Black Hole of Calcutta
[1][2]: 58 John Zephaniah Holwell, one of the British prisoners and an employee of the East India Company said that, after the fall of Fort William, the surviving British soldiers, Indian sepoys, and Indian civilians were imprisoned overnight in conditions so cramped that many people died from suffocation and heat exhaustion, and that 123 of 146 prisoners of war imprisoned there died.
[7] The desertions of Indian sepoys made the British defence of Fort William ineffective and it fell to the siege of Bengali forces on 20 June 1756.
[11] 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 Jemadars (sergeants), to whose custody we were delivered, for the number of their order killed during the siege.
[7] The physical description of the Black Hole of Calcutta corresponds with Holwell's point of view: The dungeon was a strongly barred room and it 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.
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.
Of the 146 only 23, including Mr. Holwell [from whose narrative, published in the Annual Register and The Gentleman's Magazine 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 officers, but many think this opinion unfounded.Afterward, when the prison of Fort William was opened, the corpses of the dead men were thrown into a ditch.
Lord Curzon, on becoming Viceroy in 1899, noticed that there was nothing to mark the spot and commissioned a new monument, mentioning the prior existence of Holwell's; it was erected in 1901 at the corner of Dalhousie Square (now B.
As a result, Abdul Wasek Mia of Nawabganj thana, a student leader of that time, led the removal of the monument from Dalhousie Square in July 1940.
"List of the smothered in the Black Hole prison exclusive of sixty-nine, consisting of Dutch and British sergeants, corporals, soldiers, topazes, militia, whites, and Portuguese, (whose names I am unacquainted with), making on the whole one hundred and twenty-three persons."
[13]Mark Twain, on Chapter 20 in his travelogue Innocents Abroad (1867), describes a cell he and his fellow passengers were put into by police in Bellagio, Italy as "...the Black Hole of Calcutta on a small scale."
The character Charles Mason spends much time on Saint Helena with the astronomer Nevil Maskelyne, the brother-in-law of Lord Robert Clive of India.
Later in the story, Jeremiah Dixon visits New York City, and attends a secret "Broad-Way" production of the "musical drama", The Black Hole of Calcutta, or, the Peevish Wazir, "executed with such a fine respect for detail ...".
In the science-fiction novel Omega: The Last Days of the World (1894), by Camille Flammarion, the Black Hole of Calcutta is mentioned for the suffocating properties of Carbonic-Oxide (Carbon Monoxide) upon the British soldiers imprisoned in that dungeon.
Eugene O'Neill, in Long Day's Journey into Night, Act 4, Jamie says, "Can't expect us to live in the Black Hole of Calcutta."
In Chapter V of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1885) the Black Hole of Calcutta is mentioned: "This gave us some slight shelter from the burning rays of the sun, but the atmosphere in that amateur grave can be better imagined than described.
In John Fante's novel The Road to Los Angeles (1985), the main character Arturo Bandini recalls when seeing his place of work: "I thought about the Black Hole of Calcutta."
In Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray makes a reference to the Black Hole of Calcutta when describing the Anglo-Indian district in London (Chapter LX).
[21] A minority opinion in the August 1910 report of the Penitentiary Investigating Committee of the State of Texas (USA) referred to the prison conditions in this way: I trust that this report will sufficiently arouse the people of Texas to the atrocities daily heaped upon this mass of thirty-six hundred breathing, human souls, wards of the State, to such an extent that the people will rise up and demand a Called Session of the Legislature of this State in order that legislation may be enacted whereby this organized hell and "Black Hole of Calcutta" will be in the course of a few months only a ghastly memory in the minds of the people.
