Cawnpore & Lucknow

by Donald Richards

  ‘Never, surely, was there such an emaciated, ghostly party of human beings as we,’ thought Mowbray Thomson, an opinion surely endorsed by Amelia Horne when she wrote: ‘Behold us as we then appeared, like so many ghosts, tattered, emaciated, and begrimed … destitute of all the finery so dear to the heart of a woman.’

  Lieutenant Thomson was taken aback by the women’s state of undress, when he wrote:

  There were women who had been beautiful, now stripped of every personal charm, some with, some without gowns; fragments of finery were made available no longer for decoration, but decorum; officers in tarnished uniforms, rent and wretched, and with nondescript mixtures of apparel, more or less insufficient in all there were few shoes, fewer stockings, and scarcely any shirts; these had all gone on bandages for the wounded.

  At length the white-painted rails of the wooden bridge were reached and, watched by Azimullah Khan, Bala Sahib, Tatya Tope and a vast silent crowd, the refugees made their way down the steps into the muddy shallows of the Ganges. As Mowbray Thomson looked about him, the frightening thought that they were now at the mercy of the sepoy escort filled his mind. Lieutenant Delafosse approached his craft untroubled by any such misgiving. ‘We got down to the boats, without being molested in the least,’ he later reported.

  The business of embarking began with the able bodied standing knee deep in the muddy water to assist the women and children and those less able, to board the budgerows as the native oarsmen looked on dispassionately. Amelia scrambled aboard with her stepfather John Cook and her younger stepsisters, to take her place under the awning, desperately hoping that the boat would be quickly freed from the grip of the mud and floated downstream away from what she regarded as a place of unforgettable horror.

  In the stifling humidity of the pre-monsoon, a sinister silence was broken only by the occasional creak of timber, but the overloaded barges, some carrying as many as twenty people, were now ready to be poled out into midstream to take advantage of the deeper water and the fast-running current. ‘We laid down our muskets and had taken off our coats in order to work easier at the boats,’ remembered Henry Delafosse, ‘but as the men put their shoulders to the stern of the clumsy craft, the shrill note of a bugle sliced through the air.’

  Aboard the budgerows a chorus of terrified screams broke out as a thick cloud of greenish smoke and orange flame flared up from the straw canopies as the oarsmen thrust embers from their cooking stoves into the thatch of several of the boats.

  Mowbray Thomson in his narrative paints a chilling picture of those desperate minutes which ended whatever hope the refugees might have entertained of reaching Allahabad:

  At a signal from the shore, the native boatmen who numbered eight plus a steersman to each boat all jumped over and waded to the shore. We fired into them immediately, but the majority of them escaped. Before they quitted us these men had contrived to secrete burning charcoal in the thatch of most of our boats. Simultaneously with the departure of the boatmen, the identical troopers who had escorted Major Vibart to the ghat opened upon us with carbines. As well as the confusion caused by the burning of the boats would allow, we returned the fire of the horsemen who were about fifteen or sixteen in number, but they retired immediately after the volley they had given us. Those of us who were not disabled by wounds now jumped out of the boats and endeavoured to push them afloat; but alas! Most of these were utterly immovable. Now, from ambush in which they were concealed all along the banks, it seemed that thousands of men fired upon us; besides four 9-pounders, carefully masked and pointed towards the boats, every bush was filled with sepoys.

  Those who survived the initial volley of musketry made frantic efforts to push the clumsy craft clear of the river bank but only three barges, one of which was afterwards swamped by the close fall of several cannon balls, gained the deeper water of midstream. The rest of the flotilla was raked by musketry as they remained firmly embedded in the mud. ‘Some of the boats presented a broadside to the guns,’ wrote Lieutenant Thomson, ‘others were raked from stem to stern by shot.’

  Passengers who were not immediately struck down were soon driven into the shallows by the collapsing masses of burning straw. A few sought the protection of the tall bowsprit, others waded out into deeper water in a vain attempt to escape the fire of the mutineers, but the rain of musket balls soon stained the surface of the Ganges with the blood of helpless victims. The Revd. Edward Moncrieff, a Bible in his hand, fell victim to a sowar who spurred his horse into the water towards him.

  ‘If we English take prisoners, we do not put them to death,’ he is alleged to have said to the cavalryman. ‘Spare our lives and put us in prison.’ His plea fell upon deaf ears and, struck across the neck by the sowar’s tulwar, the chaplain sank beneath the bloodstained surface.

  ‘We had entered the boats joyfully, never for a moment expecting treachery,’ wrote Amelia Horne, ‘and were taken quite by surprise when we were fired on.’

  An affidavit from a villager gives an eyewitness account of the ensuing slaughter:

  Those who escaped the shots and the burning of the thatch, jumped into the water and tried to swim across but were picked off by the bullets of the sepoys, who followed them on shore. After a while the large guns ceased and the cavalry troopers entered the river on horseback and cut numbers down. The gentlemen and soldiers were hunted from one place to another and hacked to pieces.

  Rising above the agonized screams of the women and children, and the crackle of burning timbers, were the desperate cries for help from those unable to free themselves from the threat of a blanket of burning straw. ‘Mercifully,’ commented Mowbray Thomson, ‘volumes of smoke from the thatch somewhat veiled the horror of that morning.’

  Of the two boats which had been freed from the shallows to gain the midstream current, one drifted to the Lucknow side of the river and the waiting sepoys, whilst the other, due in some measure to the frantic efforts of its compliment of twenty which included Major Vibart, Captains Moore and Whiting, Lieutenants Ashe, Glanville and Boulton, and also Private Blenman. Mowbray Thomson, having failed together with a few fellow officers to free their boat from the grip of the mudflats, saw through the veil of smoke Moore’s vessel slowly drifting downstream and decided to make an effort to save his life by swimming for it. ‘I threw into the Ganges my father’s Ghuznee medal, and my mother’s portrait, all the property I had left,’ he later wrote, ‘determined that they should have only my life as a prey’ and, joined by a dozen others, he struck out in the wake of the drifting boat.

  Most of the others, either struck by bullets or exhausted by their efforts, sank below the surface of the Ganges. Thanks to the swimming lessons he had taken at a baths in Holborn, Thompson reached Moore’s vessel and was hauled aboard by the strong arms of Captain Whiting, together with one other survivor from the group of swimmers. Behind them a pall of black smoke hung above the ghat as a reminder of the frightful events being enacted there.

  Chapter 6

  ‘KUDA-KI-MIRZEE’

  At the Satichaura Ghat most of the boats were ablaze or engulfed in smoke as the stiff breeze whipped the flames from one thatched canopy to the next. Among the sick and wounded who perished in the blaze were Amelia Horne’s mother, and John MacKillop, the ‘captain of the well’. Mercifully their agony was short lived. ‘One mitigation only there was to their horrible fate,’ recorded Mowbray Thomson. ‘The flames were terrifically fierce, and their intense sufferings were not protracted.’

  A horrified witness of the massacre was Mrs Letts, the Eurasian wife of a musician in the 56th NI, who explained:

  In the boat where I was to have gone was the school mistress and twenty-two missies. General Wheeler came last in a palkee. They carried him into the water near the boat. I stood by. He said ‘Carry me a little further towards the boat,’ but a trooper said, ‘No, get out here.’ As the General got out of the palkee head foremost, the trooper gave him a cut with his sword into the neck and he fell into the water. My son was k
illed near him. Some were stabbed with bayonets; others were cut down … The school girls were burnt to death. I saw their clothes and hair on fire.

  Mrs Letts together with a Mrs Bradshaw hid in the tall grass growing on the bank, waiting for nightfall when they could slip into the city, passing themselves off as beggars. The two women were among the fortunate few who were later liberated by Havelock’s men when they recaptured Cawnpore.

  Aware that the sepoys were approaching her boat, Amelia Home pulled her little sister Florence down beside her, praying ‘for mercy and help, my heart beat like a sledge hammer, and my temples throbbed with pain,’ she wrote. ‘But there I sat, gripping my little sister’s hand, while the bullets fell like hail around me, praying fervently to God for mercy, and every second expecting to be in the presence of my Maker.’ When the rebels reached her, one made a grab for her arm. ‘My senses had very nearly forsaken me. I was in a sort of stupor,’ she confessed. ‘The search was made on my person while I was standing, but to speak more exactly I was made to stand while I was searched as a sepoy let off his gun over my head and shoulders in the most deliberate and cold blooded manner’. Amelia’s trauma, however, was only just beginning. A sowar, riding waist deep in the water, commanded the two sepoys to throw her over the side. ‘I was there upon brutally seized around the waist, and though I struggled and fought wildly, was quickly overcome and thrown into the river.’

  She floated downstream for 200 yards before finding the strength to get to her feet in the shallows and collapse on the bank, haunted by the fading cries of Florence, calling; ‘Oh, Amy, don’t leave me!’ Writing of the event many years later, it was still fresh in her memory. ‘The cries of my poor little sister, imploring me wildly not to forsake her, still ring in my ears, and her look of anguish … has haunted me ever since. That was the last I ever saw or heard of my family.’

  Concealed by the lush growth Amelia was awakened from a fitful doze by the approach of another person – ‘To my great relief, the well-known face and form of Miss Wheeler, the General’s daughter‘. Like Amelia Horne, Margaret Wheeler had been left to drown by ‘men who perhaps thought she was not worth a bullet’. It was an hour before they were discovered by a party of rebels. Whilst Margaret Wheeler was hoisted onto a saddle and taken away by a sowar, Amelia was forced to join the surviving women and children after the Nana had given the order for their destruction to cease. By that time there were very few males left alive and only 125 women and children who were dragged from the river and herded together on a stretch of sand by the sepoys. ‘Many of them were wounded with bullets and sword cuts, their dresses were wet and full of mud and blood,’ testified Mrs Letts. ‘They were ordered to give up whatever valuables they might have hidden on their persons.’

  Amelia, in her words, was ‘pushed and dragged along and subjected to every indignity. Occasionally, I felt the thrust of a bayonet, and on my protesting against such treatment with uplifted hands and appealing to their feelings as men, I was struck on my head, and was made to understand in language all too plain that I had not long to live.’ Stumbling along half naked, and enduring the mocking jeers of the crowd of villagers, ‘for my clothes had been torn to pieces when I had been dragged along by the men, and I had the mortification of being made a spectacle before these heartless and cruel wretches’. At length she was brought to a collection of huts where, thoroughly exhausted, she rested her aching head and fell fast asleep.

  The prisoners in their bedraggled and half-drowned state – Kate Lindsay suffering from a wound in her back, Caroline, Fanny and Alice among them – were escorted along the ravine they had left an hour or two before, no doubt grateful to have escaped the slaughter, but all the time wondering what the future might hold. The frightened women and children stumbled along past the bazaar and the battered entrenchments until they were brought to a halt before the Nana’s headquarters where the Peshwa emerged from Savada House and surveyed the wretched survivors before ordering their removal to the Savada Kothi. Amelia Horne, who had been kept apart from the prisoners, wrote:

  Whilst in my hut I heard the rebels around me talking of some of the unfortunate ladies who had been removed from the boats and the ghat. They were such pitiful objects to look at that even the black hearts of some of the monsters were moved with compassion, and they declared that it was a crime to put to the sword such fair and tender creatures.

  On 26 June, Lady Charlotte Canning added a footnote to the day’s entry in her journal. ‘There have been horrors in Cawnpore, if we must believe a native’s story. I think he exaggerates, so I will not repeat them.’ A week later, Lady Canning, hoping against hope for better news, was writing: ‘A horrid report that Cawnpore has been abandoned, & Sir H.Wheeler & everybody massacred, came yesterday … A great doubt seems to exist about Cawnpore. A great many people do not believe it.’

  By mid-July there could no longer be any doubt. Viscount Canning the Governor General, unable to sleep, paced his room tormented by thoughts that had he not reduced the number of troops in Oudh, the disaster might have been averted. His wife Charlotte, equally affected by events, attempted to explain the circumstances to Queen Victoria:

  The sad news of the fall of Cawnpore after the sad death of Sir H. Wheeler and the massacre of the garrison has proved true but no details are known. I believe it is possible without too much delay, the Nana will be again attacked at his home at Bithur about 9 miles from Cawnpore. He is a small Rajah who used to pretend and delight in everything English and used to entertain the officers and go out shooting with them. The horrors committed by this man are too dreadful to relate. He has murdered every fugitive that passed thro’ his country & his treachery & wickedness appear incredible.

  The survival of those imprisoned in the Savada Koti now rested solely upon the speed of the advance of a small column of European soldiers fighting their way north along the Grand Trunk Road from Allahabad, led by Major Sydenham Renaud whose primary objective next to rescuing the Nana’s prisoners was to ‘reassert British authority and exact revenge’.

  Meanwhile, deprived of the oars which had been thrown overboard by the native boatmen and the rudder which was shot away, the budgerow carrying Lieutenants Delafosse, Thomson and others of note, drifted downstream with the current on an erratic course between the sandbanks, which in the summer months made the Ganges such a navigable hazard. Its original complement of twenty had been swollen considerably by Major Vibart’s act in rescuing the passengers of a sinking vessel struck by round shot and now, more than sixty men, women and children, some severely wounded, crowded into a space intended for less than a third of that number. ‘We had no food in the boat,’ recalled Mowbray Thomson, ‘the waters of the Ganges was all that passed our lips.’

  With only one or two spars available for steering the unwieldy craft, it was difficult to maintain a steady course in midstream, so that it frequently drifted close to the Oudh bank and the sepoys of the 17th NI who were following its progress downriver.

  ‘We were often within 100 yards of the guns on the Oudh side of the river,’ wrote Lieutenant Thomson, ‘and saw them load, prime, and fire into our midst.’

  Fortunately for the passengers, the deep loose sand on the bank prevented the sepoys from siting a cannon with any degree of accuracy, but one cannon ball raised a fountain of water close to the stern knocking over a female relative of Lieutenant Jarvis. A child, whose age Thomson thought could be no more than six or seven, came up to him sobbing bitterly. ‘Mama has fallen overboard,’ he told the Lieutenant tearfully and as Thomson attempted to comfort him, added, ‘Oh why are they firing on us? Did they not promise to leave off.’

  ‘I never saw the child after that,’ recalled Mowbray Thomson, ‘and suspect that he soon shared his mother’s death.’

  As Thomson and Delafosse jumped from the boat to free it from yet another sandbank, the sepoys who had followed along the bank began to fire at will, and the dead soon began to outnumber the living. Captain Moore, despite the injury to
his shoulder, put his back to the stern of the budgerow in an attempt to shift it from the sand’s grip, but he quickly collapsed into the shallows when a bullet pierced his heart. The same fusillade killed Lieutenants Ashe and Boulton as they jumped down to assist Moore, whilst a round shot slew both Burney and Glanville. A musket ball struck Major Vibart’s arm as he struggled to help Thomson, whilst another round shot reduced Lieutenant Fagan’s leg to splintered bone and sinews.

  Through all this, nothing could persuade Major Edwin Wiggins to leave his place of refuge in the hold. ‘No expostulation could make him quit the shelter of the bulwarks,’ noted Mowbray Thomson, ‘though we were adopting every possible expedient to lighten her burden. It was positively a relief to us when we found that his cowardice was unavailing; and a bullet through the boat’s side that dispatched him caused the only death that we regarded with complacency.’ Wiggins’s corpse, with others, was committed to the muddy waters of the Ganges and the alligators that frequented its banks, and at last the budgerow floated free of the sandbar.

  With the dead and wounded inextricably tangled together in the bottom of the boat, it had been a difficult and unpleasant task to extricate the dead from the living as Mowbray Thomson explained. ‘It was a work of extreme difficulty though imperatively necessary from the dreaded consequences of the extreme heat, and the importance of lightening the boat as much as possible.’

  Such was the frequency of the craft grounding on a sandbank or becoming entangled with branches in the shallows that it was likely that more than one body was heaved over the side without first checking the victim’s pulse. Mowbray Thomson himself was rendered unconscious from a bullet which grazed his head. Fortunately, he regained his senses just as two of his comrades were reaching for his arms and legs. ‘We were just about to throw you overboard,’ one said as he began to stir.