The Voyage of the Great Tasmania
W.J. Reader describes a scandalous episode that arose out of the transfer of authority in India from the East India Company to the Crown.
At four in the morning of Thursday, March 15th, 1860, the clipper ship Great Tasmania, Captain Gardyne commander, dropped anchor in the Mersey. She had left Calcutta about the middle of November 1859. She was carrying men discharged from the East India Company’s European regiments, who had been serving against the Company’s mutinous sepoys. The officer commanding the troops on board was Captain Alexander Pond, 3rd Bengal European Regiment. He had already announced himself, by telegram, to the India Office, and he had given some indication of the state of the ship.
William Rathbone, agent in Liverpool to the Council of India, went off to the Great Tasmania, in a steamer, soon after ten o’clock. He found that she had left Calcutta with 985 men, twenty officers, seventeen women, and twenty-one children.
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