The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expeditions to Persia, China and Japan 1856-7-8

An instructive illustration was afforded towards the close of July, of the intimate connection between the rebel sepoys and the villages of Behar or Western Bengal. The government issued a proclamation, offering rewards for the apprehension of mutineers and deserters. Mr Money, magistrate at Gayah, found by inquiries that the inhabitants of the villages refused to aid in giving up such men; but he hit upon a mode of ascertaining at least the connection between the sepoys and the villages respectively. Every sepoy remitted to his village a portion of his pay, by means of remittance-bills and descriptive rolls; each bill went to the accountant; the receipt of the payee went back to the regiment; while the descriptive roll was kept and filed in the office of the magistrate, shewing the name and regiment of the remitter. Mr Money thought it useful to collect and tabulate all these descriptive rolls for two years; and thus was able to obtain a record of the name of every sepoy belonging to every village within his jurisdiction. He could thus track any rebel soldier who might return to his village in hope of escaping punishment; for the native police, if ordered to apprehend a particular man in a particular district would do so, although unwilling to initiate inquiries. The matter is noted here, as shewing how closely the ties of family were kept up by the sepoys in this regular transmission of money from the soldier in his camp to his relations in their village.

During the first half of the month of July, before the state of affairs at Dinapoor had assumed a serious import, the towns and districts recently named were troubled rather by vague apprehensions than by actual dangers. At Gayah, the chief town of a district south of Patna, the magistrate was in much anxiety; the native inhabitants, in part hopefully and in part fearfully, were looking out daily for news from the mutineers in the Jumna and Ganges regions; and he felt much doubt whether the Company’s treasury at that place was safe. So it was in most of the towns and stations; from Raneegunge, where the finished portion of the railway ended (at about a hundred and twenty miles from Calcutta), to the districts approaching Benares and Patna, magistrates and revenue-collectors, feeling their responsibility as civil servants of the Company, cried aloud to Calcutta for a few, even a very few, English troops, to set at rest their apprehensions; but Calcutta, as these pages have over and over again shewn, had no troops to spare except for the great stations further to the northwest.

As the month advanced, these symptoms of uneasiness increased in number and intensity; and when the isolated mutineers at Rownee, Monghir, Hazarebagh, &c., became intensified by the more momentous outbreak at Dinapoor, fear grew in some instances up to panic, and the Company’s officers hastened away from stations which they believed themselves unable to hold. But here, as elsewhere, difficulties raised different qualities in different minds; many of these gentlemen behaved with a heroism worthy of all praise, as Mr Wake and Mr Boyle had done at Arrah. At some of the places not a single English soldier could be seen, or was likely to be seen at that time; and under those circumstances it was a fact of high importance that Captain Rattray’s battalion of Sikh police remained stanch and true – ready to march in small detachments to any threatened spot, and always rendering good service. When the two companies of the 8th B. N. I. mutinied at Hazarebagh, towards the close of the month, and when the Ramgurh force followed their example instead of opposing them, the civilians in this wide region were really placed in great peril; Hazarebagh wished to know what Ramgurh would do, Sheergotty looked anxiously towards Gayah, and Raneegunge feared for the safety of its railway station. The Raneegunge officials, after fleeing to Calcutta, returned to their station about the middle of August, under the protection of Sikh police. The wife of one of the civil servants of the Company, writing from Raneegunge on the 7th of August, told of the sad condition in which European fugitives reached that place, coming from various disturbed districts. ‘We are overwhelmed with refugees from all places. Some of the poor creatures have come without a thing but what they have on, and I am obliged to give them all changes of clothes for a time. Many came after riding seventy miles on one horse, and one gentleman without a saddle – a doctor and two others in their night-clothes – as they started while the wretches were firing into their bungalows. My husband had to lend them clothes to go to Calcutta in.’ The telegraphic messages or written letters that passed between Calcutta and the various stations in Western Bengal, in July and August, occupy a very large space in the blue-books relating to the mutiny; they everywhere tell of officials expressing apprehensions of being obliged to flee unless reinforcements could be sent to them; and of distinct replies from the governor-general that, as he had no troops to send them, they must bear up as long as their sagacity and resolution would permit. The Europeans at Sheergotty left that station in a body, not because they were attacked, but because they saw no hope of defence if enemies should approach. Many Europeans, however, similarly placed, afterwards regretted that they had fled; instances were not few of the moral power obtained over the native mind by men who resolutely clung to their duty in moments of peril; while in those cases where the abandonment took place, ‘the thieves and rabble of the neighbourhood,’ as an eye-witness remarked, ‘plundered the cutcheries and private houses; and those who had grudges against their neighbours began to hope and to prepare for an opportunity of vengeance.’

August found matters in an equally unsettled state. Many of the magistrates and collectors now had a new difficulty. Mr Tayler, as commissioner for the whole of the Patna division, ordered such of them as were under his control to abandon their stations and come into Patna for shelter; many were quite willing to do so; but others, resolute and determined men, did not like this appearance of shrinking from their duty in time of trouble. Mr Money, the magistrate of Gayah, called a meeting of the Europeans at that station, and read Mr Tayler’s order to them; it was decided by vote to abandon the place and its treasure, and retreat to Patna. ‘We formed rather a picturesque cavalcade,’ said one of the number, ‘as we wound out from Gayah; the elephants and horses; the scarlet of the Europeans contrasting with the white dresses of the Sikh soldiery; the party of gentlemen, armed to the teeth, who rode in the midst; and the motley assemblage of writers, servants, and hangers-on that crowded in the rear.’ While on the road towards Patna, two of the gentlemen, Mr Money and Mr Hollings, feeling some humiliation at the position they were in, resolved to march back to their posts even if none others accompanied them. It happened that a few men of the 64th foot had passed through Gayah a day or two before, and Mr Money was enabled to bring them back for a short period. These two officials, it is true, were afterwards driven away from Gayah by a band of released prisoners, and fled to Calcutta; but their firmness in an hour of difficulty won for them approval and promotion from the government. This transaction at Gayah was connected with a series of quarrels which led to much partisan spirit. Mr Tayler had long been in disfavour with Mr Halliday, lieutenant-governor of Bengal, as an official of a very intractable and insubordinate character; and after the issue of the order lately adverted to, Mr Tayler was removed from his office altogether – a step that led to a storm of letters, papers, pamphlets, charges, and counter-charges, very exciting to the Calcutta community at that time, but having little permanent interest in connection with the mutiny.

As the month advanced, the government were able to send a few English troops to some of the stations above named. When Mr Halliday had learned, by telegrams and letters, that not a single European remained in Sheergotty or Bagoda, and that the native troops of the Ramgurh battalion had mutinied at Ranchee, Purulia, and elsewhere, he earnestly begged Lord Canning to send a few troops thither, or the whole region would be left at the mercy of marauding bands. This the governor-general was fortunately enabled to do, owing to the arrival about that time of troops from the China expedition.

When August ended, the Dinapoor mutineers, under Koer Singh, were marching onwards to the Jumna regions, as if with the intention of joining the mutineers in Bundelcund; the 12th irregulars, after their atrocity at Segowlie, were bending their steps towards Oude; the Ramgurh mutineers were marching westward to the Sone, as if to join Koer Singh; while the petty chieftains, liberated prisoners, and ruffians of all kinds, were looking out for ‘loot’ wherever there was a chance of obtaining it. Bengal and Behar exhibited nothing that could be dignified with the name of battles or war; it was simply anarchy, with insufficient force on the part of the authorities to restore order.

One unfortunate result of the Dinapoor mutiny was, that the Europeans contracted a sentiment of hatred towards the natives, so deadly as to defeat all the purposes of justice and fairness. When Sir James Outram was at Dinapoor, on his way up the Ganges, he found that some of the English soldiers had murdered several sepoys against whom nothing could be charged – in revenge for the terrible loss suffered at Arrah. Sir James noticed in one of his dispatches, with strong expressions of regret, the distortion of feeling thus brought about by the mutiny; distortion, because those soldiers were not, at other times, less inclined to be just and manly than the other regiments of her Majesty’s army. It was a sore trial for men, when scenes of brutal cruelty were everywhere before their eyes, coolly to draw the line between justice and vengeance, and to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty.

CHAPTER XVII.

MINOR MUTINIES: JULY AND AUGUST

The reader will easily appreciate the grounds on which it is deemed inexpedient to carry out uninterruptedly the history of the mutiny at any one spot. Unless contemporaneous events elsewhere be noticed, links in the chain of causes and effects will be wanting. We have traced the siege of Delhi down to a certain point in the line of operations; we have followed the footsteps of Havelock until he reached the ball-shattered home of the European residents at Lucknow; we have watched the more immediate effects of the Dinapoor mutiny in the regions of Bengal and Behar. It now, however, becomes necessary to inquire what was doing elsewhere during the months of July and August – how the Europeans at Agra fared, when the stations on all sides of them were in the hands of the insurgents; how far the affrighted women and tender children succeeded in finding refuge at the hill-stations of Nynee Tal and its neighbourhood; what the Mahratta followers of Scindia and Holkar were doing; to what extent Rohilcund and the Cis-Sutlej territory were thrown into anarchy; whether or not Bombay and Madras, Nagpoor and the Nizam’s country, remained at peace; how, in short, India generally was affected during the two months above named. Fortunately, this duty will not demand so full a measure of treatment as the analogous narratives for earlier months. The isolated revolts in June occupied attention in three successive Chapters56– because of their great number, the wide-spreading area over which they occurred, the sufferings of many of the Europeans, the romantic adventures of others, the daring bravery of nearly all, and the necessity for describing the geographical and military peculiarities of the several provinces and stations. These matters having once been treated with moderate fulness, the narrative may now proceed at an accelerated pace; insomuch that we shall be enabled, in the present chapter, to take a bird’s-eye glance at the isolated or miscellaneous events, whether mutinies or suppressions of mutiny, belonging to the months of July and August.

Let us begin by directing attention to that small but thickly populated country lying between Patna and Allahabad, and extending in the other direction from the Ganges to Nepaul. Goruckpore, Ghazeepore, Azimghur, Jounpoor, and Benares, all lie within this region; Dinapoor, Buxar, Mirzapore, Sultanpore, and Fyzabad, lie just beyond it; and towns and villages of smaller character bestrew it more thickly than any other part of India. When Henry Lawrence was dead, and Inglis powerless in Oude for anything beyond maintaining his position in Lucknow; when Wheeler had been killed at Cawnpore, and Lloyd superseded at Dinapoor; when Colvin was shut up in Agra, and could do very little as lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Provinces – there was scarcely any one who could exercise control within the region just marked out. If a magistrate, collector, or commandant, succeeded in maintaining British supremacy by mingled courage and sagacity, so far well; but he was in few instances able to exercise power beyond the limits of his own town or station. Under these circumstances, Viscount Canning created a new office, that of ‘Lieutenant-governor of the Central Provinces,’ and gave it to Mr J. P. Grant, one of the members of the Supreme Council at Calcutta. The object in view was to restore order to a large range of country that had been thrown into utter anarchy. The title was not, perhaps, happily chosen; for there was already a ‘Central India,’ comprising the Mahratta country around Indore or Malwah; and, moreover, a jurisdiction was hardly ‘central’ that ran up to the borders of Nepaul. Passing by this, however, the newly aggregated ‘Central Provinces’ comprised the Allahabad division, the Benares division, and the Saugor division; containing a large number of important cities and towns.

When Mr Grant assumed his new duties in August, he found that the Goruckpore district was entirely in the hands of rebels. The leader of the rebels was one Mahomed Hussein, who was at the head of a poorly armed rabble, rather than of an organised military force, and who, with that rabble, had been perpetrating acts of great barbarity. One civilian, Mr Bird, had displayed that gallant spirit which so honourably marked many of the Company’s servants: he remained behind, at his own request, when the rest of the civil officers fled from Goruckpore; he hoped to be able to maintain his position, but was forced after a time to yield to the pressure of adverse circumstances, and escape to Bettiah. The governor-general, during the month of June, accepted aid which had been offered some time previously, by Jung Bahadoor of Nepaul. In pursuance of this agreement, three thousand Goorkhas were sent down from Khatmandoo, and entered British territory northward of Goruckpore. They were ordered on shortly afterwards to Azimghur; and most of the Goruckpore officials, availing themselves of this escort, quitted the station with their movables and the government treasure. Some of the Goorkhas then remained for a time at Azimghur, while the rest went to escort the treasure to Jounpoor and Benares. While at Goruckpore, the Goorkhas assisted in disarming such native troops as were at the station. Much was expected from these hardy troops, and it is only just to observe that they generally warranted the expectation. It was late in June that the arrangement was entered into, the immediate object in view being the pacification of the very districts now under notice.

The Azimghur district had its full share in the troubles of the period. During the first half of July, mutinous sepoys from other stations were frequently threatening the town of Azimghur, and keeping the Europeans perpetually on the watch. The 65th native infantry were very turbulent in the vicinity. On a particular day the Company’s servants at the station held a council of war; some voted that Azimghur was untenable, and that a retreat should be made to Ghazeepore; but bolder councils prevailed with the majority. At last a regular battle with the enemy took place; a battle which has been described in such a lively manner by Mr Venables, deputy-magistrate of Azimghur, that we cannot do better than quote a portion of a letter in which he narrated the events of the day.57 The action was really worthy of note even in a military sense; for a small force, headed by a civilian, defeated an enemy ten times as numerous. Mr Venables received the thanks of the government for his skill and courage on this occasion. But afterwards came a time of mortification. Of the native troops which formed his little army on the 18th, more than half belonged to the very regiment which mutinied a few days afterwards at Segowlie, after murdering their commandant, Major Holmes. Mr Venables pondered on the question: ‘Will the detachment of the 12th irregulars remain faithful at Azimghur, when another portion of the same regiment has mutinied at Segowlie?’ He thought such a proof of fidelity improbable; and therefore, he and the other Europeans sought to avert danger by removing from Azimghur to Ghazeepore, which they did on the 30th of July. The district all around the station at Azimghur remained at the mercy of lawless marauders until the arrival of the Goorkhas from Goruckpore, mentioned in the last paragraph. Then began a struggle, which should act with the most effective energy – Oudian insurgents from the west, openly hostile to the British; or Nepaul Goorkhas from the north, serving in alliance with the British – a struggle in which, it hardly need be said, many villages were reduced to ashes, and much disturbance of peaceful industry produced.

The Jounpoor district was even more completely disorganised than those of Goruckpore and Azimghur; it had been almost entirely abandoned since the first mutiny of the troops at that station in June. Not until after a Goorkha force had marched into Jounpoor in August, could the civil officers feel any safety in returning to their duties at that station.

Benares, the most important place hereabouts, became a temporary home for many officers who, by the revolt of their several native regiments, had been suddenly and unwillingly deprived of active duties; there were eight or ten of them, mostly belonging to Oude regiments which had revolted. When Jung Bahadoor agreed to send a body of Goorkha troops from Nepaul to the disturbed districts, the Calcutta government transmitted orders for some of these unemployed officers to meet those troops at Goruckpore, and act with them. Among those officers were Captain Boileau and Lieutenants Miles, Hall, and Campbell. It was early in July when this order was sent to Benares, but some weeks elapsed ere the Goorkhas reached Goruckpore. Before this co-operation with the Goorkhas took place, Benares was enabled to render a little good service against the rebels by the aid of British troops, not stationed at that place, but while on transit to the upper provinces. The gallant 78th Highlanders, journeying from Calcutta to Allahabad, were divided into portions according as the means of transport were presented, and according to the necessities of the districts through which they passed. On the 5th of July, Lieutenant-colonel Gordon, commanding the Benares district, saw the necessity of checking some insurgents near that city; and he intrusted that duty to Major Haliburton of the 78th. The major started on the morning of the 6th, with a mixed detachment of Europeans and natives, and marched eight miles on the Azimghur road. His advanced cavalry reported a large body of the enemy half a mile ahead, with their centre posted across the road, and their flanks resting on villages, partially concealed behind trees and rising-ground. Their number was about 500, aided by an equal number of villagers apparently eager for mischief. The contest was soon over, and the enemy repelled. The chief point that rendered the incident worthy of note was that a few of the 12th irregular cavalry, employed by Haliburton, shewed bad symptoms during the day; they did not charge the enemy with alacrity; and they appeared inclined to listen to the appeals made to their religious feelings by the natives whom they were called upon to oppose. These troopers belonged to the same regiment as those who afterwards mutinied at Segowlie.

After the departure of the Highlanders, this great and important Hindoo city was frequently thrown into excitement by mutinies or reports of mutinies at other places. Rumours came in early in August, to the effect that the irregular cavalry from Segowlie, after murdering their officers, were on their way to Jounpoor, thirty-five miles from Benares, with the intention of visiting Benares itself. The city contained at that time only 300 English soldiers, none of whom could safely be spared to go out and confront the rebels. The civil lines at Benares comprised that portion of the British station which contained the jails, the courts of justice, and the residences of the commissioner, judge, surgeon, &c.; it lay on the north of the Burnah River, while the military lines were on the south, the two being connected by a bridge. The civil station was thus peculiarly open to attack; and all that the authorities could do for it was to post a party of soldiers and two guns on the bridge; the prisoners were removed to the other side of the river, the courts were abandoned, and all valuable property was taken from the civil station to that of the European military in the cantonment. The Rev. James Kennedy, chaplain of the station, has in a letter mentioned a fact which shews in how agitated a state the English community at Benares were at that time;58 illustrating in a striking way – as was more than once shewn during those turmoils in India – that the panic arising from an apprehended danger was often worse than the reality, paralysing the exertions of those who would have rendered good service had actual fighting with an open enemy commenced. No sooner had the dread of the Segowlie mutineers passed away, than an approach of those from Dinapoor was threatened. Colonel Gordon, seeing the mischief that would accrue from such a step, resolved to prevent it: he sent out his handful of English soldiers, not merely to check the approach of the rebels, but to drive them from the district altogether. Koer Singh and his rabble army did not wait for this conflict; they gave Benares a ‘wide offing,’ and bent their steps towards Mirzapore. While the few English soldiers were engaged on this duty, the sentinels left behind were aided by the residents, headed by the judge – all keeping watch and ward in turn, for the common safety.

Mirzapore, from its large size and great importance as a commercial city, and its position on the banks of the Ganges between Benares and Allahabad, was often placed in considerable peril. No mutiny actually occurred there, but the city was repeatedly threatened by mutineers from other quarters, who, if successful, would certainly have been aided by all the budmashes of the place, and by many Mussulmans higher in station than mere rabble. The European residents were perpetually on the watch. When a battery of artillery came up the Ganges en route to Allahabad, they earnestly entreated to be allowed to retain it for their own protection; but Neill, the presiding genius at that time, would not listen to this; Allahabad and Cawnpore must be thought of, and Mirzapore must shift for itself. When the affairs at Segowlie and Dinapoor became known, measures were taken for making some kind of stronghold at Mirzapore. The Europeans intrenched the largest and strongest house belonging to them, barricaded the streets, buried much property, placed other property in guarded boats on the river, and prepared for service four small guns and five hundred rounds of ammunition. On numbering heads, they found 135 persons, all of whom had separate duties or posts assigned to them in the hour of need; they also secured provision for a month. This judicious line of policy answered the desired purpose: the Dinapoor mutineers did not enter or molest Mirzapore. Those marauders passed westward along a line of route further removed from the Ganges, plundering as they went, and committing great devastation. On the 19th of August, a small force set out from Mirzapore to check those acts of violence; but the Dinapoor men generally managed to keep beyond the reach of pursuers. A little later, when other regiments had mutinied in the Saugor division, it was deemed prudent by the Calcutta authorities to send a portion of a Madras regiment, with two guns, to aid in the protection of Mirzapore.