Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (51 page)

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 sickly dawn ‘from this infernal scene of horror’?

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.

The inconvenience of news from their settlements being anything from six to eighteen months out of date had for once worked to the directors’ advantage; sailing schedules had delayed the bad tidings while speeding the good. In fact Siraj-ud-Daula had enjoyed the freedom of Calcutta (or ‘Ali-nagar’ as he had renamed it), and Drake and his men had endured the misery of Fulta, not for seven weeks but seven months. The Madras Council, mindful of its own plight ten years earlier, had indeed rushed reinforcements to its Bengal brethren. They had reached Fulta by the end of July. But this was in response to the first hint of trouble, namely Siraj’s move against the Kasimbazar factory. Presuming that a show of strength would be enough to ensure its restitution, this first detachment, commanded by Major Killpatrick, was only 200 strong and quite unequal to the new task of retaking Calcutta.

When Watson and Clive, after a rough and circuitous voyage by way of Sri Lanka and the Burmese coast, finally entered the Hughli, it was mid December and half of Killpatrick’s force had already succumbed to the climate. On the other hand, Drake and the Calcutta refugees, though ‘crowded together in the most wretched habitations, clad in the meanest apparel, and…surrounded by sickness and disease’, were in better heart. Survival had been something of a triumph in itself. According to Surgeon Ives, they ‘had so long been disciplined in the school of adversity as to make them kiss the rod’.

Perhaps therein lies an explanation for the spirit of reconciliation that had at last surfaced. In time Watts, then Holwell, had both been released, and along with most of the Company’s Dhaka establishment, had found their way down to Fulta. Since there was some doubt about the authority of a Fort William Council that could no longer convene in Fort William, they now formed themselves, with Drake, Clive and Watson, into a Select Committee. This
ad hoc
body was to acquire a permanent and influential status; it ‘carried out all the Revolutions which gave Bengal to the British…and in later years developed into what is now [1905] the Foreign Department’ (S. C. Hill).

With Drake and his erstwhile colleagues deriving their authority from the Company’s Bengal establishment, Clive and his troops from the Madras Council, and Watson and his squadron from the Crown, the Committee proved a vital forum in which to resolve the always simmering jealousies of a divided command. Clive, with a Royal commission as lieutenant-colonel in addition to his undisputed command of the Madras troops, was eventually able to dominate its deliberations. But its existence can also be seen as evidence of a growing sense of shared purpose amongst the Company’s servants in India. Already a young man called Hastings (with the unlikely first name of Warren) was acting as agent and caretaker for the Company’s interests in Murshidabad. The future and first governor-general of all the Company’s Indian establishments had been making a tour of the rural weaving centres when Siraj had attacked Kasimbazar. Now neither at liberty nor certainly in detention, he was still in Murshidabad, well if precariously placed to act as go-between.

Hastings’s news of the Nawab’s affairs was not encouraging. Defeat of the English had given Siraj such delusions of grandeur that to the Emperor in Delhi he had announced his success as ‘the most glorious achievement in Indostan since the days of Tamerlane’. Such a mighty conqueror could afford to be magnanimous and he had therefore commuted the sentence hanging over the Dutch and French establishments in favour of hefty fines and constant insults; it delighted him to reflect that he had not just conquered the English but had got the other Europeans to pay for it. In October his confidence was further boosted by the defeat of a rival for the Nawabship and confirmation from Delhi of his title. He celebrated the occasion by conducting a public stock-taking of his personal wealth, the grand total coming to 680 million rupees or £85 million. Clearly here was an Indian prince who had no pressing need of
further cash. If the British at Fulta were ever to regain Calcutta, it would not be by the time-honoured expedient of dipping into the Company’s treasure chests.

Clive and Watson had already written to the Nawab demanding restitution and compensation. When by Christmas 1756 no reply had been received, tents were struck and anchors weighed. While Clive’s 1000 Madras sepoys marched upriver, his 800 European troops sailed alongside them in Watson’s ships. It was known that Siraj was back in Murshidabad but that his governor of ‘Ali-nagar’ had taken up position in the fort of Baj-baj which commanded the Hughli just below Calcutta.

Approaching the area Clive and a detachment of his troops were ambushed. Though outnumbered ten to one, they routed the attackers in just half an hour. The fort looked a more formidable proposition and, after a taste of Watson’s gunnery, was reserved for a copy-book assault by the cream of the troops on the following day. But this plan was frustrated by an act of notorious indiscipline. While Clive’s assault force lay in wait for the dawn, ‘one Strahan, a common sailor belonging to the
Kent’,
having evidently made too free with the ‘grog’, was seen to stagger uncertainly forwards, wade the fort’s moat, and ‘imperceptibly get under the walls’. There, according to Ives, ‘he took it into his head to scale a breach that had been made by the cannon of the ships’. Chance thus found him on top of one of the bastions and surrounded by incredulous guards ‘at whom he flourished his cutlass, and fired his pistol’. ‘Then after having given three loud huzzas, he cried out “The place is mine”.’

Responding to this outburst, some of his comrades, who had also ‘accidentally’ wandered into the same no-man’s-land, rushed the breach. They found Strahan bloodied but unbowed and still defending himself with ‘incomparable resolution’ plus the stub of his broken cutlass. By now the whole place was in an uproar. Sailors, sepoys and troopers poured into the breach; the fort’s garrison melted into the night. Thus Baj-baj, the first and, in the event, the only obstacle to the capture of Calcutta, fell to the British by mistake. The only casualty, a Scots captain, also fell by mistake; ‘he was unfortunately killed by a musket-bullet from one of our own pieces.’

Watson was hard put to conceal his delight at the mighty Clive being upstaged by one of his common sailors. It would have been a good moment to quote Lancaster’s grudging remark when adrift off the Cape – ‘these men regard no commission’. Instead Watson appeared to reprimand the miscreant. Strahan was taxed with a flagrant breach of
discipline and duly confessed his guilt; it was indeed he who had taken the fort, he said, but he ‘hoped there was no harm in it’. Watson pretended to be unmoved. As the offender was led away to a punishment that never materialized he was heard to utter a solemn oath to the effect that, if flogged, he ‘would never take another fort by himself as long as he lived, by God’.

Such self-denial proved of no evil consequence when two days later the squadron began pounding Fort William. In less than an hour the Fort’s guns fell silent as someone ashore ‘hoisted an English pendant on a tree’. The British retook Calcutta as easily as they had lost it, noted the chief of the Dutch factory at Chinsura. The town’s inhabitants came out to welcome back their old masters and the only serious altercation was that between Captain Eyre Coote, the Royal officer who actually took possession of the place on behalf of Watson and the Crown, and Colonel Clive who immediately claimed possession for the Company by virtue of his superior rank and the command invested in him by the Madras Council. At one point the quarrel looked like ending in the arrest of Clive or even an exchange of fire.

It was not just a question of to whom belonged the honours. Clive seems to have viewed the situation as an important test of his authority. With the Admiral making common cause with the Bengal civilians, there was a real possibility of a peace being quickly concluded with the Nawab-on the basis of the old 1717
farman
plus compensation, especially for private losses. But Clive had not come to Bengal to restore an unsatisfactory
status quo ante
and enrich the Bengal factors. He was there ‘to do great things’, as he told his father, not just to retake Calcutta but to leave the Company in Bengal ‘in a better and more lasting condition than ever’. The example of the French in Hyderabad, and of the French and then the English in the Carnatic, could be emulated in Bengal. The unpopularity of Siraj, the danger posed by the French at Chandernagar, and – not least – the pecuniary and professional opportunities offered by a Bengal campaign, demanded that the Company take the offensive.

In the end, by a ‘pass-the-parcel’ compromise, Coote handed Calcutta over to Clive, Clive to Watson, and Watson to Drake and the Bengal Council. Then, evidently as part of the same transaction, the Council,
‘persuaded by Colonel Clive
[author’s italics], immediately published a declaration of war against the Nabob [Nawab] in the name of the East India Company as did Admiral Watson in that of the King’.