From Day by Day:
March 26 Thursday – At 7 a.m. the Clemens party sailed from Calcutta on the S.S. Wardha bound for
Ceylon. Before reaching the sea, however, they had to negotiate the Hooghly River. Sam’s notebook:
March 26. At anchor at Garden Reach all night. When wind blew in, icy cold; the moment it stopped,
blistering hot & mosquitoes. We all went up & slept on deck...
This morning the Hoogly is 1 to 1 1⁄2 mile wide, with low banks, wooded, & very muddy water. Bends,
points, bars. When you are far enough away so that you cannot distinguish the cocoa tress & mud villages,
you can’t tell it from the Lower Miss.
A fatal notion. For 6 hours now, it has been impossible to realize that this is India & the Hoogli. No,
every few miles we see a great white-columned European house standing in the front of the vast levels, with a
forest away back — La [Louisiana] planter? — & the thatched groups of native houses have turned
themselves into the negro quarter familiar to me near 40 years ago & so for 6 hours this has been the sugar
coast of the Mississippi ...
We are lying from noon all day at anchor below the shoalest place, waiting for high tide for tomorrow’s
shoals. Getting below this shoal place (Mary & James) saves us 26 hours — it would be that long before w d be
a high enough tide to float us over. We had short of 4 inches to spare this time
Rudyard Kipling, on the Hugli (Hoogli), From "An Unqualified Pilot":
ALMOST any pilot will tell you that his work is much more difficult than you imagine; but the Pilots of the Hugli know that they have one hundred miles of the most dangerous river on earth running through their hands—the Hugli between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal and they say nothing. Their service is picked and sifted as carefully as the bench of the Supreme Court, for a judge can only hang the wrong man, or pass a bad law; but a careless pilot can lose a ten-thousand-ton ship with crew and cargo in less time than it takes to reverse her engines.There is very little chance of anything getting off again when once she touches in the furious Hugli current, loaded with all the fat silt of the fields of Bengal, where soundings change two feet between tides, and new channels make and unmake themselves in one rainy season. Men have fought the Hugli for two hundred years, till now the river owns a huge building, with drawing, survey, and telegraph departments, devoted to its private service, as well as a body of wardens, who are called the Port Commissioners.
They and their officers govern everything that floats from the Hugli Bridge to the last buoy at Pilots Ridge, one hundred and forty miles away, far out in the Bay of Bengal, where the steamers first pick up the pilots from the pilot brig.
A Hugli pilot does not kindly bring papers aboard for the passengers, or scramble up the ship’s side by wet, swaying rope-ladders. He arrives in his best clothes, with a native servant or an assistant pilot to wait on him, and he behaves as a man should who can earn two or three thousand pounds a year after twenty years’ apprenticeship. He has beautiful rooms in the Port Office at Calcutta, and generally keeps himself to the society of his own profession, for though the telegraph reports the more important soundings of the river daily, there is much to be learned from brother pilots between each trip.
Some million tons of shipping must find their way to and from Calcutta each twelvemonth, unless the Hugli were watched as closely as his keeper watches an elephant, there is a fear that it might silt up, as it has silted up round the old Dutch and Portuguese ports twenty and thirty miles behind Calcutta.
So the Port Office sounds and scours and dredges the river, and builds spurs and devices for coaxing currents, and labels all the buoys with their proper letters, and attends to the semaphores and the lights and the drum, ball and cone storm signals; and the pilots of the Hugli do the rest; but, in spite of all care and the very best attention, the Hugli swallows her ship or two every year. Even the coming of wireless telegraphy does not spoil her appetite.
March 27 Friday – The S.S. Wardha negotiated the last stretch of the Hooghly River and by 11:15 a.m.
was in the blue of the Bay of Bengal. Again Sam was nursing a cold. Sam’s notebook:
Mch. 27. We have slept on deck these 2 nights. Very hot, & mosquitoes troublesome elsewhere.
10 a.m. The Hoogli here is 5 miles wide, the shores a low fringe of forest — a ribbon....
Left the muddy water for the blue at 11.15 — the line separating the 2 colors distinctly mark[ed]. But the
illusion has remained — I am leaving La & the Miss behind — not India & the Hoogli. See Bayard Taylor....
We have been out of the river 2 hours, now (2 pm) but its brown streak is still visible off to one side.
March 30 Monday – The Clemens family was en route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal, headed for
Colombo, Ceylon. The Wardha anchored in the bay at Madras, India at 8 p.m.
March 31 Tuesday – The Wardha was piloted into the harbor of Madras, India at daybreak for a 24
hour stop.
April 1 Wednesday – The Clemens family was again en route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal,
headed for Colombo, Ceylon. Sam noted, Curving down around the S.E. corner of Ceylon
April 2 Thursday – The Clemens family was en route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal, headed for
Colombo, Ceylon.
April 3 Friday – Shortly after noon, the Wardha arrived in Colombo, Ceylon.
Sam’s notebook:
One very seldom sees the ocean slick enough to cast reflections, often as we see the reverse stated; but now
(noon) nearing Colombo, the vast piles of pink, & leaden & snow-white clouds on the horizon are repeated in
detail in the slick & polished surface of the sea
April 4 Saturday – At 5:30 in Columbo, Sam gave another “At Home” lecture, probably his No. 2
program. In the evening during a tropical downpour, the Clemens party sailed on the S.S. Wardha for
Port Louis, Mauritius