Page:Calcutta, Past and Present.djvu/101

 brought down to Calcutta, and most of them placed in the hospital under the care of Surgeon Ives, of H.M.S. Kent.

The hospital appears to have escaped destruction during the siege and occupation of Calcutta. It stood apart from the Fort, on the ground now occupied by Garstin's Place, in close contiguity to the burying-ground, which must have been a fruitful source of disease and death to the unfortunate patients.

Among those wounded at Chandernagore were Captain Henry Speke, of the Kent, and his son William, a lad of sixteen, who was serving as midshipman on his father's ship. Ives, who was on the Kent tending the wounded during the action, gives in his Journal a long and pathetic account of poor Billy Speke's sufferings and death, and of the distress of his wounded father. It was the same shot which struck down both father and son: the captain was not dangerously wounded, but the poor boy had a leg almost torn off, the shattered limb hanging only by the skin when he was carried down to the surgeon in the arms of a quarter-master, who, while carrying the wounded lad, was himself killed by a cannon ball. The devoted son would not allow his wounds to be dressed till his father had been attended to, and bore the amputation