Page:Calcutta, Past and Present.djvu/250

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

TOLD BY THE TOMBS

13th of January, 1782, and proceeded to Madras, where she lay for some weeks, taking in cargo. Among her intending passengers were a Mr. and Mrs. Hosea, with their young daughter. They came to Calcutta with the intention of sailing in her from that port, but Mrs. Hosea's health obliged them to allow the ship to sail without them, and to arrange to join her at Madras by a native vessel leaving Calcutta three weeks later. Their passage-money amounted to no less a sum than twenty thousand rupees, half of which amount would have been forfeited had they failed to meet the Grosvenor in time.

The Hoseas left Calcutta, as Mrs. Fay recorded, on the 2nd of February, taking with them the Chambers' six-year-old boy, and leaving in Lady Chambers' care a little infant twenty-five days old. In due course the Grosvenor sailed from Madras; five months later she had arrived off the east coast of Africa, and there, on the 3rd of August, 1782, she was cast away, at a point near Durban, on the shore of what was then an unexplored country, inhabited by savages, and five hundred miles from the nearest civilized settlement, a town of the Dutch, who then held the Cape,

The survivors of the wreck numbered no fewer than one hundred and thirty-five persons,

179