History: Edgar Allan Poe never wrote a fantasy more horrifying than Jan Dalley's true history of the Black Hole of Calcutta - as true, that is to say, as assiduous research could make it. She does not claim definitive accuracy, as the story of the atrocity took on the inflated distortion of myth, writes Patrick Skene Catling.
Dalley, biographer of Diana Mosley and arts editor of the Financial Times, conscientiously admits that some of her sources must be evaluated with scepticism. For example, she cites Noel Barber's book The Black Hole of Calcutta on several uncheckable points, though the author himself called his account "lightly fictionalised". Even so, Dalley has put together the best available descriptions of the horror of the Black Hole and presents them with admirable lucidity and sangfroid.
The Black Hole was not some sort of stygian pit underground. It was the nickname of a small military lock-up in Fort William, which Dalley calls the heart of Calcutta in the 1750s. The cell, a walled-in section of an arcade beside the parade ground, was big enough to hold temporarily a few violators of local rules, but much too small for the number of prisoners who were crammed into it on the night of June 20th, 1756.
The man who had them confined there was Siraj-ud-daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, an imperious viceroy of the Mogul empire, who, hating the traders of the British East India Company, had sent an overwhelming force to attack the company's Calcutta entrepot, their foothold on the south-east edge of the subcontinent.
His army on this expedition consisted of 18,000 horsemen, 500 elephants (to haul heavy artillery), 2,000 camels, 30,000 footsoldiers and 7,000 myrmidons or "official looters", who collected victuals from villages along the way. The managers of the East India Company's settlement managed to assemble "a motley crew", in Dalley's words, of 515 men and boys of various nationalities. "In the whole place," she relates, "there was only one officer, Captain Buchanan, who had ever seen any active service."
The defenders put up fierce resistance. With the aid of gunfire from merchant ships anchored in the adjacent Hooghly River, they are said to have killed as many as 5,000 of the attackers. However, after several days' battle, the British were beaten, the nawab's soldiers occupied the fort, and the remaining defenders were locked up overnight.
"According to the school-book version that was current in Britain for two centuries," Dalley writes, "146 people were locked into a room that measured 14 feet by 18 feet, and had only two small, high, barred windows for air. The monsoon was late coming that year, so it must have been one of the hottest nights of that sweltering place. When the door was opened in the morning, all but twenty-three had died, horribly, of crushing, suffocation and thirst."
The legend was based principally on the purple prose of the senior survivor, one John Zephaniah Holwell, who wrote a letter to a friend about the ordeal, evidently intended for publication.
Dalley takes Holwell's testimony with several pinches of salt - "in his description there are few hyperboles left untapped" - but relies on him, as on Barber, because every record is controversially suspect and Holwell's is generally recognised as probably closest to the truth, although since his time it has been experimentally demonstrated that 146 adults could not fit into a space the size of the Black Hole.
"Once someone had dropped to the floor," Dalley writes, paraphrasing Holwell, "there was little hope of survival. Even if the people above had wanted to avoid crushing those below, it would have been impossible, as they all blundered and staggered in the blackness, all trying to push their way towards the minute window embrasures, slithering on urine and blood and vomit . . . " .
Dalley places the incident of the Black Hole in its historical context, showing how the commercial exploitation of foreign resources led to military and political imperialism. The merchant venturers were superseded by armies of occupation and civil service administrators. In 1757, Robert Clive, known later as Lord Clive of India, and Admiral Charles Weston led a retaliatory invasion of Bengal, to Calcutta and beyond. The East India Company made way for the Raj. Lord Curzon , Viceroy of India from 1899, believed the Black Hole was pivotal. He erected a grand monument to its victims, "as men whose life-blood cemented the foundations of the British Empire in India". Jan Dalley expounds this complicated history very well. Her favourite adjective is huge.
Patrick Skene Catling's memoir, Better Than Working, has just been published in paperback by Liberties Press
The Black Hole: Money, Myth and Empire. By Jan Dalley, Penguin, 213pp, £16.99