During the latter part of May, European soldiers were landed at Calcutta, and sent in batches to Allahabad. At that time Lord Canning was most anxious to relieve Sir Henry Lawrence at Lucknow. The railway had been completed for a hundred miles from Calcutta. Accordingly the soldiers were sent by railway from Calcutta, then by boats up the river Ganges to Allahabad, at the junction of the Ganges and Jumna, about half way between Calcutta and Delhi. From Allahabad they were sent a hundred and twenty miles still further up the Ganges to the town of Cawnpore, where the river formed a line of frontier between the North-West Provinces and Oudh. It will be seen hereafter that only a few Europeans reached Cawnpore, and that none of those sent up from Calcutta ever reached Lucknow.
Neill's advance.
The British reinforcements were commanded by Colonel Neill, a Madras officer who had served in the Crimean war, and was distinguished by force of will. On one occasion the station-master at Calcutta proposed sending away a railway train without the soldiers, because the latter were delayed. To his utter surprise he was arrested by Neill, and kept under a guard until every soldier had taken his seat. The incident is trivial, but it tells the character of Neill.
Delay at Benares.
§2. Colonel Neill did not reach Allahabad for some days. He was detained at Benares from the 4th to the 9th of June. This city, the Jerusalem of the Brahmans, is situated on the river Ganges, about 420 miles above Calcutta and eighty miles below Allahabad. It had a population of 300,000, mostly Hindus. The cantonment is two or three miles from the city, and was occupied by a regiment of Bengal infantry, one of irregular cavalry, and a Sikh regiment. There was no European force whatever to keep the city and cantonment in check beyond thirty British gunners, but this number would have been ample had there been no scare about greased cartridges. No danger was to be apprehended from the civil population of Benares. The sepoy regiments in the cantonment were the only cause for alarm.
Turbulence of the people.
Yet the Hindu population of Benares had always been bigoted and turbulent. During the persecuting reign of the Mogul Aurangzeb, in the seventeenth century, the Hindus of the sacred city were kept down by brute force, and compelled to pay the poll-tax levied on infidels, whilst Mohammedan mosques were built on the ruins of Hindu temples. Under the tolerant rule of the British, the Hindus had been more contented, but there had been occasional fights between Hindus and Mohammedans, especially at festival times. Moreover, the Hindus at Benares were under the thumb of the Brahmans, and were more bigoted and exacting under British rule than they had dared to be under Mohammedan domination. A British magistrate, however, had generally kept the peace in Benares with the help of Asiatic police, but occasionally he found it necessary to call out a detachment of sepoys.
Hostility of the Brahmans: stamped out by Gubbins.
For many years the Brahmans at Benares utterly refused to have the sacred city lighted or drained. They declared that lighting and drainage were contrary to the Hindu religion, and the arguments of the British magistrate to the contrary were a sheer waste of words. At last, in 1851, the British magistrate, a Mr. Frederic Gubbins, carried out these municipal reforms in the teeth of a Hindu mob. Then followed a commotion at Benares precisely similar to that which occurred at Madras in the seventeenth century, when the British rulers endeavoured to reform the sanitary condition of their city. The traders and bazaar dealers shut up their shops, and refused to supply the cantonment with grain. Mr. Gubbins was pelted and fired at, and fled for his life. He called out a detachment of sepoys, arrested the ringleaders of the riot, and lodged them in the jail. From that moment Mr. Gubbins was lord of Benares. He rode through the city and ordered all the shops to be opened, and there was no one to say him nay.
British and Mogul rule.