by John Keay
It was otherwise for most of his Bengal contemporaries who, like their predecessors, shuffled through their lives, wheeling and dealing, bickering and back-scratching in happy oblivion of posterity’s scrutiny. While clive had been carving his name on the walls of Arcot, Trichy and Gheriah, the Bengal Council had been quietly managing its investment so as to offset the military costs thus incurred. Like the Madras Council ten years earlier, it was well aware that Calcutta’s fortifications left much to be desired. ‘The fort [Fort William] does not appear to be a place capable of making any long resistance’, Boscawen had told the Bengal Council in 1748; ‘Pray, Gentlemen, let Calcutta be well secured’, advised the highly qualified Mr Robins in what were practically his last words. No less than six proposals had been submitted during the preceding decade; nearly all had been approved but, courtesy of that phenomenal mortality amongst the Company’s engineers, none had been carried out.
Thus in 1755 Fort William had still looked ‘more like a deserted and ruined Moorish fort than any place in the possession of Europeans’. This was the unwelcome verdict of Captain Jasper Jones, in charge of Bengal’s artillery, and it echoed that of Colonel Caroline (sic) Scott, the latest expert sent out from London. Scott thought it would require at least 1000 European troops to defend the place ‘as it is now fortified, if we may be allowed the expression’. Needless to say, both Scott and Jones submitted new proposals for rectifying the situation; both then died within the year, and so did Scott’s successor.
The English capitulation in Madras in 1746 and the successful French defence of Pondicherry in 1748 had convinced the Court of Directors in London that the fortification of Calcutta was both essential and practicable. But it did pose two peculiar problems. For one thing, unlike Fort St George which encompassed Madras’s White Town, Fort William was just a fort. The European quarter lay outside it with the flat roofs of its three-storeyed mansions, as well as that of St Ann’s Church, completely commanding it. There was less segregation than in Madras, with Indian bazaars within the White Town and the sprawl of Black Town extending outwards on three sides.
In 1742 a ditch had been dug right round the bounds of the settlement in response to a threatened Maratha attack. Significantly the work was instigated and carried out by the native population. But this so-called Maratha Ditch was never completed and had subsequently filled with rubbish. To replace it with a wall complete with bastions, gates, glacis and garrison would have entailed a commitment in cash, artillery and additional troops which was quite prohibitive. Yet so was the alternative of reinforcing just the fort, since that would entail the destruction of the town’s most valuable real estate. The eventual compromise of a palisade halfway between the fort and the ditch merely alarmed the mainly native population outside it without reassuring the mainly European population within it. Some such structure was, however, erected and in 1756 the Maratha Ditch was cleared and a battery commanding the northern approaches to the settlement was under construction.
The second problem concerned the attitude of the Nawab. From his new capital of Murshidabad he was keeping an increasingly wary eye on his European subjects as they plied their trade downriver. It will be recalled that the threat of an incursion by Afghan mercenaries had originally provided the Company with a pretext for building Fort William. The Maratha invasions had found the incumbent Nawab equally amenable. But it was a very different matter when the province was at peace. ‘You are merchants’, he is reported as saying, ‘what need have you of a fortress? Being under my protection you have nothing to fear.’ When the French had attempted some defensive works at Chandernagar, the Nawab had immediately condemned them and had threatened dire commercial reprisals until silenced with a bribe. To avoid this complication Colonel Scott had decided to send his plans up to Murshidabad for prior approval. The Company’s Agent at nearby Kasimbazar, who was to present them, had sent them back. Either the Nawab would veto them, explained Agent Watts, or else he would demand an exorbitant consideration for his favour and go on making such demands every time a brick was baked.
Of course, what was making the Nawab especially sensitive about any military measures on the part of his European subjects was the extraordinary news that had been reaching Murshidabad from the Carnatic. During the 1740s Nawab Aliverdi Khan had concentrated on meeting the Maratha threat ‘with dauntless courage, consummate military skill, and the most unscrupulous treachery’ (S. C. Hill). By 1751 he was breathing more easily in respect of the Marathas but was aghast at the effrontery of the Europeans. For it was in this year that the French, having installed their candidate on the throne of the Carnatic, proceeded to do exactly the same thing in Hyderabad. Bengal was the adjacent province to Hyderabad and it already had a French presence. Truly, observed the Nawab, these Europeans were like a swarm of bees ‘of whose honey you might reap the profit, but if you disturbed their hive they would sting you to death’.
Such cautions did not deter Aliverdi Khan from raising that old matter of the English Company’s misuse of dastak; nor did it stop him from flying into a rage every time the Bengal Council responded with a wave of Farrukhsiyar’s farman. But news of British victories in the Carnatic and against Angrey on the Konkan only fuelled his fears, fears which he reportedly impressed on his chosen successor, the young and beautiful reprobate known to posterity as Siraj-ud-Daula. After the usual bloodbath Siraj succeeded to the Nawabship in April 1756.
Two months later he dispossessed William Watts and his colleagues of the Company’s Kasimbazar establishment and two weeks after that he was master of Calcutta. It all happened so quickly that, in the opinion of those who knew him, the idea for such an attack must have been formed well in advance. It was suggested that he had determined to reduce all the European Companies and that the English, as the most formidable in Bengal, had to be first. Of the three complaints specifically made by Siraj, one concerned the abuse of those privileges contained in the 1717 farman and another the erection of those new fortifications. Both were of long standing and both were justified.
The third complaint concerned the sanctuary in Calcutta of a distant and dissident member of the Nawab’s family. On the amount of credit to be given to this accusation depends much of the criticism afterwards levelled at President Roger Drake and his Council and much of the dissimulation and impulsiveness credited to Siraj. The facts are quite impossible to establish but in so far as Drake eventually agreed to hand the man over, it would appear that this was by way of a timely pretext.
Assuming, then, that the new Nawab’s hostility stemmed from traditional grievances, the English confidently expected a traditional remedy – in other words a financial settlement. When their semi-fortified factory at Kasimbazar was already surrounded by the Nawab’s troops, Agent Watts, a man of great experience and ability, had interpreted the offer of a safe-conduct to the Nawab’s camp as an encouraging development. The would-be plenipotentiary sallied forth only to find himself bullied and bound as a prisoner. Yet such were still the English expectations of an accommodation that no reprisals were considered and, rather than raise the stakes, the factory was handed over without a shot being fired.
A familiar sense of disbelief, later characterized as rank cowardice, prevailed at Calcutta. When the question of razing all the European houses round the fort was hastily revived, it met with no support. According to Captain Grant, the Adjutant-General, ‘so little credit was then given, and even to the very last day, that the Nabob [Nawab] would venture to attack us, or offer to force our lines, that it occasioned a general grumbling and discontent to leave any of the European houses without [i.e. outside the defences]’. Some elementary precautions were taken, like forming a Council of War, recruiting civilians and Baksaris (a martial clan from Baksar in Bihar and the Bengal equivalent of peons), and erecting three new batteries; others, like making an inventory of guns and ammunition, were not.
For this oversight Grant blamed his colleague in charge of the artillery, ‘a strange unaccountable man’ called Wi
therington. Witherington, had he survived the Black Hole, would certainly have blamed Colonel Minchin, the commanding officer, whose incompetence was immortalized in the acid comment of John Zephaniah Holwell:
Touching the military capacity of our Commandant, I am a stranger. I can only say that we were unhappy in his keeping it to himself if he had any, as neither I, nor I believe anyone else, was witness to any part of his conduct that spoke or bore the appearance of his being the commanding military officer in the garrison.
But Holwell himself, a Council member and the self-appointed hero of the hour, was not above suspicion. Clive would describe him as ‘unfit to preside where integrity as well as capacity is equally necessary’; his colleagues merely winced at the hypocrisy with which ‘he wrapped himself in the external practice of religion’, psalm-singing all Sunday with his family, while ‘for their further example and edification he lived in the closest union with another man’s wife’.
Indeed, so universal was the later spirit of recrimination among the Calcutta English that one can only assume that all were guilty of dereliction of duty but that, given the general disbelief about Siraj’s intentions, no one chose to make an issue of the matter; ‘Such was the levity of the times’, recalled Captain Grant, ‘that severe measures were not esteemed necessary.’
‘The levity of the times’ lasted until 13 June 1756 when scouting parties reported that some of the Nawab’s troops had been seen at Dum-Dum, nowadays Calcutta’s airport. Even then there was still talk of negotiations. But by the 16th the Maratha Ditch was under attack. All British women were taken into Fort William and an assault on the town’s northernmost battery was repulsed. It would be the defendants’ sole triumph and a minor one at that. The Nawab’s troops simply wheeled round to the east and poured across the Ditch where it was undefended.
Report had it that the enemy numbered somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand. Against them the Company was able to deploy just over 200 regulars; with the addition of the militia and volunteers this figure rose to a very precise 515. Had the garrison wasted less time and men attempting to hold more than the fort, had they been amply provided with powder and shot, and had they been ably commanded, the most that could have been expected would have been a brief and bloody moment of glory. It was a contest which even Clive could not have won.
After two days of street fighting a retreat behind the walls of Fort William seemed to offer the only hope. Detachments of Company troops had managed to hold out in their downtown batteries, but were now in danger of being cut off, having failed to halt either the Nawab’s cavalry as it careered through the thoroughfares or his myriad levies as they fought and fired their way from house to house. Once these troops were back inside the fort, though, it was obvious that even here resistance could only be short-lived. From the church and surrounding roof-tops the Nawab’s sharp-shooters raked the ramparts with their fire. Smoke billowed from the ruins; ever more men pressed round the fort. There was now nothing to prevent Siraj bringing up artillery and very little, given the walls’ many excrescences and apertures, to prevent him essaying an immediate onslaught. Only below the fort’s west curtain, where stepped landings and piers gave on to the broad expanse of the Hughli river, did safety beckon. There about a dozen ships – Company sloops and privately owned ketches and yachts – swung comfortingly on their moorings.
The last straw came on the sweltering night of 18 June when at an all-night Consultation the ‘unaccountable’ Captain Witherington finally delivered his inventory of the fort’s ammunition. The gunpowder might suffice, he reported, for a maximum of two or three days; but much of it was damp and would first require drying. ‘This single circumstance put it out of all doubt but we should be obliged to retreat in that time, having no prospect to effect a capitulation’, recalled President Drake. Not only was there no chance of holding out but no chance of a negotiated surrender; evacuation was now the only option. Like old Job Charnock and his not so merry men, the English would again have to abandon their settlement, take to their boats, and drop downriver to an uncertain fate amidst the swamps of the delta.
To the finality of an evacuation there can be, if not much glory, a certain memorable poignancy. What with the women and children – English, Portuguese, Indian, and many shades in between – there were probably about 1000 souls in the Fort at the time. At a push, the ships could have taken them all off. An orderly retreat under fire would have done much for English morale; Drake and his Council would thus have redeemed themselves; and the Black Hole need never have happened.
But tragically at this point all semblance of authority collapsed. At 2 a.m. on 19 June, while the Council were still debating their plans for the withdrawal, a cannon ball hurtled through the consultation chamber. The meeting broke up ‘with the utmost clamour, confusion, tumult and perplexity…leaving every member to imagine his proposals would be followed and put into execution’.
Next morning this confusion was faithfully mirrored in the scenes on the waterfront. Word had it that the women and children were being evacuated first; but what with the troops guarding them and the husbands and fathers solacing them, rumour soon suggested a general retreat. As the boats filled, men and women, Europeans and Indians began a stampede to the water. Some drowned as boats capsized, others were swept away on the tide. The enemy’s shot, passing clean over the fort, threatened to disable the ships which silently, almost guiltily, one by one weighed their anchors and, without hoisting a sail, slid away downstream on the tide. On board were Drake, the President, most of his Council, and most of the military command including Minchin and Grant.
A few days later they moored off Fulta, a Dutch pilot station ten miles upstream from Hijili island. Unlike Charnock, they were left alone with ample time to bemoan their fate, reflect on their conduct and exchange recriminations.
Meanwhile, in Calcutta the unctuous Holwell had assumed command. He promptly condemned the cowardice of his colleagues and vowed to ‘hold out the siege’. Many examples of outstanding bravery ensued but this decision was not one of them. Holwell and the remains of the garrison ‘held out’ for barely twenty-four hours throughout which time he fully expected that either the fleet would return for them or that the Prince George, moored upstream, would come to their rescue. (She was in fact aground.) Holwell had been one of the first to recommend evacuation and it was said that he was left behind only because someone had made off with his boat.
The final storming of the fort occurred just before dusk on Sunday 20 June. Holwell says that out of his remaining force of 170, twenty-five fell on that day; but his figures are not reliable, least of all that of 146 for those taken prisoner and consigned for the night to Fort William’s detention cell. That this so-called Black Hole was a semi-basement measuring about eighteen feet by fifteen with a raised sleeping area and barred windows on one side seems fairly certain. So is the fact that from suffocation and dehydration many that night died in it. How many can never be known and scarcely matters. What does matter is that John Zephaniah Holwell was one of the twenty-three survivors and that, for all his faults, he was a brilliant publicist. If the sword had failed him, the pen would not. He too sensed a chapter of history in the making that ‘must be published’, and in highly emotive language he crafted an account of it.
Like that of the Amboina Massacre, Holwell’s narrative found a ready audience, so that to people who had never heard of the Hughli, the mention of the Black Hole would yet conjure up a vivid hell. How the prisoners stripped off their clothes, fought for the window space, retched over ‘the urinous, volatile effluvia’ and finally fell beneath the weight of their comrades became common knowledge. Schoolboys could recite the details – the precious water being passed round in hats, the gaolers leering through the bars, the prisoners sucking the perspiration from their underwear and, it was whispered, even drinking their own urine. And who could fail to be moved by the description of the survivors, ‘the ghastlyest forms that were ever seen alive’ emerging into a s
ickly dawn ‘from this infernal scene of horror’?
ii
Retrospectively the Black Hole and the wide currency given it by Holwell ‘threw a moral halo over the British conquest of India’ and gave to Clive’s Bengal campaign ‘its terrific energy’ (Nirad Chaudhuri). Yet at the time it did not feature as prominently as one might expect in the Company’s deliberations. ‘The amazing catastrophe of Fort William’, described by the newspapers of the day as having put ‘All London in Consternation’, referred simply to its loss, not to the Black Hole. Undoubtedly events enlightened the general public about the hitherto obscure activities of a remote merchant community and even shed a human and sympathetic light on them. It also alarmed the City’s investors who put the loss of Calcutta to the Company at over £2 million.
But the Court of Directors, with damage limitation in mind, showed minimal anxiety. They congratulated themselves on the fact that both Calcutta’s warehouses and its treasury had been empty at the time; and by way of censure they contented themselves with dismissing just the incompetent Commandant Minchin. It helped that the news of the disaster had come via Madras and was therefore accompanied by the reassurance that retaliatory moves were already afoot. And it helped even more that a mere seven weeks of high summer elapsed between the bombshell of ‘the amazing catastrophe’ and the balm of an equally amazing recovery. Thereafter the news of further victories came so fast and fantastic that the fall of Calcutta and even the Black Hole could be seen as blessings in disguise.
