Cawnpore

Between June 5 and June 25, 1857, the forces of the British East India Company — under the command of Major General Sir Hugh Wheeler — were besieged by Nana Saheb and several thousand rebels in the city of Cawnpore, India. Despite repulsing many of the rebels' attacks, the defenders were left battered and broken by the long siege. They accepted the offer of safe passage to Allahabad in exchange for their surrender. But the East India Company soldiers and the civilians accompanying them would never reach Allahabad. On the morning of June 27, at the Satichaura Ghat river port, rebels massacred the column of 900 civilians and 300 soldiers — there were only seven survivors.

George Otto Trevelyan's account of the siege and massacre was penned several years after the events at Cawnpore — Trevelyan himself did not arrive in India until 1862 — and is a rather one-sided affair. The book's Western Chauvinism inhibits a balanced assessment of the East India Company's actions at Cawnpore and of the reasoning behind the event that led up to the Mutiny of 1857. However, it remains an interesting examination of British attitudes toward what was then the "Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire."