These under Mr Holwell, a member of the Council, had fought on gallantly, keeping the enemy off until the afternoon of Sunday the 20th, when, being at their last cartridge, they beat a parley.* While they were talking from the walls, the enemy by treachery got possession of one of the fort gates (that in the rear), rushed the guard, and compelled the garrison to surrender at discretion.* That night the prisoners, a hundred and seventy-five in number, were crammed all together into the Black Hole, whence next morning only sixteen were left alive.* Of the sixteen, Mr Holwell and Mr Burdett, a writer, with two others, had been heavily ironed* and sent to the Nawab’s camp. Such was the tale told to Admiral Watson.*
* A parley (negotiation of peace) may be proposed by sounding a trumpet or beating a drum.
* That is, surrender unconditionally, accepting whatever fate the conqueror may decide upon.
* These numbers were subsequently revised down on the testimony of a survivor, John Zephaniah Holwell (1711-1798). “By narratives made public” he later wrote “you will only know, that of one hundred and forty-six prisoners, one hundred and twenty-three were smothered in the Black-Hole prison, in the night of the 20th of June, 1756.” Some later estimates have reduced the numbers still further, by as much as half, though it would be only natural if politics has come to bear on the discussion. Holwell’s account records that these 146 soldiers and civilians, including both men and women, were crushed into a poorly ventilated 14ft by 18ft prison cell designed for at most three, and subjected to ten hours of unimaginable suffering over a sweltering midsummer’s night in Bengal, while the guards outside laughed and jeered. Not all of the twenty-three survivors lived through the new day.
* That is, shackled. Holwell was inclined to excuse Siraj ud-Daulah himself, who had “repeated his assurances to me, on the word of a soldier, that no harm would come to us; and indeed I believe his orders were only general, that we would for that night be secured, and that what followed was the result of revenge and resentment in the breasts of the lower Jemadars [junior officers], to whose custody we were delivered, for the number of their order killed during the siege”.
* On December 18th, Watson wrote to Siraj ud-Daulah “courteously, but firmly, demanding the immediate restoration of Calcutta and compensation for property looted and destroyed.” He received no reply, so ten days later his ship eased up the River Hooghly to Budge-Budge. See One Man Army.