Geography and early history

Sagar Island sits in the mouth of the Hooghly River, the western-most distributary of the Ganges. On its western side, most of the water of the Hooghly enters the Bay of Bengal, while to its east, a smaller branch of the river joins the sea, separating the island from the rest of the lower Bengal delta and the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans. At the start of the nineteenth century, the island was approximately 20 miles in length, its 8-mile-wide southerly base in the Bay narrowing to a peninsula 1.5 miles wide at its northern tip, facing up the Hooghly estuary, for a total surface area of just over 100 square miles.Footnote ¹⁴ The island is mostly flat, sitting very low in the water, and 200 years ago was criss-crossed by tidal creeks through which even large boats could pass. Indeed, it was more accurate to describe Sagar as a series of islands, rather than one, as some contemporaries pointed out.Footnote ¹⁵ Until 1814, when the coastline was re-surveyed, the name ‘Sagar’—meaning ‘ocean’—was commonly used for the southern-most of these islands only. The northern islands were labelled ‘Clive’s Island’ by the East India Company, after the first British governor-general of Bengal (Figure 1). Through the remainder of the century, after the denomination ‘Sagar’ had been applied to the ensemble, the southwestern part of the island, below the cross-cutting ‘Satbankee Khal’, was referred to as ‘Sagar Proper’, recalling the earlier naming. The land on Sagar Island consisted chiefly of mud and clay, in which a dense, low-lying vegetation of Sundari trees, ferns, creepers, and other species adapted to saltwater thrived. The island’s coast was also composed of mud, except for a wide, sandy beach along the southern shore.

Figure 1.

Detail from ‘A Chart of the Mouths of Hoogly River’ (London: Laurie & Whittle, 1794) distinguishing ‘Sauger Island’ from ‘Clive’s Island’. After 1814, the name ‘Sagar’ or variations like ‘Saugor’ were used to denote the ensemble. Public domain image from the collections of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Though many of the details remain hazy, elements of the island’s early history can be discerned. Archaeological evidence suggests that Sagar may have been inhabited as early as the first century BC.Footnote ¹⁶ Later, a temple dedicated to the sage Kapila was built on the southern shore of the island on a spot known as ‘Gangasagar’ (river-ocean) where the Hooghly enters the sea. It was rebuilt in 1760 about a mile inland from the beach on the banks of a navigable creek after the previous iteration had been destroyed by the tide.Footnote ¹⁷ Some historians believe Sagar Island to have been the site of a major port belonging to the sixteenth century Hindu ruler Pratapaditya, who defied Mughal expansion over the Bengal delta from his base further eastwards near Khulna.Footnote ¹⁸ During the Mughal period, the island was awarded to the zamindar of Hijli, on the western bank of the Hooghly. After 1765 it was attached to the East India Company district of Midnapore, which included this zamindari, before being transferred to the 24-Parganas in 1802. European observers speculated about the previous settlements that may have existed on the island, noting the brick ruins found in several raised spots, along with brass vessels, wooden and stone idols, and some freshwater plants and trees such as banyans, tamarinds, and bamboos hinting at earlier settled communities.Footnote ¹⁹ By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the island appears to have been almost entirely deserted, with the only recorded permanent inhabitants a small group of priests in the temple.Footnote ²⁰ They were joined each November and January by thousands of pilgrims coming to bathe at Gangasagar during two significant annual festivals.

For Britons arriving in Bengal by sea, Sagar Island was often the first land mass sighted. In the 1680s, during a time of conflict with the Mughal governor of Bengal, the East India Company had considered constructing a fort on the island, before settling on a site further up the Hooghly that would become the city of Calcutta.Footnote ²¹ From the early eighteenth century, a team of river pilots would meet vessels just off the island to guide them to Calcutta, some 60 nautical miles upriver. For the British, however, Sagar remained a wild and dangerous terrain. Its shoreline, wrote one contemporary traveller, was ‘a dismal and unbroken line of thick, black wood and thicket, apparently impenetrable and interminable’.Footnote ²² The ‘dark jungle’ of Sagar conjured up images of tigers, snakes, scorpions, and mosquitos, and the waters surrounding it of crocodiles and sharks.Footnote ²³ Such was the fear that Sagar Island provoked among the British that it was even referred to as the ‘black island’.Footnote ²⁴ In her 2005 book Representing Calcutta, Swati Chattopadhyay suggests that early nineteenth century representations of Sagar by British travellers were ‘so consistent as to be formulaic’.Footnote ²⁵ The wildness and dangerousness of the island, she proposes, were exaggerated in their accounts to draw contrast with the civilization and relative security of ‘white Calcutta’, where the travellers were headed. As we will see, however, those landing on Sagar had good reason to be scared. While it was tiger, crocodile, and shark attacks that usually made the headlines, diseases linked to the inhospitable climate and jungle environment, plus the absence of fresh water, were the biggest threats, along with flooding, storms, and the large waves with which they were often accompanied.

Early government efforts (1810–17)

British attempts to clear parts of the lower Bengal delta of their jungle and transform them into settled and cultivated lands began just five years after the East India Company’s assumption of revenue collecting rights over the province in 1765. In 1770, the Collector-General of the 24-Parganas, Claude Russell, launched a scheme offering leases with an initial seven-year rent-free term to investors committing to clear parcels of land immediately east and south of Calcutta. Significant progress was made in jungle clearance down the left bank of the Hooghly towards Diamond Harbour and eastwards towards the River Matla. In the following decade, a similar scheme was launched by the magistrate of Jessore, Tilman Henckell, though this time the lease-holding intermediary was removed and peasant tenants (ryots) encouraged directly by Henckell to clear and settle the land.Footnote ²⁶

For the government, the motivations were primarily financial. Little value was attached to sparsely inhabited jungle lands, which were designated ‘waste lands’, while cleared and well-populated territories could be taxed and tolled, and rents collected from leaseholders or ryots once the initial period of free possession had expired. Most of deltaic Bengal was omitted from the Permanent Settlement of 1793, which fixed in perpetuity the amount of revenue to be collected from zamindars around the province (at rates which British authorities would later regret were too low). Over the decades that followed, the delta therefore became an increasingly tempting prospect for Company officials in search of new sources of revenue, whose attention was turning to land on which no zamindari right had been created or rents hitherto collected.Footnote ²⁷ Leaseholders meanwhile stood to profit by collecting rent from settlers on their lands; by charging those traversing their territories on land or water; or by directly engaging in cultivation and the extraction of natural resources. Alongside these financial rationales, Company authorities stressed that the clearance of ‘waste lands’ was in the public good. The presence of ‘pestilential’ jungle so close to Calcutta was a serious threat to public health, they claimed, and also facilitated crime, with the jungles a haven for armed robbers (‘dacoits’) targeting boats on the delta’s waterways. For British officials, the replacement of nature by ‘civilization’—by which was meant human settlements and agriculture—was synonymous with progress. The ‘improvement’ of the delta meant cultivation where previously there had only been jungle, and a permanent human presence in what had hitherto been the domain of ‘wild beasts’.Footnote ²⁸

As we will see, the reasons behind the launch of attempts to reclaim Sagar Island were similar. The Bengal government and private investors viewed the island as a source of potentially substantial revenues, but also spoke about advancing civilization. The idea was ‘to change the tiger’s den into a dwelling for man, and transfer a noxious wilderness into a seat of plenty’.Footnote ²⁹ To this were added two more original arguments framed in terms of the public good. The first was that jungle clearance would render the pilgrimage to Gangasagar safer for pilgrims subject to tiger attacks. ‘The Island being infested with tigers, the only effectual mode of rooting them out is, by depriving them of shelter.’Footnote ³⁰ More importantly, the reclamation of the island would benefit the port of Calcutta: on the southwestern shore of the island, a lighthouse might be constructed to help ships entering and leaving the Hooghly, along with a depot for naval stores and a refuge for shipwrecked mariners who ‘dreaded’ setting foot on Sagar.Footnote ³¹ Some British speculators even thought that a settlement on Sagar might become a major port in its own right, ‘a maritime city […] sufficient for all the purposes of external commerce’ that would ‘prevent the necessity of so many Europeans proceeding upriver to Calcutta’.Footnote ³²

Before we consider the attempted reclamation of Sagar Island in detail, an overview of the reclamation process in the lower Bengal delta should be presented and the major challenges understood. Once a parcel of land to be reclaimed had been identified, the first task was usually constructing embankments (‘bunds’) around its perimeter to prevent salt water from getting in; streams and creeks crossing the parcel would also be embanked, with sluice gates added to allow excess water to be drained. A tank would then be dug to collect the rains, likely the only source of fresh water, before the task of clearing the jungle could begin. Trees and plants were chopped down, uprooted by hand or set on fire; some of the felled trees might be collected for sale as firewood, but most severed vegetation was left to rot or burnt. Only after a plot of land had been cleared and the soil prepared for planting could cultivation get underway, through the agency of labourers employed by the landholder or of ryots induced to settle on the land. The entire process was labour intensive, and likely to be taking place at a distance from urban centres where large numbers of manual labourers could be recruited. Access to remote parcels of land could take days and mean traversing thick jungle, with all the dangers that that entailed. The delta was visited regularly by major storms and storm waves that, in their height and velocity, embankments were unlikely to resist.Footnote ³³

On Sagar Island, it was the East India Company’s decision to proceed with the construction of a lighthouse that inaugurated the first reclamation attempts. In 1807, the Court of Directors sanctioned the construction of two lighthouses at the mouth of the Hooghly, one on the island and the other on the western side of the estuary at Khajuri. The Master Attendant of the Calcutta port, John Hayes, was sent to determine the exact spot on Sagar where it would be built and selected a small strip of land projecting into the river from the southwest of the island. Bounded on the south by a creek in which boats could moor, it was christened ‘Lighthouse Point’.Footnote ³⁴ The project of clearing this spot was entrusted to Hayes, who recruited 50 Indian sailors (lascars), working under two British supervisors, for the purpose. After six months of slow progress (December 1810–June 1811), clearance was paused at the onset of the southwest monsoon. The advent of the rainy season, which lasted until September, would mean the suspension of reclamation efforts every year thereafter, ‘as nothing could be done in the rains’.Footnote ³⁵

For the next round of clearance, efforts were stepped up, with the lascars relieved of their duties and 1,000 coolies hired instead. Within eight months, a surface measuring 2,500 biggahs (1.3 square miles) had been cleared and a ‘very satisfactory’ water tank dug.Footnote ³⁶ On the cleared land, two wooden bungalows were built for the British supervisors, along with huts for the coolies, surrounded by a stockade to protect against tigers. The creek running along the southern edge of the plot was bunded, but no effective protection was installed against the encroachment of the sea. As such, noted one official on site, the settlement was ‘in a greater measure inundated with water’.Footnote ³⁷ A temporary bamboo structure was erected to serve as a lighthouse in anticipation of the permanent edifice to come, but was toppled by strong winds the following year. Next, a small group of officials was sent to staff the marine establishment and naval depot envisaged at Lighthouse Point, along with a post officer. From Sagar, it was planned, post arriving from overseas would be transferred by boat to Khajuri and from there across land to Calcutta, speeding up communication with the capital. By the summer of 1814, however, the Bengal government was worried about the expense incurred at Lighthouse Point. A plan of the permanent lighthouse had been produced, along with a cost estimate, but construction was yet to start. The erection of a wharf in the mud just off the point was proving impossible, and the post officer had been forced by sickness to leave the island. In June that year, the lighthouse project was thus suspended and, in its place, a set of floating lights installed in the river.Footnote ³⁸

In parallel to these developments, the government’s attention turned to the wider reclamation of the island. First, a survey was commissioned. The instructions sent to the surveyor, military engineer George Blane, told him to:

Blane undertook his survey just before the rains in 1811, but when the government Board of Revenue received a copy of his map and field book they were disappointed to discover that it covered just the southern islands and coastline—later termed ‘Sagar Proper’ and ‘Dhobelat’—rather than the ensemble. Confusion over what constituted ‘Sagar Island’ had created different understandings of the area to be surveyed. Blane was ordered back to complete the survey, which was submitted in its final form in April 1814. The map produced after this second round of surveying imposed the name ‘Sagar Island’ on all of the islands on the western side of Channel Creek, the smaller, eastern branch of the Hooghly marking the start of the Sundarbans.Footnote ⁴⁰

Consistent with its emphasis on the role of private agency to deliver ‘improvements’ in land use elsewhere in the province, the Bengal government expected that, Lighthouse Point apart, the clearance and cultivation of Sagar Island would be effected ‘without expense to Government’.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1811 and 1812, the Board of Revenue considered the award of leases to two British individuals—Messrs Beaumont and Jones—who envisaged cultivating parcels of land and, in the case of Beaumont, establishing a leather manufacturing business transforming tiger hides.Footnote ⁴² At this time, however, the government was reluctant to permit Europeans to hold land in rural Bengal, believing that the right of Indians to the soil must be upheld, and that the preservation of law and order in the countryside required Indian landlords.Footnote ⁴³ Following discussion, the two lease applications were therefore rejected and in the following year, 1813, a resolution was passed encouraging Indian parties to submit applications for Sagar grants. The grants would be free of all assessment for seven years. When this time had passed, the cleared lands would be permanently assessed, while uncleared lands would revert to the government.Footnote ⁴⁴ The logic of this resolution mirrored that of the Permanent Settlement, at least as far as the lands cleared after seven years were concerned: that on Sagar, as elsewhere in Bengal, a class of landholders would be created who would hold their territories in perpetuity, maintain law and order, and pay a fixed amount annually into the public coffers.

Within a few months of the resolution being issued, 59 applications for Sagar land had been submitted, with the size of the grants requested ranging from 500 to 10,000 biggahs (0.26 to 5.17 square miles).Footnote ⁴⁵ The applicants included the wealthy Indo-Portuguese businessmen Joseph Barretto and Thomas De Souza and ‘a few opulent Hindoos’ whose names do not appear in the surviving records of the Board of Revenue.Footnote ⁴⁶ Taken aback by the number of applications, the government now considered adding to the scheme the lands immediately east of Channel Creek and commissioned a new survey to produce an accurate map of them.Footnote ⁴⁷ The formal parcelling out of Sagar Island was deferred until this new survey had been completed, by which time the government appears to have had a change of heart. In its view, the applicants for Sagar grants were mostly ‘speculators’ with little genuine interest in the ‘improvement’ of the land.Footnote ⁴⁸ If Sagar Island was to be successfully reclaimed, British and other European investors might be needed after all.

The Sagar Island Society (1818–33)

In his insightful essay on agriculture and ‘improvement’ in early nineteenth century Bengal, David Arnold notes a key tension in British colonial thought. On the one hand, the East India Company’s authorities were wary about sanctioning widespread European possession of land, as we have noted. On the other, the effective development of land holdings was widely believed to require ‘energy, expertise and capital’ that only Europeans could sufficiently provide.Footnote ⁴⁹ British investors campaigned for the removal of land possession restrictions and by 1813, when the Company’s charter was renewed, they had succeeded in securing some land rights, particularly for the cultivation of indigo.

A precedent thus existed for European land possession when, in 1817, the newly appointed Collector of the 24-Parganas, Charles Trower, was instructed to determine the ‘best means’ of reclaiming Sagar Island.Footnote ⁵⁰ Two Indian banking firms, among them that of the prominent Das family of Benares, were at this point showing an interest in the project, but Trower was convinced that European capital was required too, and considered Sagar an investment opportunity for himself and his British peers. To the government he argued that debates about European land possession in Bengal were not relevant to the case of the island, an unpopulated ‘waste land’ where, beyond Gangasagar and the Kapila Muni temple, the usual concerns about law and order and the ‘native right’ to the soil did not apply.Footnote ⁵¹ The plan that Trower had in mind was a much more original one: to create a joint-stock company with both European and Indian investors and lease the island to it for the purpose of clearance and cultivation. The consent of the governor-general, the Marquess of Hastings, was secured, on the condition that the company raise a capital of Rs 250,000—100,000 more than Trower had first envisaged.Footnote ⁵²

In September 1818, a public meeting was organized in Calcutta and the plan unveiled. The joint-stock company would be composed of 250 shares at Rs 1,000 each. The government would lease it the entirety of Sagar Island in perpetuity; the first 30 years of the lease would be free, after which a rent of four annas (Rs 0.25) per biggah would be payable. The company, for its part, would be obliged to clear 25,000 biggahs (12.9 square miles), roughly an eighth of the island, within five years and 100,000 biggahs (51.7 square miles), roughly half of the island, within a decade. Failure to meet these conditions would see possession of the island revert to the government.Footnote ⁵³ Two subsequent meetings in November saw the articles of the company drawn up and a 13-man committee of management appointed. In the deed of incorporation that was then signed, it was christened the ‘Sagar Island Society’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Through these records, the key investors and participants in the Society can be identified. In total, there were 105 shareholders, of whom 51 were classified as European, 44 as Indian and ten as Anglo-Indian. The European investors possessed just over two-thirds of the shares (168), and the Indians (65) and Anglo-Indians (16) the rest.Footnote ⁵⁵ Among the British shareholders were partners in some of the largest agency houses in Calcutta; government civil and military officials; and a missionary, Joshua Marshman. The Indian investors included wealthy Bengali landowners and businessmen such as Rajkrishna Deb, Cossinath Bannerjee, Ramdulal Dey, and three members of the Tagore family. In sum, the SIS attracted investment from many of the richest and most high-profile individuals of the elite Calcutta public sphere. Their prominence and connections meant that news of the Society’s launch was published in the Calcutta Gazette and swiftly reproduced in other newspapers and publications, embedding the SIS in the fast-growing print culture of the city.Footnote ⁵⁶

Most investors bought just one or two shares—Rajkrishna Deb was the largest Indian investor with five—but among the European shareholders were five influential figures with ten shares or more. The largest investor with 24 shares was James Calder, a partner in the agency house Mackintosh & Co. known for doing business with the Tagores and Rammohun Roy. In the same year that the SIS was established, Calder, Joseph Barretto, and Gopi Mohan Tagore worked together to establish a new financial institution in Calcutta, the Commercial Bank.Footnote ⁵⁷ Next with 14 shares was John Palmer, whose own agency house was the biggest in the city, with interests in indigo, agriculture, shipping, insurance, and financial services.Footnote ⁵⁸ Investment in the SIS was consistent with some of Palmer’s other business choices, which included the acquisition of plantations on Java just after the 1811 British seizure of the island from the Dutch—another significant example of venture colonialism in which the East India Company and other British companies acted together.Footnote ⁵⁹ The East India Company’s master shipbuilder, James Kyd, owned 13 shares in the SIS, and Richard Hunter, an employee of the Bengal Civil Service from a wealthy, landed family in southern England had 12. Last but not least among the large investors, with ten shares, was Charles Paton, a civil and military engineer in the Company’s service who would go on to become commissioner of Arakan. Hunter, it should be noted, was Secretary to the Board of Revenue in the Lower Provinces, which included the 24-Parganas; his investment in the SIS blurred the distinction between his official role and private interests. The same was true of Charles Trower, who bought two shares. Palmer, Kyd, and Trower were named on the Society’s management committee, along with Barretto, Dey, and Hari Mohan Tagore. Trower assumed the role of chairman and Kyd of secretary. Members of the committee doubled up as the Society’s trustees.

The main source of income envisaged by the committee of management was the cultivation of crops: rice, in the first instance, because it grew easily in salt water, and then potentially sugar, cotton, and tobacco in bunded and drained lots.Footnote ⁶⁰ The introduction of these crops was encouraged by the Bengal government and, after its establishment in July 1820, by the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Bengal, which counted Calder, Kyd, Trower, and other SIS investors among its members and shared a similar concern for the ‘improvement’ of land usage.Footnote ⁶¹ In the shorter term, the manufacturing of salt on Sagar Island was also viewed as a potential revenue stream. The SIS was optimistic about its chances of securing a licence to manufacture salt for distribution by the government, which held a monopoly on the article. Indeed, jungle clearance and salt production were imagined to go together, with wood felled on the island to be used as fuel in the evaporation process by which salt was extracted (although a solar evaporation process requiring no woodburning was also discussed). Some firewood, it was suggested, might also be sold in Calcutta, if the transport costs permitted.Footnote ⁶² A further revenue idea was the establishment of a seaside resort on the southern shore of Sagar, ‘a Brighton, for the inhabitants of Bengal’.Footnote ⁶³ In the months following the SIS’s inauguration, plans were drawn up for a ‘Saugor Lodging House’ with six spacious private rooms for ‘invalids, and persons who wish to enjoy the sea air’.Footnote ⁶⁴

As these proposals were fleshed out, the lease transferring possession of Sagar Island to the Society was executed. To the main terms mentioned above, in which the SIS took on responsibility for clearing large parts of the island in return for an initial rent-free tenure, several significant clauses were added. One empowered the Society to sublease parts of the island to third parties who would also engage in clearance and cultivation. In another, the government reserved the right to revoke the Society’s lease in the event of ‘a great or extraordinary mortality taking place amongst persons employed [on Sagar], by reason of the insalubrity of the said Island’.Footnote ⁶⁵ A small area of land at the tip of Lighthouse Point was to remain in government possession in case plans for a lighthouse or marine establishment were revived, though the Society would take on responsibility for its clearance and maintenance.

The work of the SIS could now begin, with the southwest of the island (Sagar Proper) the first site of its attentions.Footnote ⁶⁶ A Dr Dunlop, who would double as the medical professional on the island, was appointed superintendent of the reclamation works, with authorization to recruit three assistants and 3,000 coolies. He arrived at Lighthouse Point in December 1818 with about 1,000 of these labourers and set to work on the clearance of a narrow strip of land linking the Point with the Kapila Muni temple, roughly four miles to the east. By June 1819, when the rains restarted, one square mile had been cleared and a bund constructed. For the following clearance season, beginning in September, 500 more coolies were hired from Khajuri. An engineer, Lieutenant Taylor, was sent by the government to revive plans for the construction of a lighthouse. By November, however, fever and a cholera epidemic had decimated the workforce; Dunlop was forced to leave the island and his successor, a Mr Plumet, lasted just two months. The water tank at Lighthouse Point was regularly breached by the sea, Taylor recorded, and the ground ‘a complete swamp, being overflown every tide’.Footnote ⁶⁷ So saturated was the soil, he added, that a lighthouse would require much deeper foundations than first planned. To assist in jungle clearance, the SIS purchased two elephants at significant expense. When they were disembarked on the island, they were found too heavy to traverse the mud without sinking. One died soon after and an elephant keeper was carried away by a tiger.

In early 1820, the Society then extended its operations to four other parts of Sagar. First was ‘Cox’s Island’, a small parcel of land just above Sagar Proper, bounded on the west by the New Anchorage—a spot in the Hooghly where large vessels often dropped anchor—and on its other sides by two large creeks. The Society’s hope was that a second marine depot might be established here to supply the stationed vessels. Five hundred coolies worked under a British supervisor to clear the site of jungle, beginning with the sea-facing front, but no attempt was made to protect the cleared land from the tide. The worker’s settlement was destroyed by a strong wave in August 1820, after which the clearance of the site was stopped.Footnote ⁶⁸

Further up the western side of Sagar was a large stream known variously as ‘Phooldooly’ or ‘Dog’s Creek’. In February 1820, the SIS contracted the clearance of jungle on the southern side of this inlet to a native of Burdwan, Ramjoy Kur, who would be paid six rupees for each biggah cleared. Kur engaged 500 coolies for the purpose, and the clearance began. Two months later, the SIS secured from the government its anticipated salt manufacturing contract; 10,000 maunds were to be produced on the island and transported to the East India Company’s salt depot on the edge of Calcutta. Kur, who apparently knew the salt trade, was instructed to get this manufacturing started. However, in the absence of a freshwater tank, Kur and his workforce relied on drinking water shipped across the Hooghly from Khajuri. In mid-April, when strong currents in the river left the boats supposed to deliver this water stranded, the coolies quit the site and could not be induced to return. In the fall-out from this episode, the SIS cancelled its contract with Kur and took him to court for the repayment of the advance, just over Rs 7,000, that he had received. He passed away in 1821 before the case was heard.Footnote ⁶⁹

The decision of the management committee to contract Kur was informed by concern about how regularly British supervisors on Sagar were getting sick, and a hope that the costs of jungle clearance could be reduced. In April 1820, the same thinking informed an attempt to implant 25 families of Maghs (Arakanese) in the middle of Sagar on an island—named ‘Trowerland’ after the SIS chairman—formed by several cross-cutting creeks. The Society advanced a small sum to the families for the purchase of arms, tools, and tents, to be paid off through jungle clearance at a rate of two or three rupees per biggah. Once Trowerland was cleared, the Maghs would be permitted to settle there or else move to another part of Sagar to clear it on the same terms. The committee announced itself very happy with this deal, noting that the Maghs were an ‘industrious’ people willing to clear jungle cheaply.Footnote ⁷⁰ It would appear, however, that the families were less happy with the arrangement, because by September 1820 they had departed.

The fourth and final part of Sagar on which the SIS started operations in 1820 was Mud Point, at the northern extremity of the island. Here too Magh labour was called upon, but this time some 500 Maghs en route from Chittagong to Hijli were employed as part of a coolie workforce totalling 1,000 under the supervision of a Mr Maclean. A tank was dug and a square mile of jungle cleared.Footnote ⁷¹ By September 1820, as the Society’s third year of operations began, Mud Point and Sagar Proper were its only sites of reclamation still active. In both, rice paddy was planted—a first step in the cultivation of the cleared parcels—and in the latter some cotton plants were trialled. Through the 1820–21 season, the clearance of Mud Point continued eastwards towards Channel Creek. The SIS recorded that the estate was ‘the most promising on the Island’, but this said as much about events elsewhere on Sagar as in the north.Footnote ⁷² In the autumn of 1820, the bund protecting Sagar Proper collapsed, ruining the paddy crop. A plan was drawn up for fresh embankments that would encircle the estate further inland, but before it could be implemented the new supervisor, Mr Falconer, was also forced to leave the island through sickness. Operations on Sagar Proper were then suspended. Over the course of two years, more than Rs 70,000 had been spent; the clearance of four square miles had been attempted but in most places the jungle had regrown, and only 200 biggahs (0.1 square miles) of land had been brought under cultivation.Footnote ⁷³

As far as the government lighthouse project was concerned, the picture was no more encouraging. In late 1820 a new engineer, Lieutenant Edward Garstin, had arrived at Lighthouse Point. The excavations that followed confirmed what his predecessor, Lieutenant Taylor, had suspected: that at the Point there was no solid ground even 60 feet beneath the surface of the mud. Garstin suggested that the foundations of the lighthouse would therefore need to be buried at least 70 feet down—and, even then, the stability of the structure could not be guaranteed. In addition, he reminded the government, the sea made ‘large encroachments on those shores of the Island, where the Light House would require to be placed’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, it was quite possible that the estuary would in the near future cut off Sagar Proper from the rest of Sagar Island, and might even submerge it. It must be understood, he stressed,

Garstin added that the parts of Sagar Proper most liable to flooding were those that had already been cleared; his report to government contained a warning about the entire project of reclaiming Sagar Island that we will return to later. The construction of the lighthouse, meanwhile, should be stopped, he argued, on grounds of cost, the uncertainty of success, and ‘from motives of humanity in the number of lives which will be saved’, Sagar Proper being ‘indisputably one of the most unhealthy places in the World’.Footnote ⁷⁶ After deliberation, the government accepted his arguments and in mid-1821 the lighthouse project was once again halted.

Henceforth, most progress in the reclamation of Sagar Island would take place not on estates directly controlled by the SIS but on those that it subleased to other parties. Less than a year had passed after the execution of the Society’s lease before some of its largest investors demanded that the management committee (over which they held substantial influence) sublease parts of the island to them. First was John Palmer, himself a member of the committee, who in October 1819 secured a 20-year rent-free lease over the southeastern part of Sagar Island—Dhobelat. Six months later it was amended to add a second island on the other side of the Satbankee Khal, which marked the northern border of Dhobelat, bringing the total area in Palmer’s possession to 30,000 biggahs (15.5 square miles).Footnote ⁷⁷ The lease committed him, like the SIS, to clearing half of this land within ten years—a task that started much more promisingly than on the neighbouring estate of Sagar Proper. Eight hundred coolies and a British supervisor were recruited and a settlement established on the western side of Dhobelat, just across the creek from the Kapila Muni temple. An embankment six foot high and five miles long was then constructed around the entire sea face of Dhobelat, followed by smaller bunds to protect against inundation from the surrounding creeks. Next, the jungle enclosed by these embankments was cleared and paddy planted. An experimental garden was opened in which cotton and tobacco plants were tested. A small group of Chinese labourers was even employed to cultivate groundnuts, which Palmer knew from his other business ventures were a popular foodstuff in southeast and east Asia. When the SIS proved unable to fulfil its salt manufacturing contract with the government, Palmer picked up the reins, agreeing to produce 20,000 maunds of salt for the government. The exposed, gently inclining beach on the southern side of Dhobelat was deemed very suitable for the production of salt through solar evaporation.Footnote ⁷⁸

Where the Society’s second largest investor had gone, its four other main shareholders would follow, beginning with the largest, James Calder. Three months after Palmer’s sublease had been agreed, he formed a partnership with Charles Paton, the fifth largest investor, and Rampersaud Banerjeree, a Bengali owner of one SIS share, to take over 15,000 biggahs (7.7 square miles) of the island on the same terms as Palmer.Footnote ⁷⁹ The site chosen—just below the Mud Point estate, and hence the second most northerly on the island—was christened ‘Calderganj’. Clearance began almost immediately and by June 1821, 1,200 biggahs (0.62 square miles) had been cleared, two-thirds of which was planted with paddy.Footnote ⁸⁰ The SIS’s third and fourth largest shareholders, James Kyd and Richard Hunter, then joined forces with some other investors, including James Young and other partners of the agency house Alexander & Co., to secure a more extensive estate, Shikapore, occupying a large part of the eastern flank of the island, bordering Channel Creek. The Shikapore Society, as it was known, took over 28,000 biggahs (14.5 square miles) here and added to them a few months later an estate of 10,000 biggahs (5.2 square miles) on the western side of the island, titled ‘Alexandria’.Footnote ⁸¹ Reclamation began with the northern section of Shikapore, which shared a creek and moorings with Calderganj and Trowerland, and in the words of Kyd, proceeded with ‘vigor and alacrity’, although the first British supervisor, Thomas Jackson, passed away after ‘imprudent exposure to the sun’.Footnote ⁸² The Bengali, Nagpur, and Magh coolies employed for jungle clearance and bunding were encouraged to settle on the cleared land and begin the cultivation of paddy and cotton as ryots. Each family installing itself on the estate was advanced six to seven rupees and promised three years of rent-free tenure, along with payments for additional jungle cleared. By September 1822, some 180 families were living on Shikapore. The Shikapore Society trialled the shipping of firewood for sale in Calcutta, and Kyd too began experimenting with the manufacture of salt through solar evaporation.Footnote ⁸³

In total, over 40 per cent of the surface of Sagar Island had been subleased by the SIS to third parties primarily composed of the Society’s main investors. Though the rest of the island remained the legal possession of the Society, only on the Mud Point Estate, which accounted for 7–8 per cent of the total surface of Sagar, did it maintain a presence and continue reclamation efforts after the summer of 1822. The Society’s report in the autumn of that year acknowledged that the large sums invested in the now-abandoned reclamation of other parts of the island—Sagar Proper, Cox’s Island, and the southern side of Phooldooly—would probably never be recuperated, leaving it in a difficult financial position.Footnote ⁸⁴ In an attempt to revive its fortunes, the Society now threw its weight behind a proposal, under consideration by the government, for the construction of a canal linking Channel Creek with the Hooghly at Calcutta. The resulting reduction in journey times would open up new revenue sources for the Society, it was hoped, including the supply of fish to the capital.Footnote ⁸⁵

In May 1823, however, Sagar Island was struck by a cyclone and tidal wave far more damaging even than the regular storms and floods of the preceding years. The centre of the storm appears to have passed about 50 nautical miles west of Sagar Island, making landfall between Balasore and Hijli. It was followed by a wave estimated at 20-feet high when it struck the coast of the mainland, submerging villages.Footnote ⁸⁶ On Sagar, all of the sea-facing embankments were breached and the estates flooded. In the north, the sea began receding after six hours, limiting the damage to the Mud Point and Calderganj estates, but in the south it was another story, with half a mile of land on the southern shore of Sagar Proper and Dhobelat seemingly permanently lost to the sea. Casualty figures were mercifully low, with most labourers just recently sent away at the end of the clearance season, but thousands of maunds of salt stored on Palmer’s estate were washed away, and its embankments destroyed.Footnote ⁸⁷

After the cyclone, the prospects of the SIS were even gloomier but the management committee was not quite ready to give up. Within six weeks, the damage done to the Mud Point estate had been repaired. A few months later, a programme of settlement was launched with the same financial inducements that had been trialled by the Shikapore Society on its land. A total of 137 families were settled as ryots on the estate by April 1825, and 8,712 biggahs (4.5 square miles) reclaimed.Footnote ⁸⁸ The SIS was now, however, almost entirely out of funds. The cleared lands of Mud Point were therefore subleased by public auction at Calcutta, the sublease purchased for Rs 25,000 by Scotsman Alexander Campbell of the Bengal army, who then took over the uncleared lands of the estate as well.Footnote ⁸⁹ The SIS reinvested the sum paid by Campbell in the reclamation of Trowerland, where clearance efforts had been suspended back in September 1820. One hundred and fifty coolies were employed on the site in 1826, rising to 340 the following year, and by 1828 some 42 families were installed as ryots on 3,000 biggahs (1.5 square miles) of cleared land. The sublease of this estate was then in turn sold at auction. It was acquired by another Scot, military surgeon Duncan Macpherson, who renamed it ‘Cluny’ after his clan’s ancestral home in Aberdeenshire.Footnote ⁹⁰

Of the estates already subleased when the 1823 cyclone struck, Calderganj was the least seriously affected. By October the following year, the area reclaimed had been extended to 7,000 biggahs (3.6 square miles), of which 4000 (2 square miles) were fit for cultivation.Footnote ⁹¹ Rice paddy remained the predominant crop, but cotton, tobacco, sugar, and ginger were also introduced, the latter three planted by a small group of Chinese labourers. On the Shikapore estate, recovery from the cyclone was more difficult, however. With several of the Shikapore Society’s partners away from Calcutta, little new investment was forthcoming to replace the estate’s destroyed embankments facing Channel Creek. The number of ryots fell by a quarter, and some of the cleared land was abandoned.Footnote ⁹² In 1828, Richard Hunter would withdraw from the Shikapore Society, taking with him its second grant, Alexandria, on the western side of the island. Henceforth, this estate would go by the name of Thurston, after the village of Hunter’s family in southern England.Footnote ⁹³

On Dhobelat, meanwhile, the situation was more difficult still. In the months following the cyclone, three co-investors in Palmer’s estate pulled out. Palmer financed the construction of new bunds at a greater distance from the sea and resumed the manufacturing of salt, his golahs for storage removed to slightly higher ground near Channel Creek. Mango, mahogany, and teak trees were introduced in a new bunded enclosure that measured a very modest 800 biggahs (0.4 square miles), and rice paddy was replanted.Footnote ⁹⁴ As storms and labour shortages continued, however, Palmer struggled to meet the salt production targets that he had negotiated with the government. From late 1825, as the wider struggles of Palmer & Co. intensified, little new investment in the estate was forthcoming. A couple of years later, as the estate wallowed in ‘unproductive inertia’, the right to salt manufacturing was taken over by George Prinsep, who would revive experiments with the production of salt through solar evaporation on the site.Footnote ⁹⁵ At this point, the estate was home to just 53 families of ryots.Footnote ⁹⁶

In January 1830—11 years after its efforts had begun—the SIS submitted a report to government on the progress of the reclamation of Sagar Island, including the subleases, that allows a detailed picture of the situation on the island to be obtained (see Figure 2). The main success, in the Society’s view, was Mud Point, where 14,000 biggahs (7.2 square miles) of jungle had now been cleared, including the upper part of the estate, from the Hooghly to Channel Creek, in its entirety. The 720 families of ryots installed and the large area cultivated with paddy made this by ‘far the most thriving establishment in Saugor’. ‘The entire absence of Jungle from side to side of the Island together with the luxuriance of the Crops, the abundance of fresh water and the villages scattered over the fields present a wonderful contrast to the dense jungle a few years ago’, Kyd recorded.Footnote ⁹⁷ Calderganj was a close second, with 12,000 biggahs (6.2 square miles) of land cleared and 350 families living on the land, a number ‘expected to be doubled this season, as there is abundance of land for an increase of hands’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Hunter, for his part, had made rapid progress with the reclamation of Thurston, which had 4,500 biggahs (2.3 square miles) cleared, almost half of which was under cultivation. Different varieties of cotton and tobacco seed had been imported from the United States, with the help of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society, and planted on these estates to determine which would grow best, while Calder had also begun cultivating sugar cane.Footnote ⁹⁹ On the other grants, however, the surface of reclaimed land had actually shrunk over the preceding years, as once-cleared jungle regrew and the sea encroached on the southern estates. On Shikapore, cultivation was now confined to an area of 3,000 biggahs (1.5 square miles) bordering Channel Creek. On Dhobelat, 74 families of ryots occupied a space just two-thirds of this size, and Prinsep’s salt experiments were winding down, to be entirely stopped the following year.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Sagar Proper remained abandoned. Overall, the SIS admitted, there had been ‘little progress made in the clearing of lands’ since 1824, while a total of just 30,000 biggahs (15.5 square miles)—less than 15 per cent of the surface of Sagar—was under cultivation.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Figure 2.

A map of Sagar Island produced by the SIS in 1830, showing the different estates and the extent of jungle clearance. Hunter’s estate is here referred to by its older name, ‘Phooldooly’, rather than ‘Thurston’, and the southern section of Palmer’s estate as ‘Gunga Saugor’ rather than ‘Dhobelat’. IOR/F/4/1233.

For investors in the Society and its subleases, the wider economic situation had not helped. Through the 1820s, a series of economic and political crises—including the Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26) and the failure of the indigo crop (1826)—had impacted their trading and investment ventures. The agency houses of Calcutta—from which most of the capital spent on Sagar Island issued—had seen the interest rates that they were compelled to pay on deposits forced up and some of their major borrowers, such as indigo planters, imperilled.Footnote ¹⁰² For Palmer & Co., the situation was particularly grave; the firm’s losses on Sagar were combined with unsuccessful investments in shipping, horse trading, and the Java plantations. On 1 January 1830, the largest agency house in Calcutta collapsed, triggering a commercial crisis that would last four years and precipitate the SIS’s winding up.Footnote ¹⁰³

The possibility of dissolving the SIS had been raised by its trustees with the government as early as 1826, just after it had relinquished control of the Mud Point estate, but favourable terms for the cancellation of its lease of the island had not been agreed.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Palmer’s bankruptcy and resulting disqualification as a shareholder, followed by the passing away of Charles Paton a few months later, put this back on the agenda. The Shikapore Society indicated a wish to transform its sublease—the rent-free period of which, like that all of the subleases, was set to expire in October 1839—into a more generous lease held directly from the government.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Prinsep then wrote his lengthy pamphlet documenting the SIS’s failures and arguing, with some justification, that the sublease holders had done a much better job of clearing and settling the island. With the rent-free period of the subleases set to expire in 1839, he asserted, insufficient time remained for them to make further significant investments on their estates. ‘All further exertions are therefore paralysed.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Society, he added, was effectively defunct already, with three-quarters of its shareholders disqualified by absence, death, retirement, or bankruptcy. No general meeting of shareholders had been held since March 1825, he pointed out, and no lands were any longer subject to its direct reclamation efforts. All that remained was to legally dissolve the Society and re-distribute Sagar among those holders of subleases who wished to remain in possession of their grants. The lease of the remaining estates on the island might then be divided up between interested shareholders.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In July 1831, the Shikapore Society formally requested that it be awarded its estate as a ‘distinct grant’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ At a meeting chaired by Richard Hunter, with James Kyd still acting as secretary and James Calder in attendance, the SIS accepted the request and agreed to seek the approval of government. Kyd then wrote to the government requesting ‘an immediate division of the Island’, suggesting that in light of the ‘exhausted state’ of the SIS’s funds, such a division was ‘the only feasible mode of effecting the clearance and cultivation of the Island’, thereby ‘accomplishing the objects for which the Society was established’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He added a request that, when the subleases became leases held directly from the government, their rent-free term be extended by ten years to October 1849.

The response of the government to this set of requests was broadly favourable. Given the legal questions involved, however, the opinion of the advocate-general, John Pearson, was sought before any decisive steps were taken. Before it arrived, the island was struck by another serious cyclone and flood. On 31 October 1831, a storm traversed the Bay of Bengal to make landfall, as in 1823, near Balasore. The winds were reportedly stronger than eight years previously and the water higher. The coastal territories of Balasore, Hijli, and Khajuri were ‘overwhelmed by a tremendous wave, sweeping away with resistless force every house and every article of property in the native villages, and destroying the paddy crops, all the cattle of an extensive tract of country, and a large portion of the inhabitants’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Though Sagar Island was not directly in the line of the wave, it too was completely inundated, the water passing about two feet over the sea-facing embankments, some of which were destroyed. Once again, it was Dhobelat that suffered most greatly. Most of the ryots’ homes were swept away, along with the British supervisor’s bungalow. The salt golahs were destroyed, the paddy crops ruined, and the tanks compromised by salt water. On Shikapore, half of the homes were destroyed and a similar proportion of crops lost. The north of the island was not spared either. On the Mud Point estate, most homes were blown down. The wave deposited a new sandbank at the entrance of Channel Creek, increasing the pressure of the Hooghly’s currents against Mud Point, leading to fears that the settlement would be swept away.Footnote ¹¹¹

Prinsep estimated that across Sagar as a whole, the damage done by the cyclone was probably greater, in financial terms, than the ‘entire saleable value of the island in its present condition’.Footnote ¹¹² A few weeks later, John Pearson arrived at his conclusions: the direct re-allocation of the island from the SIS to its sublessees and shareholders was not within the legal power of the Society, nor that of the government. However, the advocate-general continued, the grant of Sagar Island made to the SIS back in 1818 could now be considered ‘virtually at an end’ because a number of its clauses—not least the clearance of 100,000 biggahs (51.7 square miles) of land within ten years—had not been respected.Footnote ¹¹³ The government was therefore within its rights to revoke the lease and take the island back into its possession, without paying the Society any compensation. Alternatively, the Society could dissolve itself and voluntarily relinquish control of its grant. In either of these solutions, Pearson cautioned, the rights of sublessees on the island would have to be respected.

The government preferred the second approach. In its response to James Kyd, it encouraged the trustees to come up with a plan for the dissolution of the Society and the regranting of the island, but the deepening of the commercial crisis at Calcutta undermined these intentions.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Among the agency houses involved in the reclamation of Sagar, Alexander & Co. was the next to go bust, in December 1832, taking with it the Shikapore Society, in which Kyd, along with the key partners in Alexander & Co., had a stake. James Calder’s firm, Mackintosh & Co., followed a few weeks later, meaning that the largest investor in the SIS was now also bankrupt.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The island then fell victim to another major cyclone—the third in ten years and the second in little over 18 months. Again, the storm built up in the Bay and made landfall over Balasore. The wave accompanying it was of an ‘extreme violence’ and this time its trajectory took it directly over Sagar and up the Hooghly estuary.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The coastal lands on both sides of the river were overwhelmed, ships torn from their anchors and deposited on land, and even the suburbs of Calcutta inundated.Footnote ¹¹⁷ When it struck Sagar Island, the wave was an estimated 20 foot high, three times the height of the highest embankments supposed to protect the island. The embankments were swept away, along with the houses, huts, and crops across the island, from south to north. When the previous storm waves had flooded the island, some of the ryots and coolies present had saved themselves by rushing to slightly higher ground or taking refuge on the inland bunds. This time, however, there was no escape from the wave; after it had passed, the island remained up to ten foot underwater. According to contemporary reports, the ‘whole population’ of Sagar—between 3,000 and 4,000 people—lost their lives.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Unlike in 1823 and 1831, not a single first-hand testimony from the island features in the records of the cyclone that the Bengal government compiled.Footnote ¹¹⁹

In the aftermath of this latest disaster, the SIS’s lease of Sagar was finally declared over, but efforts to reclaim the island were not entirely halted. While no investors could be found willing to take on the island’s southern estates, Mud Point, Calderganj, Cluny, and Shikapore were all leased out by the government again. Campbell and Macpherson retained possession of Mud Point and Cluny, respectively, while Richard Hunter took over Shikapore. Calderganj was leased by a Mr Hare, previously unconnected with the island, and renamed ‘Ferintosh’.Footnote ¹²⁰ The leases granted to these four included an initial rent-free period expiring in 1849, as James Kyd had suggested, with clauses stipulating the amount of land to be cleared and cultivated during this time. Rice cultivation and salt manufacturing would remain the key commercial undertakings on the estates during the decades that followed. The logic of the SIS—clearance, cultivation, and resource extraction—continued on Sagar Island beyond the Society’s collapse.

Reflections

As we have noted, the SIS was a first in nineteenth century Bengal: a joint-stock company created for the purposes of land clearance and cultivation. Nevertheless, it was very much a product of the economic and political context of its time: an enterprise with British and Indian investors, backed by the agency houses of Calcutta, that invested large sums of Indian-based capital; the vehicle for a large-scale project of ‘improvement’ in land use encouraged by the colonial government.

The role of the government in the undertaking warrants further consideration. As the problems of the SIS mounted, colonial authorities began to refer to its reclamation attempts as a ‘desperate speculation’, or words to that effect, distancing themselves from the Society, but government support had been influential in getting the project off the ground, from the endorsing of Charles Trower’s plan to the drawing up of the Society’s lease. Concerns about the European possession of land were parked as the imperative of reclaiming and ‘improving’ a ‘waste land’ with the aid of ‘European enterprise and skill’ took centre stage.Footnote ¹²¹ Significant practical support for the reclamation process was then provided by the government as it progressed: a medical officer, a police presence, and a post office were installed and maintained on the island at the government’s expense; the Society’s boats were waived through customs posts along the Hooghly and, in 1822, duties on the transport of firewood were abolished at the Society’s request. The government offered a reward of ten rupees for every tiger killed on the island, to which the Society added five rupees more. At government expense, a road was constructed down the left bank of the Hooghly to Harwood Point, opposite Mud Point, to improve access to Sagar, and then repaired after the 1823 cyclone.Footnote ¹²² The government and the Society shared similar concerns to clear and cultivate the island, for reasons that we have discussed. The involvement of colonial officials in the Society as trustees and investors meant, however, that, regardless of the public good, the interests of the Society were rarely overlooked in government, at least until the failure of the Society’s project became clear.

Why did the attempt to clear and cultivate the island fail during the years of the SIS? In its reports to the government and shareholders, the Society stressed the ‘obstacles’ that it had faced, in particular the climate and unhealthiness of the island, the problems procuring fresh water, shortages of labourers and ryots, the journey time to Calcutta, and the encroaching sea—plus, of course, the damage caused by storms and storm waves.Footnote ¹²³ Other contemporary observers pointed out the mistakes that the Society and its sublease holders had made, including their clearance of the sea-facing parts of their estates first, which left them more exposed to tidal flooding; their failure to construct sufficient embankments, taking into account the height and strength of tides; and their tardiness in cultivating cleared lands before the jungle regrew. The SIS, it was argued, would have been better off starting cultivation at the northern end of the island, less exposed to the sea and closer to Calcutta; it should have concentrated its resources on one or two estates, rather than spreading them too thinly over five in the first years of its operations. Too much expectation had been placed on salt manufacturing, it was added, to the detriment of other possible sources of revenue, such as the collection and sale of firewood.Footnote ¹²⁴

To these explanations of failure, an understanding of the economic context should be added. Investors in the SIS and its subleases were seriously affected, as we have noted, by a series of economic and political crises in the 1820s culminating in the 1830 commercial crash. The problems of the SIS had begun, however, before the effects of the most serious of these crises—the Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26) and the failure of the indigo crop (1826) were felt. To some observers, it was evident even before the first cyclone that the prospects of the Society were very poor, the clearing of Sagar ‘distant, and almost hopeless’ and the Society’s anticipated profits ‘visionary’ (i.e. delusional).Footnote ¹²⁵ As such, the economic context of early nineteenth century Calcutta is more useful for understanding why the SIS was launched than why it failed per se. In the years immediately after the 1813 Charter Act, which opened trade between India and Britain to firms other than the East India Company, the number of British companies operating in Calcutta grew rapidly, more than doubling between 1815 and 1820 from 15 to 32.Footnote ¹²⁶ The resulting increase in competition made Calcutta companies, including the old agency houses of the city, more likely to make risky investments, of which the SIS was one.Footnote ¹²⁷ Prinsep calculates that the SIS spent a total of Rs 329,000 on the reclamation of Sagar Island and the sublease holders Rs 581,000, bringing the total expenditure on the island to Rs 910,000 (approximately £91,000 at the time, or £5.2 million today).Footnote ¹²⁸ Sublease holders who continued to reclaim their plots of land after 1833 were able to recoup some of this investment, although most of it, including practically all of the SIS’s capital, was lost. The total value of land on Sagar was estimated at Rs 95,000—a meagre 10.4 per cent of the overall expenditure on the island—just after the third cyclone.Footnote ¹²⁹

Ultimately, the biggest mistake made by those involved in ‘that unfortunate speculation’ of reclaiming Sagar Island was to make the attempt at all.Footnote ¹³⁰ In part, a lack of knowledge or understanding was to blame, leading to over-confident predictions that the island would be ‘entirely cleared’ within three years.Footnote ¹³¹ At the outset, British figures had differing understandings of which land masses constituted ‘Sagar Island’, as we have seen. Until the area was re-surveyed in 1814, they relied on surveys dating to as far back as the 1770s, and even in the 1830s maps based on these old surveys were being consulted.Footnote ¹³² The science of storms was very poorly understood, and the phenomenon of cyclones was yet to be seriously studied and given a name. Climatic conditions were often described in euphemisms like ‘blowing weather’.Footnote ¹³³ For all that, there was plenty of evidence available of the potential perils of clearing and settling Sagar Island when the government and then the SIS began their work. From sickness to the absence of fresh water or the time required to travel to and from Calcutta, the ‘obstacles’ encountered in the clearance of Sagar Island were foreseeable. The government was aware from its first attempts to construct a lighthouse on the island that clearing even a small plot of land was arduous, yet still endorsed the launch of efforts to reclaim Sagar in its entirety. Investors in the SIS only had to look at the government’s struggles at Lighthouse Point to know how difficult the wider reclamation of the island was going to be. The mortality clause in the government’s lease to the Society, permitting it to revoke the lease if there was an ‘excessive’ number of deaths on the island, confirms that the authorities were aware of the dangers of the project, or at least of the potential dangers, but sanctioned it nonetheless.

While modern meteorology was in its infancy, it was widely recognized that storms in the Bay of Bengal were ‘frequent’ and ‘violent’, particularly in May, October, and November.Footnote ¹³⁴ The vulnerability of Sagar Island and the Hooghly estuary to these storms was at least anecdotally known, with accounts of previous storms in 1688, 1737, 1787, and 1797 in circulation. One story held the ‘catastrophic’ storm of 1688 responsible for the depopulation of the formerly densely inhabited island, its entire population swept away.Footnote ¹³⁵ The instability of the land formations at the mouth of the Hooghly, and their propensity to flooding, were also understood, not least by those familiar with the challenges of navigating between the river and the open sea. John Hayes, Master Attendant of the Calcutta port, noted, for example, that the shifting channels and sandbanks of the river mouth were ‘uncontrollable’.Footnote ¹³⁶ The river, it was recognized, created new islands through the deposit of sand and silt, while its ever-shifting flow, combined with the tide, eroded or destroyed others. Clearly, then, some awareness of the risks of reclaiming Sagar existed. On one occasion, while clearing jungle in the interior of the island, employees of the SIS discovered the mast of a ship a couple of miles inland from the coast and surmised that it must have been carried there over the top of the jungle by a storm wave in the not-too-distant past. According to one contemporary, the discovery was kept a ‘profound secret’ by the committee of management to avoid discouraging investors.Footnote ¹³⁷ The committee, it is clear, was not averse to manipulating the truth. In one communication with the government in October 1824, it claimed that 80,500 biggahs (41.6 square miles) of the island had been cleared, a gross exaggeration. Ryots, it pretended, ‘flock’ to the island with ‘avidity’ to settle on the cleared land—a confirmation, supposedly, of the ‘propriety’ of the Society’s undertaking.Footnote ¹³⁸

Given the warnings issued by engineer Edward Garstin from Lighthouse Point in 1821, authorities could not claim ignorance about the possible consequences of jungle clearance and bund construction either. Garstin, as we have seen, convinced the government to abandon its plan to construct a lighthouse on Sagar. In parallel, he tried in vain to alert his contemporaries to the folly of reclaiming the island. Clearing jungle, he observed, was making Sagar more vulnerable to flooding; as natural defences like shrubs and trees were removed, the sea encroached further inland and the soil was rendered less capable of holding together. Indeed, Sagar Proper appeared ‘in danger of being washed away, more particularly if cleared of its Jungle’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Constructing embankments, he added, was not an effective solution to this problem: no embankment would ever be tall enough to prevent flooding during very high tides; over time, the constant motion of the sea would undermine the foundations on which embankments stood.

While Garstin was not the first to raise doubts about the effectiveness of bunds, his thought went further with the highly perceptive argument that bunding was in fact causing ‘serious injury’ to Sagar.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Embankments, he explained, prevented the sea from making deposits of silt and minerals on the island, stopping the process by which it was being naturally elevated above the level of the sea, and impoverishing the soil. In addition, they prevented rainwater from draining away, creating swamps that added to the island’s unhealthiness. Garstin outlined the process of sedimentation that over centuries had built-up the land formations of the Ganges-Hooghly basin and made them fertile. Constructing bunds not only interfered with this process but meant that sedimentation would build up on the bed of rivers and creeks instead, raising their overall level and making even higher bunds necessary—a costly vicious circle. His conclusion should be read as a damning verdict on the entire reclamation project. There is, he advanced,

As far as bunds were concerned, ‘a great quantity of land, behind, in front, and on which they stand is useless’, Garstin stated.Footnote ¹⁴² Far from facilitating cultivation on Sagar Island, embankments would render it impossible. The lieutenant was aware that his advice would be unpopular—running counter, as it did, to ‘all the sanguine and interested speculations in the Saugor Society’—but issued it all the same.Footnote ¹⁴³

As their efforts on Sagar went awry, the SIS and its sublessees did make some adjustments to the environmental challenges confronting them. Embankments were constructed at a greater distance from the seashore, for example, and palm trees and Casuarinas were planted to act as windbreaks. Plans were adjusted so that embankments were completed before clearance got underway, and to ensure that lands were settled and cultivated as soon as clearance had been effected. In some instances, coarse paddy was planted simply to stop jungle re-growing. To make more significant changes to reclamation attempts—in line, for example, with Garstin’s insights—would, however, have been at odds with the protagonists’ raison d’être on the island—clearance, cultivation, and resource extraction—and the short-term timeline for profit-making to which, as capitalist enterprises, they were working.

From the sources available, determining local, Indian reactions to the events on Sagar during the period is challenging, but a close reading offers some clues. The fact that more than a quarter of shares in the SIS were held by Indian investors reminds us that attempts to reclaim Sagar were not met with universal scepticism by Indian parties, some of whom were no doubt familiar with the natural environment of Sagar and the Sundarbans, and ought perhaps to have better anticipated the challenges that it would pose. At the first public meeting in Calcutta to discuss the launch of the SIS, in September 1818, a suggestion was put forward by one unnamed group of Indian investors that two reclamation companies should be launched, one backed solely by Indian capital and the other by European. The Indian company, it was suggested, would start the clearance of Sagar at the northern end of the island and the European company in the south.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The intriguing thought arises—though it is impossible to know for sure—that the prospective Indian investors were aware of the greater dangers arising from clearing the southern side of the island. What about the reactions of individuals whose labour was called on for the clearance and cultivation efforts? The almost constant difficulties that the government, the SIS, and its sublessees had procuring workers suggests that many were aware of the dangers of Sagar. The lascars employed by the government at Lighthouse Point were given rations as well as being paid, because ‘without this inducement, such was the prejudice against Saugor, that people could not be persuaded to go there’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The monthly wage of coolies was increased from three rupees to four and sometimes five to secure their recruitment in sufficient numbers.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ More damning still was that many families preferred being paid as coolies to settling on the island as ryots; the estates, even after clearance, were not always an attractive proposition. ‘[P]robably they were frightened, by the discovery, that the level of Saugor was below that of ordinary high tides’, Prinsep noted.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Even on the comparatively successful Mud Point estate, attracting settlers proved difficult. Alexander Campbell was forced to increase the period of rent-free tenure on his estate from three to five years and revise down the maximum annual rent payable by ryots from two rupees to one and a half rupees per biggah.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Finally, the human and ecological costs of the attempt to reclaim Sagar during this period should be assessed. According to Prinsep, more than 500 labourers and supervisors of the SIS died of sickness on the island between 1818 and 1831, plus an unknown number of ryots and persons on the subleases.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Such was the frequency of epidemics, including cholera, and the prevalence of ‘jungle fever’, that the total number of deaths was almost certainly much higher. Approximately 4,000 people lost their lives during the cyclones, particularly that of 1833, as we have noted. Without the attempted reclamation of the island, few if any of these people would have been on Sagar when the cyclones struck.

The attempt to reclaim the island may have failed, but significant ecological damage was nonetheless caused. By 1833, some jungle in the north of the island had been permanently cleared and the use of land on cleared parcels transformed for good. The burning of semi-cleared and chopped jungle emitted carbon into the atmosphere, while the construction of embankments prevented streams and creeks from following their natural course. Attempts to introduce new crops on the island—cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco most notably—were almost universally unsuccessful but the experiments with them profoundly affected local ecologies, as did the planting of non-indigenous tree species. Rewards were paid out by the government and the SIS for the killing of 50 tigers on the island—a small but lasting contribution to the official campaign for the ‘destruction of Tigers and other wild Beasts’ across the Bengal presidency during the 1820s.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The significance of these ecological impacts for the environmental and climate crises of the present will be briefly considered in the concluding remarks that follow.

Conclusion and legacies

The reclamation of Sagar Island was a project started by the British colonial government in Bengal and continued by a joint-stock company with the encouragement of that government. The project’s launch reveals the concern of colonial authorities to extend the frontiers of revenue extraction in early nineteenth century Bengal. The discourses accompanying the launch remind us that ideas of ‘improving’ land usage and arguments about the wider public good went hand-in-hand with this revenue extraction. The handing over of the reclamation project to the SIS, meanwhile, underscores the close links between large capitalist interests and colonial authorities in Calcutta, and shows us that these capitalist interests were equally adept at speaking the language of ‘improvement’ and the public good while seeking to extract profits for their investors. The large number of shareholders in the SIS, and their diverse backgrounds, made it a particularly high-profile project within the trading and financial milieu of British Bengal. Individuals raising concerns about the project—which, after all, involved the clearance of more than 100 square miles of thick jungle, followed by embanking, settlement, and cultivation, in a very challenging natural environment—were in a small minority and struggled to have their voices heard. The failure of the project can be read as a parable about the over-confidence of humans in their capacity to control and ‘improve’ natural environments, even with large capital and the latest technological innovations at their disposal. The consequences of that failure, including death and illness, ecological damage, and the financial ruin of many of those involved, may be considered a warning.

In British India, the collapse of the SIS unfurled alongside the end of an era. With the East India Company’s Charter Act of 1833, restrictions on the sending of British-based capital to India were removed, a decision marking the final demise of the old agency houses of Calcutta and their replacement by new financial institutions set up to manage the import of surplus British capital from the metropole.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Undeterred by events on Sagar Island, the UK parliament also removed the restrictions on European land ownership in India, ushering in a new age of British plantation agriculture, while colonial authorities began to play a larger role in the development of infrastructure (e.g. canals, roads, and railways) that would enable this capital to flourish. The result, of course, was environmental disruption and damage on a scale that would dwarf the attempts to reclaim Sagar Island that we have considered.

On Sagar, the rent-free period of the leases granted in 1833 over Mud Point, Cluny, Ferintosh, and Shikapore was later extended to 1863, 30 years after their commencement. In the final quarter of the century, they were superseded by fresh rounds of leases that included estates such as Dhobelat that had long since been abandoned. Little progress in clearance and cultivation took place, however, with the surface of reclaimed land on the island remaining below ten per cent of the total, and the rest ‘still covered with dense jungle’.Footnote ¹⁵² Further cyclones and storm waves visited Sagar in 1842, 1848, 1852, 1864, 1867, and 1874, followed by an earthquake in 1897. The wave of 1864 was particularly destructive, with almost three-quarters of the 5,625 people on the island losing their lives.Footnote ¹⁵³ From 1904, the government would transition away from the leasing of estates on the island towards a programme of jungle clearance under its own direct supervision, coming full circle some 90 years after its first Sagar reclamation efforts.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ By this time, awareness was growing of the problems created by embankments in the lower Bengal delta, but the government continued to encourage the settlement of ryots on parcels of cleared land on the island.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Today, Sagar Island is home to approximately 250,000 people, most of whom earn their living from agriculture or fishing.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The process of clearing the island of jungle was completed in the 1970s, the governments of postcolonial India pursuing very similar policies of reclamation and settlement to their colonial predecessors. Upstream dams on the Ganges-Hooghly, plus the embanking of the island’s coastline, mean, however, that Sagar no longer receives the deposits of sedimentation through which it first emerged from the water. As Edward Garstin predicted some 200 years ago, the island is now subsiding back into the sea. Given, additionally, the rising sea levels in the Bay of Bengal caused by global heating, the very survival of the island is now under threat, with at least 11.5 square miles of land lost to the sea since the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ A distance of just 500 yards today separates the temple of Kapila Muni from the southern shore of the island, compared to almost four times that distance in the 1820s.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ An ‘unpredicted high tide’ destroyed 4,000 homes and displaced 25,000 people, primarily on the eastern side of the island, in 2014.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As a result of man-made climate change, the island is now visited by more frequent and violent cyclones and storm waves, most recently Cyclone Dana in October 2024. The monsoons are becoming less predictable, with both more intense periods of rainfall and an overall decline in the volume of rain. The Bengal tiger is seriously endangered and none remain on the island.

In the face of enormous environmental challenges, people living on Sagar continue to adapt, replanting trees to act as windbreaks and introducing new, more salt-resistant varieties of rice, for example. On a global scale, however, the logic of extracting revenue from the transformation and exploitation of natural environments endures. While the term ‘development’ is today used instead of ‘improvement’, the collusion between government and big business that facilitated the first attempts to reclaim Sagar Island has perhaps never been more pronounced. Among the major natural sites of human intervention and engineering today are fragile deltas, coastlines, and islands where hundreds of millions of people live exposed to the consequences of the global climate and environmental crisis, the origins of which are inescapably colonial and capitalist.