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Still, from the swampy nature of the soil, and its proximity to the great marshes of the Sunderbunds, Calcutta could never be a really healthy place. An arrival by water up the Hooghly unquestionably gives the most favourable impression of the Indian ex-capital, though the river banks are flat and uninteresting.
At 200 miles from the ocean the Ganges separates into two branches; the south-east retaining the name of the Ganges, and the west assuming the appellation of the Hoogly; the delta, or triangular space between the two, being called the Sunderbunds.
I had no skin to my palate for seven weeks after, and lived on rice-water during the rest of the voyage. The anecdote is trivial, but it shows the power of Julia Jowler over me. With such sentimental outpourings did our voyage continue and conclude. We landed at the Sunderbunds on a grilling hot day in December 1802, and then for the moment Julia and I separated.
To the geologist the Jheels and Sunderbunds are a most instructive region, as whatever may be the mean elevation of their waters, a permanent depression of ten to fifteen feet would submerge an immense tract, which the Ganges, Burrampooter, and Soormah would soon cover with beds of silt and sand.
At the close of our conversation, which was long and to me intensely interesting, the babou informed us that he had recently become interested with a company of Englishmen in reclaiming one of the numerous and hitherto wholly unused islands in the Sunderbunds for the purpose of devoting it to the culture of rice and sugar-cane, and that if we cared to penetrate some of the wildest and most picturesque portions of that strange region he would be glad to place at our disposal one of the boats of the company, which we would find lying at Port Canning.
The Sunderbunds as the natives term that alluvial region which terminates the delta of the Ganges can scarcely be considered either land or sea, but rather a multitudinous reticulation of streams, the meshes of which are represented by islands in all the various stages of consistency between water and dry land.
In the sunderbunds there is little to look after, the people are quiet and very scattered; but farther east they are piratically inclined, and prey upon the native traders, and we occasionally catch them at it, and give them a lesson. "Well, I shall be very glad to adopt your suggestion, and to drop all ceremony.
And there, as I sat in that open boat, midst of the Sunderbunds, at my domestic antipodes, happened to me the most wondrous transformation which the tricksy stage-carpenters and scene-shifters of the brain have ever devised.
Being at the head of the Gangetic delta, which points from the Sunderbunds obliquely to the north-west, it is much damper than any locality further west, as is evidenced by two kinds of Calamus palm abounding, which do not ascend the Ganges beyond Monghyr.
While the hunters were so successfully bagging the big game of the jungle, Captain O'Flaherty had taken the party who had remained on board the steamer on an excursion through some of the waterways of the Sunderbunds, so that they were not wearied by waiting for those more actively employed. The united party had thoroughly enjoyed the day, even into the evening.
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