell was conferring with the bearer, the nabob's troops came storming and swarming against it on every side, over the palisades and weaker points by ladders, firing at every one they saw. A gentleman fell wounded by the side of Mr. Holwell, who endeavoured to collect the men on the ramparts to sell their lives as dearly as possible. But those who were sober could not be got up in time, and those who were drunk burst open the water-gate, hoping to escape by the river. As they opened it, a mass of Indians who were lurking close beneath the walls, rushed in like a living flood, while thousands poured in over the undefended curtain, and advancing into the heart of the fort, met those who had come in by the gate. About twenty of the garrison threw themselves in despair over the walls, to escape death by mutilation and torture; while the miserable remnant piled the arms they had wielded so well, and surrendered, with prayers for mercy. At five in the evening, the cowardly tyrant, Surajah Dowlah, who had kept at a comfortable distance, so long as there was the least chance of peril to his precious person, now entered the fort with all the air of a conqueror, and seating himself in the principal hall of the factory, summoned Mr. Holwell before him. In all the copiousness which the native language afforded for abuse, he reviled that unfortunate gentleman for daring to oppose his will and defend the fort, and fiercely and bitterly complained of the small amount of treasure, only £5,000 sterling, when his avaricious imagination had fancied there must be millions. Dismissing Mr. Holwell, he recalled him to ask "if there was no more money," and then dismissed him again. About seven in the evening he summoned the sturdy Briton to his presence once more, and gave him his word as "a soldier that he should suffer no harm." Perhaps the nabob was beginning to consider that he had gone a little too far, and Mr. Holwell seems to have thought that the tyrant did not mean to violate his promise, but merely gave general instructions that the prisoners "should, for the night, be secured." On returning to his comrades in misfortune, he found them surrounded by a strong escort, gazing upon a terrible conflagration that reddened all the sky, and which, whether by accident or design is unknown, had been kindled outside the fort. Without having the least suspicion of the awful fate that was impending over them, they asked where they were to be lodged for the night; and then they were marched to a verandah, or open gallery, near the eastern gate of the fort, and, about eight o'clock, the principal officer who had charge commanded them all to go into a room in rear of the gallery. This room, says Mr. Holwell, in his Personal Narrative, was "at the southern end of the barracks, commonly called the Black Hole Prison; whilst others from the Court of Guard, with clubs and drawn scimitars pressed upon those of us next to them. This stroke was so sudden, so unexpected, and the throng and pressure so great upon us, that next the door of the Black Hole Prison, there was no resisting it; but, like one agitated wave impelling another, the rest followed us like a torrent;" in short, to avoid being cut to pieces. 1756.] THE BLACK HOLE CATASTROPHE. Even for a single European prisoner the chamber in which these unfortunate creatures now found themselves would have been by far too small, in such a climate, at the height of the Indian summer. The dungeon was only twenty feet square. "It was the summer solstice, when the fierce heat of Bengal can scarcely be rendered tolerable to natives of England by lofty halls and the constant waving of fans. The number of the prisoners was 146." 47 The door was then instantly shut and locked the murderers mocked their agonies, raved, prayed, upon them. blasphemed, and implored the guards to fire on them. prisoner the them. The gaolers in the meantime held lights to the bars, and shouted with laughter at the frantic struggles of their victims. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings. The nabob slept off his debauch and permitted the door to be opened; but it was some time before the soldiers could make a lane for the survivors, by piling up, on each side, the heaps of corpses, on which the burning climate had already begun its loathsome work. When at length a passage was made, twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their mothers would not have known, staggered one by one out of the charnelhouse. A pit was dug. The dead bodies, 123 in number, were flung into it promiscuously, and covered up." The chamber had only two small windows, and these were deprived or obstructed from air, by two projecting verandahs. "Nothing in history or fiction," says the eloquent Macaulay, "not even the story which Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, when he wiped his bloody lips on the scalp of his murderer, approaches the horrors that were recounted by the few survivors of that night. They cried for mercy. They strove to burst the door. Holwell, who, even in that extremity, retained some presence of mind, offered large bribes to the gaolers. But the answer was, that nothing could be done without the nabob's orders; that the nabob was asleep, and that he would be angry if any one awoke him. Then the prisoners went mad OBELISK ERECTED IN MEMORY OF THE SUFFERERS AT with despair. They trampled each other down, The details of this event, as given by Mr. Holwell, are most harrowing. One officer saved his life by sucking the perspiration from his shirt, as several others strove to do; while the steam that rose alike from the living and the dead was appalling; "it was," he says, "as if we were forcibly held with our heads over a bowl full of strong volatile spirit of hartshorn until suffocated. I felt a stupor coming on apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old man, the Rev. Mr. Jervas Bellamy, who lay dead with his son, the lieutenant, near the southernmost wall of the prison." Many died on their feet, and remained so standing, the press around not permitting the corpses to fall. "But these things," continues Macaulay, "which, after the lapse of more than eighty years, cannot be told or read without horror, awakened neither remorse nor pity in the bosom of the savage nabob. He inflicted no punishment on the murderers. He showed no tenderness to the survivors. Some of them, indeed, from whom nothing was to be got, were suffered to depart, but those from whom it was thought anything could be extorted were treated with execrable cruelty. Holwell, unable to walk, was carried before the tyrant, who reproached him, threatened him, and sent him up the country in irons, with some other gentlemen who were suspected of knowing more than they chose to tell about the treasures of the Company. These persons, still bowed down by the sufferings of that great agony, were lodged in miserable sheds, and fed only with grain and water, till at length the intercessions of the female relations of the nabob procured their release. One Englishwoman had survived that night. She was placed in the harem of the prince at | Stephenson, Guy, Porter, Parker, Caulker, Bendall, This lady, who was possessed of considerable attractions, was the wife of Captain Carey, an officer of the Company's sea service, who perished in that awful night. The following is the "List of persons smothered in the Black Hole Prison," as given by Mr. Holwell (exclusive of sixty-nine noncommissioned officers and soldiers, whose names he did not know), "making on the whole 123 persons." Mr. Holwell-whom the nabob frequently threatened to blow from a gun unless he would reveal where treasures that had no existence, save in his own imagination, lay-erected at Calcutta an obelisk to the memory of those who perished in that catastrophe, which he survived for more than forty years. He died in 1798 at the age of eighty-seven. The brutal nabob informed his nominal master, then seated on his crumbling throne at Delhi, that Of the Council: E. Eyre and Wm. Baillie, Esq., he had utterly expelled the British from Bengal, and the Rev. Mr. Bellamy. and forbidden them for ever to dwell within its Of the Civil Service: Messrs. Revely, Law, Jenks, Coles, Valicourt, Jebb, Torriano, E. Page, S. Page, Grub, Harod, Streat, P. Johnston, Ballard, N. Drake, Casse, Knapton, Gosling, Byng, Dod, and Dalrymple. precincts; and that, having completely purged Calcutta of the infidels, to commemorate the great event, he had ordered that, in all future time, it should be called by a new name-Alinagore, or "the Port of God." On the 2nd of July he colArmy Captains: Clayton, Buchanan, and Wither- lected his army, and, after leaving behind him ington. 3,000 men in Fort William, made a triumphant Lieutenants: Bishop, Hays, Blagg, Simson, and departure from the place. His barges were decoBellamy. rated with banners and streamers, and the air was Ensigns: Paccard, Scott, Hastings, C. Wedder- filled with the clangour of Indian drums and burn, and Dumbleton. barbaric music, as he proceeded to fall upon his Sea Captains: Hunt, Osburne, Purnell, Carey, neighbour and near kinsman, the ruler of Purneah. 1756.] EXPEDITION AGAINST SURAJAH DOWLAH. 49 CHAPTER IX. "CLIVE THE AVENGER."-CALCUTTA RETAKEN.-HOOGHLY AND CHANDERNAGORE REDUCED. THE dreadful news of the event at Calcutta reached Madras early in August, and excited the keenest resentment he felt at the recent events at Cal cutta, and the pleasure and satisfaction with which he accepted that command which though he From the whole settlement there rose one knew it not-was destined to crown him with fame resentment. universal cry for vengeance. If ever Britain had a cause for war, she had it now against the monstrous Surajah Dowlah, and her people would have been unworthy of an empire had they failed to punish the author of crimes so terrible. So great was the ardour in Madras, that within fortyeight hours an expedition up the Hooghly was determined upon, and it was the universal desire of the Council that the command of the troops, only 2,400 in all, should be given to Clive, "to punish a prince" who, as Macaulay says in his Essay, "had more subjects than Louis XV., or the Empress Maria Theresa." On the 11th of October, 1756, Clive wrote to the directors, expressing the great horror, grief, and and glory, and to win him the name of "Clive the Avenger "-" Clive the Daring in War." The Five days subsequently, the expedition sailed from Madras Roads. The squadron consisted of the Kent (sixty-four guns), bearing the flag of Admiral Watson; the Cumberland (seventy), with that of Rear-Admiral Pococke; the Tiger (sixty); Salisbury (fifty); the Bridgewater (sloop, twenty); the Company's ships, and two transports. land force consisted of 900 Europeans, 250 of whom belonged to H.M. 39th Regiment, and 1,500 sepoys. "The weather proved so extremely tempestuous," says Captain Schomberg, "attended with other disasters, that the admiral did not reach Balasore Roads before the 5th of December. |