THE GREAT BENGAL CYCLONE OF 1876. 193 



near the mouth of the Godavary, destroying nearly the entire town 

 with its 30,000 inhabitants, and driving far inland the ships which lay 

 at anchor in the bay. In 1839 the same locality was visited by 

 another cyclone, which was nearly as destructive as the preceding. 

 The coast of Madras and of Coromandel has again and again been 

 the theatre of cyclones, though here the wave is not so destructive 

 in its effects as elsewhere, owing to the situation and the formation 

 of the coast. In Madras the cyclone usually appears to expend its 

 fury on the many ships at anchor in the roads, and on the buildings 

 on the land, as was the case in the years 1773, 1783, and 1872. As 

 on October 15, 1783, so on the 1st and 2d of May, 1872, an enormous 

 amount of shipping was lost. In the latter case the greater part of 

 the vessels might have put out to sea, if the officer of the port had 

 been at his station and given warning in time. The destruction of 

 life and property caused by the wind and rain, as also by the swell of 

 the sea, was very considerable. Another cyclone which on October 

 15 and 16, 1874, swept the inland districts of Midnapore and Bur- 

 deran, claimed but few victims comparatively : in Midnapore only 

 about 3,000 persons lost their lives, while in Burderan there were but 

 a few fatal casualties. Of all the coasts of India the mouths of the 

 Ganges and the Hooghly appear to have suffered oftenest and most 

 severely from this catastrophe, for there wind and water are, as it 

 were, " forced into one sack." 



Thus the country situated about the mouth of the former river 

 was, on October 31, 1831, overflowed by a storm-wave to a distance 

 of 150 miles from the coast, and 300 native villages with their 10,000 

 inhabitants were destroyed ; and it was visited a second and a third 

 time by cyclones on October 7,1832, and September 21, 1839. At 

 the mouth of the Hooghly on the 21st of October, 1833, some 10,000 

 lives were lost in a storm-wave, and on May 21st of the same year, 

 near Coringa, 600 villages, with 50,000 souls, were swept away. In 

 the last-named case the wave rose nine feet higher than the high- 

 est point ever before observed, and the barometer suddenly fell all of 

 two inches. During the cyclone of October 5, 1864, at Calcutta, 

 1,500 square miles of country was overflowed, though the banks of the 

 Hooghly and its tributaries, and the shores of the islands in the 

 mouth of the stream, were protected by dikes eight to ten feet high. 

 But even though these dikes had been sufficiently strong to resist 

 the pressure of the water, still they were far from being sufficiently 

 high. On this occasion the storm-wave rose sixteen and a half feet 

 over the water-mark of the spring-tide, and twenty-seven feet above 

 the mean level of the sea; still, it attained this height only because it 

 entered the river at about high water. The wave was noticed as far as 

 Mehurpore, on the Matabangha, It caused the loss of 50,000 human 

 lives, but the destruction of life would have been far greater had the 

 cyclone occurred at night, and had the people, as at Bacarganch been 



TOL. XII. 13 



