CHAPTER X
INDIA'S MODERN CAPITAL
Kipling, who has gracefully lured roamers to India by saying, "It is good for every man to see some little of the great Indian Empire and the strange folk who move about it," obligingly prepares those entering by the gateway of Calcutta for an olfactory affront. The stenches of Calcutta are numerous and pervading, surely; but the tourist who has crawled up the Bay of Bengal in a caravel of the Peninsular & Oriental Company cheerfully accepts them. The "P. & O." line is one of Britain's venerated institutions; consequently English people would as soon commit a felony as criticize this antiquated concern. In these times ten-knot passenger steamers are hard to find outside the Calcutta service of the "P. & O." Company and in marine junk yards.
As a great commercial port, Calcutta is unfortunately located. It is on the Hooghly river, one of the outlets of the sacred Ganges, and ninety miles from its mouth. The Hooghly is a tortuous stream of mud that can be navigated by large vessels only by daylight and with favoring conditions of tide, for its channel is seldom two days alike. This demands expert piloting, and explains why Hooghly pilots are selected with great caution. A Hooghly pilot is the very maximum of a nautical swell, and one's boarding of a ship attended by man-servant and a mass of belongings partakes somewhat of the character of a function.
This Calcutta pilot is a fine fellow—well-bred, educated, and entitled to the splendid compensation and social position which he enjoys. Since the days of the East India Company, the forerunner of British rule in India, the pilots of the Hooghly have been esteemed as personages and they have taken rank but slightly lower than officers of the navy, and much ahead of ordinary commercial people and mariners. When off duty in Calcutta the pilot goes to his club and drives on the Maidan with other Anglo-Indians of quality, and never is seen about hotel bars and cafés like the ruck of seafaring men having a spare day on shore.
A CALCUTTA NAUTCH DANCER
The Hooghly is charted practically every twenty-four hours, and on his way upstream the pilot gets his information pertaining to depths and bars by signals from stations on shore. The river presents nothing of interest to the traveler until a point twenty miles from Calcutta is reached; thereafter it is a stream of many attractions. Fortifications with visible native troops and an occasional red-coated English soldier occur frequently; then come scores of enormous cotton and jute mills, attended by strange-looking stern-wheel steamboats, most of them with huge cargo barges