several members of his council and the commandant of Fort William — made his way on board ship, leaving the rest of the garrison to their own devices. The ships then weighed anchor and dropped a few miles down stream.
Holwell, as a leading member of council, who had borne his part manfully in yesterday's fighting, now took command of the troops thus shamefully abandoned. All through that day and far into the next afternoon the wearied little garrison fought on against the doom which their recreant countrymen, safe on board the fleet, made no kind of effort to avert. At last, while Holwell was parleying for a brief truce, the assailants broke into the ill-guarded fort, and made prisoners of all who survived. By eight o'clock on the evening of June 20, one of the very sultriest in the Bengal year, a hundred and forty-six souls, including more than one woman, had been squeezed into a small guard-room about twenty feet long by fourteen wide, lighted by two small windows strongly barred. It was one of those cells or Black Holes in which a few soldiers were sometimes confined.
Of the horrors endured that night by its helpless inmates Holwell has left a plain unvarnished record which still falls short of the stem reality. No words, indeed, could express what even the imagination of Dante or Shakespeare might fail in all its ghastliness to conceive. The blaze of burning warehouses and bázárs intensified the torture of close tropical heat in that overcrowded prison, whose
