om those under which he first
adventured for the East. Then he was an unknown, unappreciated
rapscallion of a lad, needy, homesick, desperate, and alone; now he was
going out as the Governor of Fort St. David, as lieutenant-colonel in
the British army, with a record of fame and fortune behind him. New
fame, new fortune, awaited him almost on the very moment of his arrival
in India. The pirate stronghold of Gheriah fell before him almost as
easily as if the place had been a new Jericho and Clive a second
Joshua. But there was greater work in store for him than the
destruction of pirate strongholds. Bengal became suddenly the theatre
of a terrible drama. Up to the year 1756 the tranquillity of the
English settlers and traders in Bengal had been undisturbed. Their
relations with the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan had been of the friendliest
kind, and the very friendliness of those relations had had the effect
of making the English residents in Bengal, like the native population,
men of a milder mould than those whom hard fortune had fashioned into
soldiers and statesmen at Madras. But in the year 1758 the Nabob Ali
Vardi Khan died, and was {266} succeeded by his grandson, Siraju'd
Daulah, infamous in English history as Surajah Dowlah.

[Sidenote: 1756--The Blackhole]

This creature, who incarnated in his own proper person all the worst
vices of the East, without apparently possessing any of the East's
redeeming virtues, cherished a very bitter hatred of the English.
Surajah Dowlah was unblessed with the faintest glimmerings of
statesmanship; it seemed to his enfeebled mind that it would be not
only a very good thing to drive the English out of Bengal, but that it
would be also an exceedingly easy thing to do. All he wanted, it
seemed to him, was a pretext, and to such a mind a pretext was readily
forthcoming. Had not the English dogs fortified their settlement
without his permission? Had they not afforded shelter to some victim
flying from his omnivorous rapacity? These were pretexts good enough
to serve the insane brain of Surajah Dowlah. He attacked Fort William
with an overwhelming force; the English traders, unwarlike, timorous,
and deserted by their leaders, made little or no resistance; the madman
had Fort William in his power, and used his power like a madman. The
memory of the Blackhole of Calcutta still remains a mark of horror and
of terror upon our annals of Indian empire. When Lord Macaulay,
eighty-four