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Most seafarers would agree that the Hooghly is the most dangerous stretch of water in the world to pilot. This twisting, shifting ribbon connects Calcutta to the sea. Without it, and its proud pilots, there might never have been a British Raj. Today, the Hooghly pilots are still part of an élite that keep the river functioning as the commercial artery for Calcutta.
A terse warning to mariners is printed in the top right-hand corner of British Admiralty charts for the approaches to the River: The channels in the entrance change frequently; the buoyage is moved accordingly. No one should attempt to navigate the river without local assistance. The 1910 Sandheads chart belonging to A.D.Linklater, below left, bears no such warning. But neither is it an Admiralty chart. The Admiralty chart is a fine example of British understatement. What it omits to tell you is that the 120 nautical miles from Sandheads, in the Bay of Bengal, to the anchorage at Garden Reach, in the port of Calcutta, constitute the most hazardous stretch of water in the world for pilots.
The master of a ship bound for Calcutta must take a pilot on board 40 miles off the river entrance. Here, at Sandheads, out of sight of land, but just to seaward of the shoals where breakers roar in the south-west monsoon, the vessel of the Calcutta Pilot Service keeps Station in all weathers, cyclones not excepted, to put pilots on board inward-bound ships or to take them off outward-bounders after their voyage down the Hooghly.
As a word, Hooghly is very appropriate onomatopoeically for this mighty distributary of the Ganges. The river twists and turns, its powerful tides and bores behaving in the most unpredictable manner, their scouring and sluicing causing daily changes in the shapes and depths of sand bars and shoals. Had the British stayed in India a little longer, the verb to ‘hooghle’ - travel the longest route between two points making many twists and turns - might have entered the English language.
The men who provide ‘local assistance’ are acknowledged to be the best pilots in the world. Kipling and Conrad wrote of their skills in rapturous terms. More prosaically but more magisterially, the ‘Handbook of the Bengal Presidency 1882’ said of them:
"They are better paid, better educated and occupy a higher position than any other pilots, and it is quite right that they should be so, for the Hooghly is a most dangerous and difficult river."
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