Bengal supplied 'rich cargoes for fifty or sixty ships yearly; besides what was carried in smaller vessels to the adjacent countries.' In saltpetre alone, of which they had the monopoly, the Company drove a traffic so lucrative, that their Dutch and French rivals on the Húglí tried all they could to wrest some part of it from their hands. Two years after Hastings reached Calcutta, its population was reckoned at 400,000 souls, most of whom huddled together in low mud huts on ground which, during the rainy season, became a mere bog[1]. At all seasons fever and dysentery brooded over a town begirt by swamp and jungle, whose only scavengers were jackals, kites, vultures, and crows.
In October, 1753, Hastings was sent up to the flourishing factory at Kásimbázár on the Ganges, two miles below Murshidábád, the capital of Bengal. Among the silk-weavers and ivory-workers of what was then the great trading-centre of the richest province in India, he discharged his new duties so well and honestly, that within two years he rose to a seat in the factory council, of which Watts was then chief. From the first he seems, by his own account, to have led a quiet, solitary kind of life, much taken up with his own thoughts and purposes, making no intimate friendships, and indulging neither in the pleasures nor the vices of his day.
The death of Alí Vardi Khán in April, 1756, was the beginning of troubles for the English in Bengal.
- ↑ Grose's Voyage to the East Indies. Hunter's Imperial Gazetteer of India.
