N. Francis Xavier
Part XVII, (Continued from last week)
The gentle breeze hardly gave the speed required for the now heavily laden whaler to cross the dangerous coastline and head into the open sea.
The men were too tired to try the oars. They must conserve their energy to pull if required in an emergency.
They have lost all sense of time. But the monsoon was still active. It might be August still. They would get a favourable wind for at least another month.
Hemraj quickly weighed the options before him.
They will not be able to cover the entire distance in one day. They must camp in a safe place. Austen Strait was a passage that would take them to the west coast. But Portman had already entered it, and his broken steamer might still be there, undergoing repairs.
Hemraj mentally charted a course that would keep them out of danger.
Their first stop would be Long Island. They would beach the boat in the lee of the Island. It was totally uninhabited, with thick forest. Hemraj remembered visiting the Island with a party from Burma who planned logging operations there.
After a day or two there they would set out for Stewart Sound, passing Cuthbert Bay and camp on Aves Island at the mouth of Austen Strait.
The third and last camp would be in the maze of islands inside Port Cornwallis. Chatham Island where a settlement was established by Blair in 1792 may provide them shelter and water.
Even as Hemraj charted the course the boat glided past Peele Island, Nicholson Island, and Wilson Island. Outram Island was visible on their starboard side. Neill and Havelock have been left behind.
The wind had picked up and the whaler was moving faster. Hemraj remembered Doodnath Tewari telling him that the Islands were all named after British Generals who fought to suppress the Mutiny. Luckily most of them have been killed. But the names of some of them still aroused dread among the sepoy convicts. That was the intention of the government in naming the islands in Ritchie’s Archipelago. The phantom generals guarded the escape routes of the convicts.
Neill was the most notorious. Known as the ‘Butcher of Allahabad’ Brigadier General James Neill used ruthless methods to punish the mutineers, or anyone suspected to be associated with the Mutiny.
There were many sepoys in Port Blair who were witnesses to his ‘bloody assizes’ at Kanpur.
Neill was a Colonel in the Madras Fusiliers at the time of the Mutiny. In contrast to the short statured Havelock he was a big man with great shaggy moustaches and eyebrows.
He was a veteran of the Second Burmese War and the Crimean War. He was just six weeks in India when news came about the outbreak in the north. Neill left Madras with his regiment at a moment’s notice and proceeded to Banares. The day after his arrival he completely and ruthlessly crushed all the mutineers.
Allahabad fort was relieved against heavy odds, saving the lives of the few Europeans who held it out against a vastly superior number of mutineers. Neill inflicted terrible punishment on the captured mutineers.
His eagerness to crush the mutiny brought him in conflict with his senior officer Gen. Havelock. He considered Havelock too slow. Had he marched to Kanpur a couple of days earlier he could have prevented the Bibighar massacre, Neil thought.
Neill arrived in Kanpur on 20 July 1857, five days after the terrible massacre of British women and children in Bibighar. He has just been promoted Brigadier General. The sight of the relics of the massacre – the still-blood smeared floor of Bibighar, the clothing and hair of infants and final messages scratched on the walls made him boil. He made all the British soldiers to visit the “Slaughter House” where the women and children were killed and the well into which their bodies were thrown. Scores of suspects were rounded up each day and hanged on a gallows erected close to the place. Most of them were innocent natives or deserters who had nothing to do with the massacre. It was a well-known fact that the sepoy mutineers refused to shoot the women and children. It is believed two butchers, led by a woman associate of the Nana committed the heinous crime. But for Neill all Indians were suspect. He inflicted ruthless punishment against anyone caught in the vicinity.
Hundreds were sentenced to death in summary trials held by Neill. Before they were to be hanged Neill made them to go through his reprehensible “licking orders”. The condemned men were made to lick clean a square foot of the blood splattered floor of Bibighar. They were then flogged by sweepers before being taken to the gallows.
The sepoys told Hemraj how an innocent man was condemned by Neill for the alleged murder of Gen. Wheeler at the Sati Chaura Ghat. The man, a Duffadar in the 2nd Light Cavalry, addressed the crowd from the scaffold before being hanged. He professed his innocence and told them that he was being punished unjustly for a crime he had not committed. His last words were that one day his infant some, growing up in Rohtak, would avenge his death by killing Gen Neill or any of his descendants.
But death came to Neill much earlier. He was shot through the head during the Second Relief of Lucknow.
Some sepoys believed that the man’s son has now come of age and would one day avenge the death of his father by killing Neill’s son, Maj. A.H.S. Neill, working as an officer in the Second Regiment of the Central India Horse.
“Perhaps his nemesis was in his own regiment, and Maj. Neill was blissfully unaware of it”, thought Hemraj.
“Turn the head of the boat towards the inlet you see on the left Sheo, and keep South, Middle and North Buttons on your right”, Hemraj ordered as he leaned against the mast.
The men started preparations for making camp. (To be continued…..)
Leave a Reply