CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
villages, or, gaining the river, would attack the slow-moving heavy cargo boats and merchant vessels, robbing and slaying with impunity, and carrying home their plunder to be hoarded away in subterranean chambers and passages.
Whatever may have been the early history of the spot, it was in the days of Clive's Government, between 1757 and 1767, that Dum Dum House was built, for the benefit of change of air for the convalescent servants of the Company, after illness. A similar sanitarium was established at Baraset, but the bungalows erected there were less substantial than the house at Dum Dum. They were converted later into quarters for the young cadets of the Bengal establishment on their arrival in the country, and when the system was altered the cadet establishment at Baraset was done away with, and the connection with the military ceased, leaving only a weed-grown cemetery as a mournful memorial of the past.
Dum Dum, from being a sanitarium, grew to a military camp. When Colonel Pearce's detachment of Artillery returned from Madras in 1785, they were quartered at Dum Dum Camp, and were there reviewed in February, 1786, by the Commander-in-Chief, on which occasion Colonel Pearce "gave an elegant entertainment, at which were present, besides the Commander-in-Chief
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