The "Govindpur" on her Beam Ends.
S S "Thunder" on shore, at Colvin Ghât.
I recollect there were also no trees surrounding Government House, nor in the vicinity of the Eden Gardens. And there were none on the space fronting Esplanade Row, West. Dalhousie Square and Old Court House Street were also very bare of trees—scarcely one to be seen. The loss of life amongst the natives was appalling, caused principally by the huge storm or tidal wave accompanying the cyclone, resembling a solid wall of water, which at Diamond Harbour rose to the height of 34 feet; when it reached Calcutta it was 27 to 28 feet, rushing up the Hooghly from the sea at the rate of 20 miles an hour, destroying and overwhelming everything it encountered in its wild and devastating career. It was, of course, a matter of extreme difficulty to arrive at any very reliable estimate of the number who perished, owing to the vast area of country over which the storm raged. Happily the death rate in Calcutta itself was, comparatively speaking, not so very great, and was confined more or less to the crews of small native craft plying on the river, such as lighters, cargo-boats, dinghees, budgetows, and green-boats. This closes a brief chapter of some of the incidents that occurred and which have flitted across my memory in this never-to-be-forgotten storm which nearly overwhelmed Calcutta in October 1864, and shook it literally to its very foundations; but no pen can adequately visualise the picture of awful desolation and ruin that it wrought and left behind in its terribly devastating course.
[The pictures illustrating this chapter are from a collection in the possession of Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co.]
THE CYCLONE OF 1867.
This happened about a month later than that of 1864, on the 1st November, 1867, and long past the usual period for storms of this violent nature. On this occasion I was occupying the top flat of what was then 12, Hastings Street, Colvin Ghât, next door to the offices of Grindlay & Co., and on the site of the building recently erected by Cox & Co. as a storing warehouse. It was a very old shaky kind of house of three storeys having an insecure-looking, narrow strip of railed-in wooden verandah skirting the whole length of the southern portion of the second and third flats, which many people now in Calcutta will doubtless recollect.