In the autumn of 1694, the burgeoning settlement at Sutanuti received a stark reminder of the Hooghly’s hidden perils. Charles Eyre, recently appointed Agent of the East India Company, watched with growing apprehension as the merchant ship Royal James and Mary—laden with Sumatra pepper, behār timber, and redwood candy—attempted her first passage upriver after loading cargo at Madras.
On 24 September, as the vessel neared the narrow channel off Suttanuttee, she ran aground upon a notorious quicksand known to pilots as the Madras Shoal. Eyre’s own journal records that the ship “struck upon the fatal shoal, turned over immediately, and broke her back.” In an instant, a proud ocean‑going trader became a shattered hulk, her stern buried in shifting sand while her fore‑section rose and collapsed like a snapped beam.
Eyewitnesses described frantic scenes: sailors and passengers struggling through knee‑deep silt, their cries borne across the water to anxious onlookers on the riverbank. Company factors hastily dispatched small boats to rescue survivors, but many lives and all precious cargo were lost to the river’s embrace. The disaster underscored the urgent need for better hydrographic knowledge and reliable navigation aids—a lesson the Company could ill afford to ignore if it hoped to establish Calcutta as a safe entrepôt.
In the ensuing weeks, Eyre convened a council of pilots and European mariners to chart and mark the treacherous currents. Buoys were laid at the site of the wreck, and local fishermen were recruited to guide Company vessels. The Royal James and Mary, though broken beyond repair, thus bequeathed a measure of security to those who followed. This calamity, while costly, prompted the first systematic efforts to tame the Hooghly’s shifting sands—a foundational moment in Calcutta’s transformation from precarious riverside clearing into a permanent port of empire.
Source
Cotton, H.E. (1907). Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical & Descriptive Handbook to the City. London: W. Newman.
Arup K. Chatterjee 