Travel narratives of early Bengal often highlight its wildness. Captain Alexander Hamilton – a Scots merchant (not the later American) – chronicled Bengal around 1700 with striking detail. In his New Account of the East Indies (1727) Hamilton warns of the tiger-infested waterways near Calcutta. He writes that the islands off the Hooghly river mouth were virtually uninhabited “for they are so pestered with Tigers that there could be no Security for human Creatures to dwell on them.” On Sagor (Sagar) Island, Hindu ascetics still pilgrimaged yearly to bathe in holy waters, yet many “fall Sacrifices to the hungry Tigers” during these rites. Hamilton even reports that at night the tigers would swim out to anchored boats – “in the Night they have swum to Boats at Anchor, and carried Men out of them.” Such lurid detail, drawn from EIC captains’ journals, shows early Calcutta’s residents were keenly aware of their delta’s perils. This story of wild cats and holy men is not from folklore but from a visitor’s diary – it underscores how the environment itself could intrude on human affairs, even in Asia’s burgeoning port city.
Source: P. Thankappan Nair’s Calcutta in the 18th Century (1984)
Arup K. Chatterjee 