Cawnpore safe—nay, that I may send aid to Lucknow if need be.’ On 3 June, Lawrence having expressed uneasiness, Wheeler sent two officers and fifty men to Lucknow.
Wheeler's selection of a defence post was injudicious, his defence works were weak, and supplies were altogether inadequate. His confidence in the native troops, who, from all accounts, entertained great respect for him, and his excessive anxiety not to alarm them in their disturbed condition by evincing suspicion of their loyalty, led him deliberately to reject the most suitable defence position. This was the magazine, a large walled enclosure, close to the river and the treasury, amply supplied with arms, ammunition and stores, where he could easily have held out until succour should arrive.
On the night of 4 June the outbreak commenced, the native cavalry joining the troops of the Nana at Nawabganj; the treasury was sacked, the public buildings set on fire, and the magazine, with its heavy guns, ammunition, and stores, was occupied by the rebels. On the following day the native infantry followed suit, and the mutineers, laden with spoil, were all on the way to Delhi, when the Nana persuaded them to return to Cawnpore to attack the Europeans. On the 6th the bombardment of Wheeler's position commenced. The heroic defence, the details of which are well given in Kaye's ‘History of the Sepoy War’ (vol. ii.) and in Trevelyan's ‘Cawnpore,’ lasted until 27 June. The daily casualties were large. Wheeler's son, who lay wounded in a room, where he was attended by his parents and sisters, had his head taken off by a round shot. Extreme heat, hunger, and thirst added to the horrors of the situation.
On 25 June the Nana offered terms of capitulation. Wheeler was unwilling to listen to any terms, but the probable fate, if the siege continued, of the large number of women and children still surviving was pressed upon him by officers who had distinguished themselves by their heroic conduct during the siege, and he reluctantly gave way. The remnant of the garrison, with the women and children, marched out on the morning of the 27th to proceed by river to Allahabad under a safe-conduct from the Nana. At the ghat where they embarked and in the boats on the river the first massacre took place, and Wheeler and his family were among the victims.
[Despatches; India Office Records; Annual Register, 1857; Times (London), 27 and 29 Aug. 1857; Men of the Reign; Coley's Journal of the Sutlej Campaign of 1845–6; Humbley's Journal of a Cavalry Officer, including the Memorable Campaign of 1845–6; Thackwell's Second Sikh War, 1848–9; Archer's Commentaries on the Punjab Campaign, 1848–9; Gough and Innes's Sikhs and the Sikh Wars; authorities mentioned in the text; Mowbray Thomson's Story of Cawnpore; Historical Records of the Queen's Own Corps of Guides; History of the 1st Sikh Infantry.]
WHEELER, JAMES TALBOYS (1824–1897), historian of India, son of James Luff Wheeler (d. 1862), by his wife Anne Ophelia, daughter of David Alphonso Talboys [q. v.], was born at Oxford on 22 Dec. 1824. Educated at a private school, he started business as a publisher and bookseller, but with little success. Having gained, however, some credit, when still a young man, as a writer of handbooks for university students, and by a more elaborate work on the geography of Herodotus, he obtained during the Crimean war a supernumerary clerkship at the war office. In 1858 he went to India as editor of the ‘Madras Spectator,’ but gave up the profession of journalism on being appointed (4 Oct. 1858) professor of moral and mental philosophy in the Madras presidency college. In May 1860 he was employed by the Madras government to examine the old records; the results of his researches being a report, highly commended by the secretary of state, Sir Charles Wood, in a despatch dated 25 May 1861, and a ‘History of Madras in the Olden Time.’ On 26 Feb. 1862 he was appointed assistant secretary to the government of India in the foreign department, and removed to Calcutta, where, among other duties, he had charge of the foreign and, later, of the home offices when the secretaries were at Simla. Among the printed but unpublished volumes which he compiled under orders of government were a memorandum on the Scinde ameers, summaries of political affairs from 1864 to 1869, of Afghan affairs in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, and of Persian affairs, a valuable report on Afghan-Turkestan, and a memorandum on the Wahabis, all of which have been freely used by official writers as well as by others who had access to confidential documents. His services were specially acknowledged by Lord Mayo in a minute dated 20 Feb. 1870. Early in that year he was transferred to Rangoon as secretary to the chief commissioner of British Burma. In that capacity in November 1870 he visited Mandalay and Bhamo, and had an interview with the king of Burma. In 1873 he obtained long furlough to England. Since his appointment to the foreign office his leisure had been devoted to the compilation of his excellent and sympathetic history of India,
