Twain visited Kanpur because of his "growing fascination with the Sepoy Uprising and especially what he saw as the heroic stand of his British hosts. Certainly Smythe would not have been too pleased with the receipts, for Twain’s performance was more an after-dinner speech in the officers’ mess than the usual Talk in a town hall or theatre. In fairness to Twain’s enthusiasm for visiting the place, one can say that although Cawnpore played only a minor strategic part in the Sepoy Uprising, events here so horrified the British imagination that that the retaliatory massacres were deemed to be justified—and in Twain’s account ignored."
Strathcarron (page 161)
"Cawnpore was an important garrison town with about 10,000 sepoys and a thousand British officers, their wives, children and servants. As word of the Uprising spread from Lucknow a local ne’er-do-well nobleman called Nana Sahib rounded up several thousand malcontent sepoys and for three weeks they besieged the British officers and families in their fortifications."
"In the first days of June the aged general, Sir Hugh Wheeler commanding the forces at Cawnpore, was deserted by his native troops. He had with him a few hundred white soldiers and officers, and apparently more women and children than soldiers. He was short of provisions, short of arms, short of ammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything but courage and devotion to duty. The defense through twenty-one days and nights of hunger, thirst, Indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm of bullets, bombs, and cannon-balls is one of the most heroic episodes in history."
"After three weeks the beleaguered British negotiated a truce: there was to be safe passage in barges downstream on the Ganges to Allahabad. They were to board the barges at the Satti Chaura Ghat just south of the cantonment. Most ghats have a temple attached, and Satti Chaura Ghat had one—and still does, as we shall see—to Shiva, and it was from this temple that Nana Sahib’s lieutenants gave the signal to attack."
"When at last the Nana found it impossible to conquer these starving men and women with powder and ball, he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded. He agreed to supply them with food and send them to Allahabad in boats. They came forth helpless but suspecting no treachery, the Nana’s host closed around them, and at a signal from a trumpet the massacre began. About two hundred women and children were spared—for the present—but all the men except three or four were killed."
Strathcarron (page 162)
Slaughter Ghat:
By Robert Christopher Tytler (1818-1872) and Harriet Tytler (1828-1907) - This file has been provided by the British Library from its digital collections. It is also made available on a British Library website., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26685221
"All but one hundred and twenty of the British escapees were shot or slain in the Ganges barges as they were leaving Satti Chaura Ghat. The survivors, all women and children, were brought ashore and sent off to a supposedly safe house, the Bibighar, while Nana Sahib decided what to with them. They were soon joined by a further eighty women and children from nearby Uprising skirmishes; all the men had already been murdered. "
"As British reinforcements were rumored to be arriving Nana Sahib decided to execute them, but the Bibighar sepoys, who knew all of the survivors at least by sight and in many cases much more closely than that, mutinied against him and refused to murder them. Undaunted, he rounded up half a dozen Muslim butchers from the town and had them dismember the survivors with meat cleavers and throw the limbs, torsos and heads into the Bibighar well to hide the evidence. Not all of the women and children were successfully hacked to death, and with time short the next morning he ordered the remaining living, mostly by now children, to be thrown down the well alive to join the dead."
Strathcarron (page 164)
Bibighar house where European women and children were killed and the well where their bodies were found, 1858.
By Dr. John Murray - From 'Murray Collection: Views in Delhi, Cawnpore, Allahabad and Benares' taken by Dr. John Murray., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5623937