On the afternoon of 23 June 1850, British magistrate of the north Indian city of Patna, Bihar, E.H. Lushington wrote a somewhat breathless letter to the secretary to the government of Bengal. He described how the night before, Captain C.M. Cawley, commander of the steamer Brahmapootra, had arrived at his house in disarray, to tell a ‘desperate and fatal’ tale. His steamer had been towing a river flat called the Kaleegunga, which was carrying a chain gang of thirty-nine convicts from Allahabad to Calcutta along the River Ganges. Like hundreds of men and women each year, the convicts on board were to be imprisoned in the huge jail at Alipur on the outskirts of Calcutta while they awaited their transportation overseas. Their destination was Moulmein in the Tenasserim Provinces, the place to which the British shipped all Indian transportation convicts that year. But this usually routine journey had erupted in violence and bloodshed. About 20 miles from Patna, a ‘notorious Sikh Sirdar’ called Narain Sing had, Lushington reported, broken off the convicts’ irons, raided the vessel's weapon store and, having seen off the crew and passengers, taken charge of the ship. Captain Cawley had run his ship ashore and ‘fled for his life’.