Later that afternoon, despite everything that had been done to lighten the craft, it again grounded heavily on a sandbar, but it was decided to remain where they were until darkness fell before disembarking most of the passengers. That done, and once more on their way downstream, they were quickly faced with an unexpected hazard in the shape of a fire raft launched by hostile villagers. Carried by the swift-flowing current, the blazing mass of straw and bamboo passed within a few feet of the budgerow to be followed by a flight of flaming arrows of which a few lodged in the thatched roof of the canopy. The ensuing conflagration was quickly extinguished by the simple expedient of cutting the frame loose and toppling the blazing mass into the river, but for the rest of the night few people slept.
Morning came and with it the knowledge that a little more than 10 miles had been covered in a matter of twenty-four hours. Such disappointing progress cast an air of gloom over the whole party and when shortly after midday the barge grounded on yet another sandbar near the village of Najafgarh, their chagrin deepened into a mood of black despair. Najafgarh was the domain of a petty landlord who had sworn to return every fugitive to the Nana Sahib and within minutes the river bank became thronged with his armed retainers. When a brass cannon was dragged to within easy range it seemed to the refugees that they had reached journey’s end.
Fortunately, before the cannon could be primed and loaded, the dark mass of cloud which heralded the approach of the monsoon shed a heavy downpour which soaked the sacks of powder and rendered the cannon virtually inoperable. Although spared a discharge of grape, a volley of musketry from both sides of the river took a disproportional toll of the boat’s more notable occupants. ‘Major Vibart had been shot through the arm on the preceding day,’ recorded Mowbray Thomson. ‘Nevertheless, he got out, and while helping to push off the boat, was shot through the other arm.’ Captain Turner had his leg smashed, Captain Whiting and Lieutenant Harrison were both shot dead as they struggled to free the craft, whilst Private Blenman, who had bravely attempted to breach the enemy’s lines at Cawnpore, was so badly injured in the groin that he implored an officer to make an end to his sufferings. His plea was refused.
Towards evening the wind freshened and through the mist rising from the river, a second vessel crammed with an assortment of villagers and sepoys was to be seen bearing down upon the stranded barge. It had been sent by the Nana to follow and destroy the survivors of the massacre at the Satichaura Ghat, but before the rebels could close with the fugitives heavily laden boat, their craft too had grounded. The sixty or so mutineers had every reason to curse their luck for with angry shouts, a score of ragged figures led by Thomson and Delafosse splashed through the shallows intent on wreaking vengeance for the murder of their loved ones.
‘Instead of waiting for them to attack us, eighteen or twenty of us charged them,’ recalled Thomson, ‘and few of their number escaped to tell the story.’
The determined sortie enabled the Europeans to replenish their stock of ammunition, but there was no food available to satisfy their gnawing hunger, and exhausted by events most fell asleep.
That night, the second they had spent on the river, those in the group who were not in a deep slumber discovered that the combination of a stiff breeze and rising water levels had succeeded where their efforts had failed, and the craft was once again on its journey downstream. The relief they must have felt was short lived, however, for with daylight on 29 June came the bitter realization that the craft had drifted into a backwater in the vicinity of Surajpur, from which there was no possibility of escape. In less than half an hour a crowd of hostile villagers were directing a punishing musket fire into the trapped vessel.
It was then that Major Vibart, lying helplessly in the bottom of the boat, gave instructions for a sortie to be made against the villagers in order to give others in the boat a chance to free it from the sandbank. Led by Lieutenants Thomson and Delafosse, closely followed by Sergeant Grady of the 84th, a small group of eleven soldiers from the 32nd and 84th of Foot splashed ashore to drive their furious opponents to the fringe of the jungle. In the general fracas Sergeant Grady fell dead from a shot to the head, and when the party returned to the river bank, the boat had gone. They were never to see either it or its occupants again.
At Surajpur, the budgerow which the gallant band had left in an attempt to drive off the hostile villagers, had come under attack from the sepoys massed on the river bank. The fugitives, heavily out numbered, were faced with an unenviable situation and after a brief exchange of fire in which five officers were killed and several wounded, Major Vibart decided to raise a white flag. The surrender was accepted by the sepoys who seemed to have spent their aggressiveness in earlier attacks. Carts were brought from the village to convey the wounded, the women and four children, the 18 miles to Cawnpore. The men, including the wounded Major Vibart and Lieutenant Fagan were bound with rope. Major Vibart succumbed to his wounds en route and was abandoned at the roadside, leaving his wife and children to complete the journey with the others. Later that morning the prisoners were brought to Savada House where the Nana Sahib left his tent to congratulate their escort and order the execution of the male prisoners.
‘The Nana ordered the Sahibs to be separated from the Mem Sahibs and shot,’ a native witness later testified. ‘The Sahibs were seated on the ground and two companies of the Nadiree Regiment [Irregulars] stood with their muskets ready to fire. Then said one of the Mem Sahibs, the doctor’s wife [Mrs Harris], I will not leave my husband. If he must die, I will die with him. So she ran and sat down behind her husband, clasping him around the waist. Directly she said this, the other Mem Sahibs said: We will also die with our husbands, and they all sat down, each by her husband. Then their husbands said: Go back. But they would not. Whereupon the Nana ordered his soldiers and they going in, pulled them away forcibly. But they could not pull away the doctor’s wife, who there remained.’
Captain Seppings asked the Nana for a few moments of prayer, to which he agreed; the Revd. Cockey’s arms were untied and he reached for the Bible in his jacket pocket. The group knelt in prayer and then, as they attempted to shake hands, the sepoys opened fire.
‘One Sahib rolled one way and one another as they sat,’ continued the native witness. ‘But they were not dead only wounded. So they went in and finished them off with swords.’ The bodies were stripped of their clothes and dragged to a corner of the compound to be left for disposal by the beasts and birds of prey. The women and children were taken to the Savada Koti, there to join the survivors of the massacre of 3 June. A mile away, the Commissary head clerk lay on the earthen floor of his prison bathed in the clammy sweat of a fever, recalling with anguish the care that used to be taken of him on such an occasion by his wife Ellen. ‘Where was she now, and the dear ones I had left behind in the entrenchment,’ wondered William Shepherd. The very uncertainty of their fate somehow gave him hope, for he had learned from the conversations of his guards that a great many women and children were still alive.
Back at Surajpur, Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson, having given up ‘seeing the boat or our doomed companions any more’, realized that the task of forcing a way through the jungle to Allahabad was beyond the capability of his small force and with the agreement of the others, it was decided to retire along the river’s edge and sell their lives as dearly as possible. Soaked in perspiration, the group of thirteen trudged with blistered feet over sharp rock and burning sand for a distance of 3 miles before stumbling upon a ruined temple partially concealed by vines some dozen yards from the river. The cool interior came as a welcome relief from the cloying heat of the jungle and although there was no food to satisfy their gnawing pangs of hunger, the pint or so of stagnant water was scooped out with as much relish as if it had been vintage champagne. Tired, but fired with a determination to hold the temple against every attack by villagers or sepoys, Mowbray Thomson and his band crowded into the restricted area to await the inevitable assault.
The attack when it cam
e was a vicious affair of close-quarter fighting in which, as Thomson described it, ‘bayonets dull with rust took on a brighter hue’ and a rampart of bloody corpses quickly grew in front of the temple’s single entrance to provide an additional shield for the defenders. A bid to smoke out the Europeans with bundles of faggots proved unavailing as did an attempt by the villagers to demolish part of the temple wall. It was not until bags of gunpowder were brought up by sepoys and thrown onto the smouldering embers to create dense clouds of suffocating smoke, that Thomson ordered his men to break out in the direction of the river.
In a sudden rush which took their opponents by surprise, the thirteen charged through the black smoke scattering in all directions. Seven swimmers among them dashed for the river while the remaining half dozen, surrounded by a screaming mob, fought a desperate running battle with clubbed muskets or bayonets, until dragged down by force of numbers, dying to a man from the rebels’ knives or swords.
A fusillade of musket shots peppered the surface as the others plunged into the water killing two of the swimmers who sank below the surface. Mowbray Thomson turning on his back, noticed that the bank was thronged with villagers and sepoys, howling for their blood, whilst in the background he could see others rifling through the tunics of the slain for anything of value.
Diving frequently to avoid the matchlock men pursuing them along the river’s bank, Thomson, Delafosse and two privates, Murphy of the 84th and Sullivan of the Madras Fusiliers, were the only ones to escape the attention of their pursuers as they were carried rapidly downstream until all but a solitary trooper on horseback had been outdistanced. Eventually even he gave up the chase and the four fugitives turned thankfully for a sandbank, experiencing a moment of alarm at the sight of a trio of long-nosed alligators basking in the sun on an adjacent sandbar. After resting from their exertions, the four took cautiously to the river once more, floating downstream some 3 miles before the sound of voices sent them diving beneath the surface. When Thomson and the others came up gasping for breath, instead of the whine and splash of a musket ball, they were greeted with a friendly shout. ‘Sahib! Sahib! Why swim away? We are friends.’
‘We have been deceived too often,’ called Thomson, ‘that we are not inclined to trust anybody.’ It was only after the Rajput matchlock men offered to cast their weapons into the water as an act of good faith, and explained that they had been sent by their Raja to conduct them to safety, that the swimmers were persuaded that it was safe for them to swim for the river bank.
Astonishingly, their frightful ordeal was over for they were in the territory of an elderly Raja, one Dirigibijah Singh, who was friendly to the British, and willing hands were extended to help them ashore. Mowbray Thomson could hardly believe his good fortune and of the many thoughts that flitted through his mind at that moment, one predominated. ‘How excellent an investment, had been that guinea spent at the baths in Holborn learning to swim.’
The fugitives were in a pitiful state. Exhausted and naked they possessed only one flannel shirt and a strip of linen cloth between them – exposure to the sun had raised huge blisters on their shoulders and only Delafosse bore no mark of a bullet wound.
After a short rest and their first meal in more than seventy hours, a mood of cheerful optimism sustained them in spite of their poor physical shape and Thomson could afford to joke about his shirt from Messrs Thresher & Glenny which had gone into the siege a bright pink, but was now such a deplorable colour that he admitted: ‘If these very respectable vendors could see it now, they would never accredit it as being from their establishment.’
The fort at Moora Mhow, to which they were taken, was the property of one of the most powerful Rajputs in that part of Oudh who still favoured the British. The two officers found him to be an agreeable character, much interested in their account of the siege and full of astonishment at the circumstances of their escape. It was, he told them, ‘Kuda-ki-Mirzee’, the will of God, an opinion with which the two lieutenants were in full agreement.
During the three weeks they remained under his roof, their time passed in a pleasant cycle of eating, sleeping – on straw mattresses, for an infidel’s touch would have defiled the Raja’s bedding. The group was measured by the Raja’s personal tailor for Indian clothes, and, commented Mowbray Thomson, ‘when Hindustani shoes were added to our toilet, we felt quite respectable again.’ It said much for the integrity of their host that although the territory was infested with mutineers, many of whom visited the fort at Moora Mhow, they were never allowed access to the Europeans unless in the presence of the Raja’s personal bodyguard. These occasional confrontations were a source of great amusement to the two officers.
‘We were told that the Muchee Bhowan [at Lucknow] had been blown up with two hundred Europeans in it,’ wrote Thomson. ‘One day the Punjab was lost, another day Madras and Bombay were gone into mutiny, then a hundred thousand Sikhs were said to be marching south to exterminate the English.’
Both Thomson and Delafosse could not restrain themselves from bursting out with laughter, but the rebels were convinced of the truth of the matter and every attempt by the Englishmen to explain the impossibility of such claims was received with total disbelief. The fact of the four Europeans being granted asylum by Dirigibijah Sing was a sore point with the Nana and he ordered that they be given up. In the face of mounting hostility the old Raja suggested that it might be safer for them if they were sent to a less troubled area. Accordingly, after a week spent in the seclusion of a river village, whilst awaiting a British-manned boat to pass, on 29 July, no boat having arrived, they crossed the Ganges in the care of a friendly zemindar who provided them with a hackery to make the journey to Allahabad.
It was a journey undertaken with every expectation of success and as they jolted over a little-used track in the springless carriage, the four looked forward with some anticipation to the cool taste of an English beer. Their goal was not reached without one further alarm, however, for after little more than an hour, the native driver halted the carriage and in a low agitated whisper, informed them that sepoys had been observed among the trees. Bitterly resentful that fate should play such an ugly trick and sick with apprehension, the four pushed warily through the long grass, fearful that at any moment a shout of ‘Ferungee by, Maro! Maro!’ would bring their hope of salvation to a savage and bloody end.
The cry never came, and in breasting an incline near a tope of banyan trees, Thomson was greeted by the welcome sight of a detachment of the 84th on its way to join the army of Major General Sir Henry Havelock. ‘Our bronze countenances, grimy beards, huge turbans and “tout ensemble” caused them to take us for a party of Afghans,’ confessed Mowbray Thomson. ‘However, Murphy soon recognized one of his old comrades of the 84th, and they greeted us with a truly British cheer.’ The four also received their long anticipated beer, for so pleased were the friends of Private Murphy by his unexpected appearance that they willingly contributed their allowance of porter to ‘treat the men who had not tasted beer for eight summer months’.
‘Never was the beer of our country more welcome,’ enthused Mowbray Thomson, ‘and that first meal, interspersed with a fire of cross questioning about the siege and our subsequent history, inquiries after lost comrades and relatives … made a strangely mingled scene of congratulation, humour, lamentation, and good will.’
When the column eventually reached Cawnpore, the group of four were summoned by General Neill to give an account of their experiences. ‘Thomson,’ recalled John Sherer, who was to succeed the late Charles Hillersdon as Magistrate and Collector, ‘had the bright face and laughing eyes of an undergraduate in his first term. Both he and Delafosse struck me very much in one way; they took the events which had happened to them, events almost surpassing the most romantic adventures of fiction, as if they were ordinary circumstances to be looked for in the day’s work of life.’
Chapter 7
THE BIBIGARH MASSACRE
As the Nana Sahib relaxed at Bithur, som
e 12 miles from Cawnpore, on rising ground covered by sugar cane and brushwood, he savoured the prospect of becoming Peshwa with feelings of delicious anticipation. General Neill’s small force, decimated by cholera, was still at Allahabad, Henry Lawrence was trapped with his garrison in Lucknow, the bulk of the British Army was immobile on a ridge outside Delhi, and in much of the Central Provinces sepoys were rising against their British officers. The mutiny successes were such that it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the British would be driven back to the sea – and so thought many of the merchants previously loyal to the Raj – but what was beyond doubt was the fact that the Company’s administration no longer held sway in Cawnpore, and the Nana’s succession to the throne as the legitimate Peshwa was assured.
Astrologers had recommended 1 July as being the most favourable date for the consecration of Baji Rao’s adopted heir, and to the accompaniment of a twenty-one-gun salute, the sacred ceremony was duly undertaken at his palace in Bithur. An additional salvo was authorized when, conscious of the homage he would enjoy as the Supreme Ruler of the Mahratta nation, the Nana announced that gold from the treasury would be melted down and distributed to his soldiers as bangles, in recognition of the part they had played in securing his kingdom.
As darkness fell, Bithur was illuminated by a lavish display of lanterns and flares, rivalled only by the rockets which lit up the night sky above the palace. In Cawnpore, as the Nana celebrated his success with a nautch, the European prisoners, including those from Fatehgar and Surajpur, were transferred from the Savada Koti to a bungalow around 21 miles away, originally intended for an English officer’s native mistress. Known locally as the Bibigarh, or House of the Ladies, with its two small end rooms, a larger central room and an open courtyard, it was to become the venue for an act of infamy which changed the suppression of a mutiny into a savage act of reprisal every bit as brutal as the atrocities committed by the agents of the Nana. In these two small rooms, each no larger than 10 feet by 8 feet, divided by a central room 10 feet by 24 feet, four men and 206 women and children were imprisoned for fifteen days without a punkha to cool the air and nothing but bamboo matting to ease the discomfort of a clay baked earthen floor.
Cawnpore & Lucknow Page 10
