Mad Dogs & Englishmen

THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA by Noel Barber. 254 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $3.95.

The Black Hole of Calcutta? U.S.

Physicist and Amateur Historian Harvey Einbinder declared in 1963 that it was just a gory story to frighten voters with, an atrocity invented by the British to justify their conquest of Bengal. The British bristled, and this brief but masterly report by a correspondent for the London Daily Mail assures any doubters that the atrocity actually occurred. It occurred, in fact, at the anticlimax of a comedy of horrors scarcely paralleled in British history.

The horrors began early in June 1756, when the Nawab of Bengal, taking umbrage at the swaggering economic imperialism of the British, marched on Fort William, the East India Company's stronghold in the brawling boom town of Calcutta. There were 50,000 regulars in the Nawab's army, and in the fort only 515 Europeans able to bear arms --such arms as were available. Thanks to Governor Roger Drake, a 34-year-old ineffectual, fifty cannon were rusted useless, and almost all the powder was too damp to burn.

Sold Out. Nevertheless, the siege began with a British victory. One English officer and 57 men held an outpost for nine hours against the attacks of 5,000 Indians. The Nawab prepared to order a general retreat, but he did not have to: Drake retreated first. In a panic he abandoned a key position--and then hid in a cellar, where he fell asleep on a storage bin. After he woke up, Drake took his first and last decisive action. He strode to the riverbank, jumped into a rowboat, and was last seen shinnying shamelessly aboard a merchantman moored near the fort.

After Drake's desertion, command was awarded to Chief Magistrate John Zephaniah Holwell, a man with a will to win. The garrison, now reduced to 170 fighting men, battled so fiercely that Indian losses soon stood at 7,000 dead. Once again, the Nawab stood ready to lift the siege, but once again his enemies rescued him. Fifty-six Dutch mercenaries sold out to the Indian leader and handed over the fort.

The Oven. The scene was now set for the last ghastly act of the Calcutta tragedy. Spoiling to avenge their losses, Indian officers persuaded the Nawab to confine his prisoners in the Black Hole, a stone brig precisely 18 ft. long and 14 ft. 10 in. wide, ventilated by two small barred embrasures and designed to accommodate three or four disciplinary cases at a time. Normally, the cell was stinking hot, but when 145 men and one woman were pounded into it by rifle butts, the air became noxious with excremental exhalations, and the temperature rose so rapidly that within an hour at least 50 men had roasted to death in the infernal oven. They died where they stood, the dead and the living pressed so closely together that they could not fall down. At 6 a.m., when the heavy door was opened, only 22 men and the woman staggered out of the Black Hole alive.

Those who survived lived to witness a crowning irony: Governor Drake, the villain of the episode, was continued in office for two years as though nothing had happened, and then was allotted a liberal sinecure as "head of the Senior Merchants."

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