THE CALCUTTA CYCLONE.
THE English language does not contain a native word to express the more violent forms of wind. We have borrowed a great many since we became the great merchants of the East, but hur- ricane and tornado are Spanish, typhoon, we believe, Chinese, though dictionaries derive it from the Greek, simoom Arabic, and cyclone pure Greek, with a conventional meaning imposed upon it by science. Gale means anything, according to the speaker's idea of the proper power of wind, blast and squall imply limited dura- tion, and whirlwind is restricted to the lesser forms of circular hurricane, the waterspouts of air. Storm is the only native word of any force, and an Englishman's idea of a storm does not tempt him to sympathize greatly with the sufferers from its violence. Accustomed only to the winds of the north, which bring catarrh and consumption, but leave wooden houses standing for years, which seldom last many hours, and are never destructive except at sea, his power of imagining wind is limited, and he reads a story like that of the catastrophe at Calcutta with a feeling of pity in which there is just a trace of something like contempt. People out there must be very weak or arrangements very bad for a mere wind to work all that destruction, throw 'Lloyds into a panic, and impede the systole diastole of Her 'Majesty's foreign mails. We question whether even after reading Lloyds' report, and the much more graphic narrative which appeared in the Telegraph, the average reader quite understands that an Indian cyclone is to Indians a catastroplfb like an earthquake, an irresistible outburst of the destructive forces of nature before which man and man's works are as powerless as before the breath of the Almighty, which can be encountered only by submission, or that resignation which while it lasts is so undistinguishable from paralysis. It has been the lot of the writer to live through two cyclones, only less violent than that of the 5th of October, and one considerable earthquake, and on the whole he considers the earthquake the friendlier manifestation of the two. It brings your house about your ears, and suggests that the protection of Heaven is suspended, but it gets itself done with, and the cyclone does not That, we take it, is the secret of the horror with which all men who have lived in Asia regard a genuine cyclone. The popular theory that such a storm occurs about once in ten years is, we believe, a mistake founded on imperfect knowledge. It occurs every year just after the tropical rains, but 'fortunately for civilization its force is not spent twice on the same spot, except after intervals of years, sometimes of quarter-centuries. The park planted by Marquis Wellesley, for example, sixteen miles from Calcutta, though now destroyed, htu3 survived the eyloees of seventy years, apparently though not really unharmed. It is only when the destruction affects Europeans that in Asia details are known, and a storm which destroys everything between the Mauritius and Africa, or submerges a vastriee district, mayremain in Europe unre- ported. Once, however, in every ten years some city like Calcutta, which, though tropical in every attribute and circumstance is still not in the tropics, is included within the sweep of the broad band of wind which rushes, twisting itself in a spiral with twists a thousind miles long, from the north-east to the south-west, meetiugfortun- ately nothing in its course from Bengal, till seven thousand miles away it brushes the white cloth off Table Mountain. Once in about a generation the same place finds itself near the centre of the current, and civilization realizes for an instant how utterly feeble it is when nature chooses that barbarism shall reign. In Bengal there is always a slight but significant warning of such an occurrence being at hand. Nature suddenly sinks to rest, the atmosphere glows with heat, every settlement seems surrounded with a wall of rose- coloured haze, the birds stop chirping, and the hum of insects, which over all Asiatic deltas is as permanent a sound as the low roar of London is in Cheapside, suddenly arrests itself, leaving on the ear a sort of pain of silence. A little white cloud conies up marching as if self driven in the very teeth of the breeze, a wall of dust is visible hundreds of feet high and as even to the eye as a canvass sail, and then the unlucky watchers know that probably for twelve hours life and property are in the hands of God alone. . Man and animals simply crouch, conscious for once that even courage has become worthless. Even in the plains, in stations where there is no water, such a wind is bad enough. The tree•, as it rises higher and higher, bend and twist and groan ' till the roots yield to the tremendous strain, and they are not broken but flung out of their sockets as if the blast were wroth with their resistance, every roof with a pitch to it goes whirling through the air, the wooden shutters are blown in with reports like pistol shots, and exposed to the full fury of the tempest the Europeans wait, half maddened with the roar of the typhoon, to see if masonry can hold out. 'There are few situations on earth, not even waiting for the certainty of murder of which Government has forewarned you, equal to the strain such a wind produces on the mind. It is not the " storm," the con- tinuous volleys of bolts, rapid as the firing during an engagement which usually accompany a cyclone, and strike, or seem to strike, within a few feet of every house, it is the wind, the never ceasing rushiug blast, strong as an avalanche, and, so to speak, studded every ten minutes with gusts which strike the walls like solid substances, which so wears out the nerves. Europeans feel as if they were battling with spirits, as if the slightest loss of their own hold over themselves, the slightest intermission in the strain of mental resistance,—mental, for there is little to do, —would destroy them. Many actually lose their tempers, clench teeth and fiats as
at everything higher than a blade of grass, the water strikes blows like the impact of a locomotive at speed below the bank, and in THE FREEDMEN'S AID SOCIETIES.
of brick and concrete, is swept away to the sea, and the waves to further the objects of one of the English Freedmen's Aid
measured sixty-five from high-water mark. The great cedars slavery was at least one million, is reported to have replied that which surround the Friend of India premises, eighty feet high and «there were counter-allegations that they worn but few." Con- seventy years old, are whirled round and uprooted, with every fibre sidering that Mr. Jefferson Davis lately estimated the number twisted, and the blast with one and the same impact levels the giant of slaves enfranchised by the war at two millions, and that it trees of Lord Wellesley's Park, the only scene in India absolutely appears to be an article of faith with English politicians and English. The native houses are of course all down. In the publicists in general that Southerners never exaggerate, the instance we are speaking of eleven thousand persons were roofless" counter-allegations "spoken of by the Chancellor of the Excite- in half an hour, their houses, roofs, joists, beams, and doors blowing quer were rather startling to those who have paid some attention about like straws, while that eternal maddening wind, which seems to this particular aspect of the American struggle. Still the almost a personal foe, keeps sweeping on as if the destruction of a want of accurate data on the subject was really felt. From a town were but an incident for which it could not wait. A few recent number of the Philadelphia Gazette (September 29) it minutes later it struck Calcutta sixteen miles away, and then the appears that that want is met at last. The ascertained number losses ceased to be individual. The great city itself consists, looking of freed, escaped slaves, divided over all the States, we are from the north, as the wind did, of a vast assemblage of huts, some informed, is 1,368,000. If to these escaped slaves we add the 150,000 of them, wholly unsheltered, the nearest undulation being number of those sot free, actually or prospectively, by constitu- -eighty miles away, fringed to the south-west with green-windowed, tional action in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Western Virginia, colonnaded houses. Away went the huts of the natives and —by Act of Congress in the district of Columbia and in the -the verandah roofs of the Europeans, and portions of the roof Territories,—we reach a total over 1,500,000, so that Mr. Davis -of the cathedral, weighing scores of tons, followed, flying visi- may not have been so far wrong after all. bly, like condors with wings outspread, for yards over the Anyhow, the ascertained number of 1,368,000 escaped slaves plain. This building was designed with ecclesiastical disregard actually freed by the war is a sufficient answer on the one hand for all proprieties of locale to be purely Gothic, and is bastard to those who assert that the war has done nothing for Human Gothic, it has in consequence a pitched roof, and of course freedom, on the other to those who assert that the coloured in the first grand cyclone the structure showed how completely it race has not cared to avail itself of the opportunities it held out to felt itself out of place. In the river the ships were lying five them. More than one-third of the late slave-population of the tiers deep for a space of nearly three miles, every interstice being United States are now, to all intents and purposes, free. A filled with native craft till the water is not visible, and down on glance at the map will show that this number is far more than the crowd came the blast above and the Hooghly below, a volume proportionate to the area of slave-territory as yet occupied by the of yellow water a mile broad, fifty feet deep, racing at the speed Federals, and a reference to the tables of the last census will of a fast horse, and accumulated just above the port by a sand- show that it is also far more than proportionate to the density bank which acts like the dam of some enormous mill-stream. Half of the slave population on that area. There has thus been a the ships were without moorings, but against the Hooghly when positive effort of the coloured race towards freedom And it is -once up chain cables matter little. The whole mass began to drift, one of the unspeakable blessings of this, the grandest struggle the native boats dropped under like walnut-shells, their crews of modem times, that that effort has been till now almost dying in hundreds like water rats, the forest of masts, ropes, and invariably in the first instance a bloodless ono ; that the American in many instances, or we wrong Calcutta carelessness, furled sails, negro has not savagely fought his way into a selfish freedom, gave way like the forest on shore, and with every new heave of like a wild beast breaking his cage, but has fled into freedom first, the river some great steamer was thrown upon the bank. Imagine and fought for freedom afterwards like a man. The most hopeful st two-thousand-ton steamer loaded for departure, weighing perhaps advocates of his freedom durst not have hoped either that the five thousand tons, hurled from the river up Wellington Street to war could have been carried on till now without kindling the Somerset House, and our readers may form some idea of the fires of servile insurrection, or that regiments of the disciplined force exerted against the shipping. They will not understand the freedmen of yesterday would have been ready to fight with the scene if they do not add that the wind maddens them till they valour which they have displayed at Port Hudson, before Charles- would scarcely look at the steamer as it passed. Yet even this was ton, or more recently at Laurel Hill.
not the strangest illustration of the power of the wind. It seems in- On the other hand, this enormous number of fugitives from credible, but it is before us in two independent records, that the blast slavery is for the Federal Government a difficulty such as no tore bamboos from their roots and carried them through the air, belligerent probably has ever had to cope with. To subdue the a feat to which the destruction of a cathedral is a trifle. A cannon- quarter of a continent in arms is a task seldom attempted before, ball would hardly break a bamboo, and it presents to a wind a but as if that task were not sufficiently Herculean, the Federal surface hardly larger than a thick rope and as flexible as a hair. authorities must also feed, clothe, house, andemploy refugees whose Two hundred and ten vessels are reported wrecked, the Euro- hundreds of thousands are now running on towards the second peens with characteristic sell-absorption not counting the native million. Simply to have attempted this is great; the Northern craft, which in the river and the canal would raise the number to people have attempted it, and no words can be too strong for the thousands, and the loss of life is, we fear, not exaggerated in the baseness of those Englishmen who choose to deny, ignore, pooh- French telegram. We know nothing as yet, be it remembered, pooh, ridicule, or distort the fact. Competent observers have, it of the destruction above the port, or the effect of the inunda- is true, reckoned that for every refugee who is a charge to the if they were being exposed to hainah violence, and indeed there tion which must have rushed over the scattered villages to the is a sort of living malignity in the blast. They are swimming against south, or the losses below Sauger, which must have been close to a flood, and as it recedes they remainas prostrate as if the wave had the centre of the gale. For hours the wind, which while it been areality, utterlyworn out, hardlyableto use the little judgment blows absorbs all thought, continued battering the city, and fatiguehasleft. The natives give way first. "In the office," writes a when it lightened Calcutta looked as if it had just survived friend to ourselves, " the natives were weeping like babies, sitting a bombardment. The destruction must be inconceivably great. and rocking to their own sobs, a Portuguese alone standing fairly There are some two millions of human beings living within up to the storm," and though the European neither sits nor sobs five miles of Government House,—official estimates of Cal-
his mind gets gradually unhinged. cutta only include all within the " Marhatta ditch," which is
If the settlement stands, as most Indian settlements do, about as much Calcutta as the City is London,—and every soul by the river, the horror of the wind is aggravated by a among them must have many rupees to pay apart altogether from more dangerous though leas irritating plague of waters. The the commercial loss. Fortunately natives bear such losses with cyclone comes when the river is full,—tile Heoghly, for ex- the calm phlegm of fatalists, and the Europeans never lose for au ample, was brimming, the water swollen by the late rains instant the sense of being encamped. Both classes will meet the rushing down yellow with mud at a speed of eight miles an hour, catastrophe with a serenity never felt in a country where the and in a volume of millions of tons per minute. As the wind dread of poverty is on men's souls, and in a week the only traces of struck the village of Serampore, for instance, on its road -to Cal- the storm will be the Cathedral trying in vain to look uglier than cutta, the river began to foam, to rise, to billow, till in an hour it it was, and the broad belt of clearing visible from the °elites- was striking with huge waves upon the Strand, usually ten feet lony Monument—the furrow marked in the forest as by the above it. Nothing can stand the double action. The wind tears ploughshare of the Almighty.
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