The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

Suddenly, in the hot morning air, a bugle screamed shrill and menacing, somewhere up the ravine. It was the signal! Out of the forty boats the native boatmen leaped, and splashed through the water to the bank. Into the straw roofs of many of the boats they thrust, almost in the act of leaping, red-hot embers, and nearly a score of boats were almost instantly red-crested with flames.

A little white Hindu temple high up on the bank overlooked the whole scene. Here sat Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, with a cluster of Sepoy officers. He controlled the whole drama from this point of vantage like a stage-manager; and, on his signal, from the lines of Sepoys who were lying concealed in the undergrowth, from guns perched high on the river-bank, and from both sides of the river at once, there broke upon the forty boats, with their flaming roofs and hapless crowds of white-faced passengers, a terrific storm of shot.

Those slain by the sudden bullet were many, and were happy in their fate. The wounded perished under the burning flakes and strangling smoke of the flaming straw roofs. Many leaped into the river, and, crouching chin-deep under the sides of the boats, tried to shelter themselves from the cruel tempest of shot. Some swam out into the stream till they sank in the reddened water under the leisurely aim of the Sepoys. Others, leaping into the water, tried to push off the stranded boats. Some of yet sterner temper, kneeling under the roofs of burning thatch, or standing waist-deep in the Ganges, fired back on the Sepoys, who by this time lined the river’s edge.

General Wheeler, according to one report, perished beneath the stroke of a Sepoy’s sword as he stepped out of his palkee. His daughters were slain with him, save one, the youngest, who, less happy, was carried off by a native trooper to die later. In the official evidence taken long afterwards is the account given by a half-caste Christian woman. “General Wheeler,” she said, “came last in a palkee. They carried him into the water near the boat. I stood close by. He said, ‘Carry me a little farther towards the boat.’ But a trooper said, ‘No; get out here.’ As the general got out of the palkee head foremost, the trooper gave him a cut with his sword through the neck, and he fell into the water. My son was killed near him. I saw it, alas! alas! Some were stabbed with bayonets; others cut down. Little infants were torn in pieces. We saw it, we did! and tell you only what we saw. Other children were stabbed and thrown into the river. The school-girls were burnt to death. I saw their clothes and hair catch fire.”

Presently the fire of the Sepoys ceased, and the wretched survivors of the massacre—125 in number—were dragged ashore. They came stumbling up the slope of the bank, a bedraggled company, their clothing dripping with the water of the Ganges, or soiled with its mud. They crept up the ravine down which, a brief hour before, they had walked with Hope shining before them. Now Grief kept pace with them; Despair went before them; Death followed after. They had left their dead in the river behind them; they were walking to a yet more cruel fate in front. “I saw that many of the ladies were wounded,” said one witness afterwards; “their clothes had blood on them. Some had their dresses torn, but all had clothes. I saw one or two children without clothes. There were no men in the party, but only some boys of twelve or thirteen years of age.”

The sad company was marched back to the old cantonment, where the Nana himself came out to exult over his victims. Lady Canning, in her journal, writes: “There were fifteen young ladies in Cawnpore, and at first they wrote such happy letters, saying time had never been so pleasant; it was every day like a picnic, and they hoped they would not be sent away; they said a regiment would come, and they felt quite safe. Poor, poor things; not one of them was saved.” How many of that girlish band of fifteen perished, with flaming hair and dress, in the boats? Or did they strand shivering in the icy chill of terror, amongst the captives over whom the tiger glance of Nana Sahib wandered in triumph? After being duly inspected, these poor captives were thrust into a couple of rooms in the Savada-house, and left to what reflections may be imagined.

Three boats out of the forty, meanwhile, had actually got away. Two drifted to the Oude shore, and were overtaken by instant massacre. One boat, however, had for the moment a happier fate. It caught the mid-current of the Ganges, and went drifting downwards; and that solitary drifting boat, without oars or rudder, bearing up in its crazy planks above the dark waters of the Ganges the sole survivors of the heroic garrison of Cawnpore, started on a wilder, stranger voyage than is recorded elsewhere in all history.

It was Vibart’s boat; and by a curious chance it included in its passengers the most heroic spirits in the garrison. Moore was there, and Ashe, and Delafosse; Mowbray Thomson swam out to it from his own boat, and with him Murphy, a private of the 32nd—two of the four who finally survived out of the whole garrison. The boat was intended to carry only fifty, but nearly a hundred fugitives were crowded within its crazy sides.

A cannon-shot smashed its rudder. It had no oars nor food. From either bank a hail of shot pursued it. Every now and again the clumsy boat would ground on some shallow; then, while the Sepoys shot fast and furiously, a group of officers would jump overboard, and push the clumsy craft afloat again.