114 C. E. Wilson — Topography of old Fort William. [No 2, 
mutilated fragments of brie It work I had just been touching and measur- 
ing were all that remained of the well-known court of guard, barracks 
and Black Hole, spoken of by Orme and Holwell. West of them was 
the parade ground where the soldiers of Suraj-ud-daula had been drawn 
up to keep guard over their captives, and west of this again I should 
find the foundations of the Governor’s House in the Fort. On advancing 
westward to a distance of about 110 ft. from the east curtain, the walls of 
the south-east wing of the Governor’s House were readily discovered ; and 
after a certain amount of careful excavation its leading features were all 
ascertained. Meanwhile I was anxiously trying to fix the position of the 
south curtain wall and the three lines of arches shown in the plan run- 
ning parallel to the south curtain. The tradition has always been that 
the old arcade in the yard of the General Post Office was part of the old 
fort, and althoug'h Mr. Bayne had argued that this could not be the case, 
I felt convinced that tradition was right. I was, however, for’ a long 
time baffled in my efforts to prove the truth of the tradition owing to the 
fact that the actual distances between the lines of the arches of the ar- 
cade and the corner of the north-east wing of the factory, which had been 
discovered, could not be made to agree with the distances shown in the 
plan between that corner and the liues of arches along the south curtain. 
It was only after a good deal of excavation that the true position of the 
south curtain was established, and it became evident that the south face 
of the old arcade is part of the first line of arches within the curtain, that 
the pillars in the centre of the arcade belong to the second line of arches, 
and the north side of the arcade is on the alignment of the third and in- 
nermost line of arches. 
The settling of this difficulty necessarily led to a further set of in- 
vestigations. If these were the real positions of the south curtain wall 
and of .the lines of arches within it, it followed that the plan was inac- 
curate in its representation of this part of the fort. Hence doubts 
naturally arose as to whether the plan was correct when it represented the 
east curtain wall as inclined at an angle to the north and south align- 
ment of the Governor’s House. It could not but seem more likely that 
they were parallel. To determine this point, excavations were made in 
the yard of the Custom House, and by this means the main outlines of the 
north-east wing of the factory and also the north and south alignment of 
the main building were ascertained. Here too it turned out that the 
plan was incorrect. 
From this point the work of excavation was comparatively easy. 
Further investigations cleared up all that was obscure about the south 
curtain wall, and fixed the position of the block of building’s running 1 
east and west dividing the fort into two sections. 
