Page:Calcutta, Past and Present.djvu/56

 August about twelve hundred English, and before the beginning of January there were 460 burials registered in the clerk's book of mortality."

This terrible mortality following the rainy season continued for over half a century after Hamilton wrote, and it was quite a matter of course for men as the sickly season came round to make their wills and set their affairs in order, and for the survivors at the close of the period to congratulate each other on their escape from death.

The situation of Calcutta was not only unhealthy, but was exposed to the fierce storms which sweep up from the Bay of Bengal at the close of the south-west monsoon. On the 30th of September, 1737, such a hurricane devastated the country for sixty leagues up the Ganges, and did an immense deal of damage in Calcutta. The Gentleman's Magazine for June, 1738, gives a quaintly worded and harrowing account of the havoc wrought when—

"an earthquake overthrew abundance of houses, and in the storm twenty thousand ships, barks, sloops, boats, canoes, etc., were cast away, a prodigious quantity of cattle of all sorts, a great many tigers, and several rhinoceroses were drowned, even a great many caymans were