Saturday 5 June 2021

20 June: The Black Hole of Calcutta

On this date in 1756, 146 English people were imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta. 10 things you might not know:

The Black Hole of Calcutta was a dungeon in Fort William, Calcutta, India, intended to imprison no more than two or three minor offenders at a time. It was 18 feet (5.5 metres) long and 14 feet (4 metres) wide, and had two small Windows.
The fort was built by the British to defend their trading interests in Calcutta. On the fateful day, the army of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, captured to fort.
The governor and many of his staff fled to the ships in the harbour, leaving women and children behind, defended by just 170 soldiers, under the command of one John Zephaniah Holwell, who had no military experience. He'd been a military surgeon, but now was basically a tax collector. The weaponry left behind for them to use was either too wet or had been eaten by pests, so Holwell was forced to surrender.
Holwell met with Siraj-ud-Daulah, who assured him: “On the word of a soldier; that no harm should come to us”. While it may seem Siraj's word was worth about as much as that of a member of a Tory cabinet today, it appeared he didn't order the British to be thrown in the dungeon and didn't even know it had happened until the next morning. While some Indian guards were bribed to inform him so the prisoners could be moved, Siraj was asleep by then and his minions were too afraid to wake him.
The story goes that 146 people were locked in overnight. The heat at that time of year was suffocating anyway, there was little ventilation and the prisoners were left with very little water. Fires which had broken out during the battle were still raging, which wouldn't have helped. The prisoners were packed so tightly that the door was difficult to close.
At 6am the next morning when the door was unlocked and it was discovered that all but 23 of the prisoners had died. The dead were hastily buried in a pit.
Needless to say, Britain wasn't going to stand for such a thing and six months later Robert Clive marched on Calcutta, set siege to Fort William and took it back.
Some doubt has been cast on Holwell's account by historians, who believe it would have been physically impossible to cram that many people into such a small space (they've probably never travelled on the Central Line in the rush hour) and that the number of prisoners was actually no more than 64, and the death toll was 43.
An obelisk 15-metres (50') high was later raised to commemorate the victims.
Objects in deep space resulting from the gravitational collapse of very heavy stars, so dense that not even light can escape, get the name of Black Hole from the Black Hole of Calcutta after astronomers in the 1960s comparing the objects with the prison.