...Siraj-ud Daulah retaliates and captures Calcutta (shortly…

June 1756 CE

...Siraj-ud Daulah retaliates and captures Calcutta (shortly renamed as Alinagar) from the British in June 1756.

Fort William, built in 1696 by the British East India Company under the supervision of John Goldsborough, had been established to protect the East India Company's trade in the city of Calcutta.

Sir Charles Eyre started construction near the bank of the River Hooghly with the South-East Bastion and the adjacent walls; the fort was named after King William III in 1700.

John Beard, his successor, added the North-East Bastion in 1701, and in 1702 started the construction of the Government House (Factory) at the center of the fort.

Construction ended in 1706.

The building has two stories and projecting wings.

In 1756 India, there exists the possibility of imperial confrontation with military forces of the Kingdom of France, so the British reinforce the fort.

The local ruler, the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, is unhappy with the East India Company's political interference in the internal affairs of his province; the British merchants are undermining his political power.

Perceiving a threat to Bengali independence and himself as Nawab, he orders the immediate cessation of the reinforcement of Fort William, but the East India Company pays no heed to the native ruler.

In consequence to that British indifference to local Bengali authority, Siraj ud-Daulah organizes his army and lays siege to Fort William.

In an effort to survive the losing battle, the British commander orders the surviving soldiers of the garrison to escape, yet leaves behind one hundred and forty-six soldiers under the civilian command of John Zephaniah Holwell, a senior bureaucrat of the East India Company, who had been a military surgeon in earlier life.

Moreover, the desertions of allied Indian troops make ineffective the British defense of Fort William, which falls to the siege of Bengali forces on June 20, 1757.

The surviving defenders who are captured and made prisoners-of-war number between sixty-four and sixty-nine.

J. Z. Holwell wrote about the events that occurred after the fall of Fort William.

He met with Siraj-ud-Daulah, who assured him: “On the word of a soldier; that no harm should come to us”.

After seeking a place in the fort to confine the prisoners (including Holwell), at 8.00 p.m., the jailers locked the prisoners in the fort’s prison — “the black hole” in soldiers' slang — a small room that measured four point three meters by five point five meters (fourteen feet by eighteen feet).

The next morning, when the black hole was opened, at 6.00 a.m., only around twenty-three of about sixty-four prisoners remained alive.

Historians offer different numbers of prisoners and casualties of war; Stanley Wolpert reported that sixty-four people were imprisoned, and twenty-one survived imprisonment.

D.L. Prior reported that forty-three men of the Fort-William garrison were either missing or dead, for reasons other than suffocation and shock.

Busteed reports that the many non-combatants present in the fort when it was captured makes infeasible a precise number of people killed.

Regarding responsibility for the maltreatment and the deaths in the Black Hole of Calcutta, Holwell said it “was the result of revenge and resentment, in the breasts of the lower Jemmaatdaars [sergeants], to whose custody we were delivered, for the number of their order killed during the siege.”

Concurring with Holwell, Wolpert said that Siraj-ud-Daulah did not order the imprisonment and was not informed of it.

The physical description of the Black Hole of Calcutta corresponds with Holwell’s point of view:

    The dungeon was a strongly barred room, and was not intended for the confinement of more than two or three men at a time. There were only two windows, and a projecting veranda outside, and thick iron bars within impeded the ventilation, while fires, raging in different parts of the fort, suggested an atmosphere of further oppressiveness. The prisoners were packed so tightly that the door was difficult to close.

    One of the soldiers stationed in the veranda was offered 1,000 rupees to have them removed to a larger room. He went away, but returned saying it was impossible. The bribe was then doubled, and he made a second attempt with a like result; the nawab was asleep, and no one dared wake him.

    By nine o'clock several had died, and many more were delirious. A frantic cry for water now became general, and one of the guards, more compassionate than his fellows, caused some [water] to be brought to the bars, where Mr. Holwell and two or three others received it in their hats, and passed it on to the men behind. In their impatience to secure it nearly all was spilt, and the little they drank seemed only to increase their thirst. Self-control was soon lost; those in remote parts of the room struggled to reach the window, and a fearful tumult ensued, in which the weakest were trampled or pressed to death. They raved, fought, prayed, blasphemed, and many then fell exhausted on the floor, where suffocation put an end to their torments.

    About 11 o'clock the prisoners began to drop off, fast. At length, at six in the morning, Siraj-ud-Daulah awoke, and ordered the door to be opened. Of the 146 only 23, including Mr. Holwell [from whose narrative, published in the Annual Register for 1758, this account is partly derived], remained alive, and they were either stupefied or raving. Fresh air soon revived them, and the commander was then taken before the nawab, who expressed no regret for what had occurred, and gave no other sign of sympathy than ordering the Englishman a chair and a glass of water. Notwithstanding this indifference, Mr. Holwell and some others acquit him of any intention of causing the catastrophe, and ascribe it to the malice of certain inferior officers, but many think this opinion unfounded.

Afterwards, when the prison of Fort-William is opened, the corpses of the dead men are thrown into a ditch.

Moreover, as prisoners, Holwell and three other men are transferred to Murshidabad; the remaining survivors of the Black Hole of Calcutta will be freed after the victory of a relief expedition under command of Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive.