rivers-and-navigation

How movement on the Hooghly actually works, and who controls it — established in play on the approach to Calcutta.

Overview

The Calcutta chapter is built on a river, and play established on the approach that the river is neither neutral nor freely navigable. This domain records what the table has made load-bearing about moving on the Hooghly.

Details

The James and Mary sands

The mouth of the Hooghly carries shifting sandbars known as the James and Mary sands, and they move. A Company pilot boarded the Shah Alam at the river mouth without waiting for an invitation, took the helm, and worked the ship through, steering past the standing masts of vessels that had not managed it — wrecks left where they died, in water the colour of milky tea, both banks unbroken jungle down to the waterline.

Established facts:

• The pilot service is not optional and not a courtesy. It is how the Company controls who enters Bengal by water, and it is why the party’s arrival was reported ahead of them. Inbound vessels carrying Europeans are noted.
• The bars shift, so local, current knowledge is the whole of the skill. Charts are not enough.
• The wrecks are visible. The hazard advertises itself.

Hooghly wildlife: the susu and the adjutant

Above the town, on a clean stretch of bank, Adrien and Elizabeth watched two of the river’s regular residents:

• The susu (Ganges river dolphin). It is blind. It surfaces with an audible puff of breath and a long, thin snout, rolls once through the brown water and goes under again.
• The adjutant stork. A huge wading bird that stalks the bank on stilted legs. The British named it after a staff officer because it paces with its wings folded behind its back.

Elizabeth knew both animals from her childhood in Sutanuti. The wildlife is ordinary to anyone raised on the river and new to every European in the party.