Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (50 page)

Back in London between the Carnatic campaigns and the attack on Gheriah, Clive had first savoured celebrity. With Orme, who had accompanied him from India, busily chronicling his battles, comparisons had soon been made with the great Comte de Saxe, the recently deceased Marshal of France. The Chairman of the Company presented him with a diamond-studded sword and the directors obtained for him a royal commission as lieutenant-colonel; when he returned to India it was with the promise of succeeding to the Presidency of Madras – yet he was still only in his twenties. To such a disciple of fame news of the fall of Calcutta must have sounded like the muezzin of destiny. Lawrence was too old and too ill to command the land forces of the relief expedition; Colonel Aldercron of the Royal regiment brought out by Watson was too untried
and too reluctant to defer to the Madras Council. That left Clive, ‘the capablest person in India’ according to the faithful Orme. He sailed for Bengal already aware of the bright lights and the sharp focus of history.

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 Witherington. 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.