In the first decades after 1690, Calcutta rose on low, marshy ground beside the Hooghly—and paid dearly for it. As Captain Alexander Hamilton grimly noted, a vast salt‑water lake lay three miles northeast of Charnock’s settlement. Each autumn’s floods filled it with countless fish, only to strand them on the banks as waters receded. Their rotting carcasses poisoned the air with thick stinking vapors, driven by northeast winds straight into the new factory at Fort William, causing annual waves of fever and mortality.
Residents marked their survival each November 15th, congratulating themselves on having escaped the perils of the rains and the effluvia from the pestilential Salt Lakes. Even as the East India Company pressed on with brick and mortar, the city remained a swamp at war with its own surroundings—so much so that the original open sewer, the Mahratta Ditch, lay in the very heart of the European settlement until 1766, a constant source of miasma and dread.
These grim conditions drove many early settlers to build country‑house retreats outside the city limits. Clive decamped to Dum‑Dum, Sir William Jones to Garden Reach, and Warren Hastings to Bhowanipore—seeking a healthier breeze away from Calcutta’s stench. Yet it was on that same cursed ground that the city truly took root, transforming a malarial swamp into the capital of an empire.
Source: Deb, Raja Binaya Krishna. (1905). The Early History and Growth of Calcutta. Calcutta: Romesh Chandra Ghose.
Arup K. Chatterjee 