The Sun.
London, England, 1858-08-12 00:00:00

TILE SUN.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 1858.

A detailed narrative has now distinctly under-
taken to authenticate the flying rumours hitherto
alone conveying to us a vague idea of that frightful
massacre on the 24th of June, 1857, at Cawnpore.
It affects to be the record of the sufferings of a young
lady only sixteen years of age at the period of the
occurrence—a young English maiden who by some-
hing very little short of a miraculous interposition
Heaven in her behalf, represents herself as hav-
ing (unmaimed and untarnished) escaped through
all the hellish torture and turmoil of that deadly
catastrophe. The narrative comes before the
public authenticated by Dr. KNIGHTON, of The
College, at Ewell, in the county of Surrey.
It bears about it otherwise none of the appearances of
authenticity. Originally, Dr. KNIGHTON informs us
the MS. came from the dictation of the young lady
herself and passed into his own hands through the
agency of a former pupil, one Mr. GEORGE STUART,
of the Suddur Courts Alipore, Calcutta.
_

If we could seriously induce ourselvelfto believe in
the accuracy of this terrible narrative, it would be
scarcely possible to read it now, at the distance of
more than twelve months from the period to
which it refers, without tearful emotion : with-
out moreover occasionally some momentary terror
as to the fate of; the narrator—even though the in-
stant afterwards we remembered that that fate is so
far secured, seeing that the words we are reading pur-
port to have been dictated by her own lips as
descriptive of a tragic incident in a precocious auto-
biography.

With the particulars of the massacre itself we are
long since only too painfully familiar. The ill-judged
treaty entered into on that fatal 24th of June, 1857,
between General WHEELER on the part of the Bri-
tish, and NANA. SAHIB as the leader and representa-
tive of the Sepoy insurgents—the dastardly perjury
of the latter *hen he swore by his gods and upon
the Gunge that he would protect the women and
children, and see them safely conducted in boats to
Allahabad—the butchery effected immediately after-
wards by his ruthless mandate when the overladen
boats were riddled with shot discharged against
them when they were just in the mid-stream—the rob-
beries, the cruelties, the devilries, all the imaginable
and till then unimaginable horrors which followed,
we know alas! asa nation long since, with only a too
dreadful distinctness. The knowledge has nerved
the arm of every soldier in our Anglo-Indian forces.
It has given a more truthful accuracy to the
aim of their rifles, a keener edge to their sword-
blades, a more resistless impetus to the
thrust of every bayonet. Wherever the
rebels since then have been encountered—no matter
in what numbers, in what apparently overwhelming
proportions—by the Merest handful of our troops,
theyhave never failed to feel bitterly the recoil of that
atrocious massacre upon themselves. They have
long ago learned to curse the day when the NANA
dreamt of indulging his tiger-like thirst of
blood with this unparelleled act of perfidy and
cruelty. It is from this point that the narrative of
the assumed survivor would lead us on, rapt in at-
tention, breathless, watchful, listening as she bids us
track her from the foundering boat in which she
noted the perpetration'of the deed of infamy—step
by step through all the torments of suspense, of
hair-breadth 'stapes, of brutal ill-treatment, of pre-
ternatural barbarity and inhumanity, on the part
of the Sepoys, until the day when she first re-
turned, under the shelter of the tattered ban-
ners and the strong arms of her conquering fellow-
countrymen. Buffetting with the waters, scrambling
ashore, crawling on hands and feet until effectually
hidden for the time under the trees and brush-
wood—she tells us how she lay there thinking
of those dear to her struck down together in the
carnage, from which she describes herself as
having but just then, as by a miracle, alone
escaped. "My thoughts, oh Heavens! were
agonising: my sister, her husband, and children,
had, I had not the slightest doubt, been ruthlessly
murdered." After lamenting and praying to Heaven
for aid in her wretchedness, she tells us of her
being startled by the unexpected apparition (like
herself as a fugitive) of Miss WrIEELER, the
General's daughter. And adds, that they have
scarcely communed together for an hour when
the rebels surprise them in their lair, and they are
separated. The story thenceforth becomes suf-
ficiently incoherent to pass for the vague and agonised
remembrances of one who has prematurely traversed
the Valley of the Shadow and returned to tell the
'horrors there experienced.
Heartily glad shall we be to learn that the com-
munication transmitted to Dr. KNIGHTON from one of
the former alumni of Ewell is from first to last a cruel
and harrowing fabrication. Better that a series of de-
liberate falsehoods should have been penned with the
:most heartless affectation of truthfulnessby a morbid
itrreamer of waking nightmares—than that the sicken-
ing tale of horror should even partially be the re-
cord of the actual sufferings of one miserable
girlish survivor. There are, at any rate, divers in-
:accuracies of detail, false dates, mistaken names, and
ara forth, that demand explanation. It signifies little
wlether the explanation come to us from Surrey or
ifrorE Calcutta, from the principal of the College at
Ewell, or from his former pupil, the Judge of the Sud-
sOrCearrt, at Alipore. Dr. KNIGIITON having adven-
tured' boldly upon the course of giving his startling
Pacquet of intelligence the advantage or disad-
vantage (such ao it may prove to have been in the
end) of at
*ll4, publication—it behoves him now
to employ every means within his reach
of proving or Oisproving its claims to authen-
ticity. It is , -to merely idle curiosity which
prompts this genera(:agerness for the discovery of
its worth. There ai .e th,;usands cf the relatives of
the victims of that deploraoe massacre at Cawn-
pore still brooding i n anguish over their fate, far
and wide through du h ;e fair and peaceful islands, to
whose grief the evade n ce of the truth or falsehood
of the statement rece al tly transmitted from Cal-
cutta, would bring ei ter fresh anguish Or some