CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
ordered them to be loaded with chains and conveyed to Murshedabad, there to await his return.
The bodies of the poor creatures who perished in the Black Hole were carried out of the Fort, and thrown into the ditch of an unfinished ravelin, which the English had hastily begun opposite the main gate, but had been unable to complete before they were driven within the walls, and were covered with earth. Holwell, when he returned to Calcutta, after the town had been recovered by Clive and Admiral Watson, erected, at his own cost, over this common grave of his fellow-sufferers a monument, on which he inscribed their names and a vigorously worded record of their fate.
This monument, standing at the north-west corner of Dalhousie Square at its junction with Clive Street, was long a conspicuous object in Calcutta. Nobody, however, seemed to be responsible for its upkeep, and in the course of years it fell into disrepair and became unsightly. New sentiments and fashions had arisen too; the predominant feeling at the beginning of the nineteenth century appears to have been a desire to forget all that was disagreeable in the past, and, in 1821, the monument was taken down, and its commemorative tablet mislaid and lost.
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