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which I met with so many years ago in "The Light That Failed," where the
Nilghai sings it to his own music! He got it, he said, from a tombstone,
in a distant land; and the tombstone is now incorporated with Job
Charnock's, the distant land being India; but the verses I have had to
collect elsewhere. I found them in Calcutta, in my host's library.
Joe was Joseph, or Josiah, Townsend, a pilot of the Ganges, and
tradition has it that he and Job Charnock, who, as an officer of the
East India Company, founded Calcutta in 1690, saved a pretty young Hindu
widow from ascending her husband's funeral pyre and committing suttee.
Tradition states further that Job Charnock and his bride "lived lovingly
for many years and had several children," until in due time she was
buried in the mausoleum at St. John's, where her husband sacrificed a
cock on each anniversary of her death ever after. The story has been
examined and found to be improbable, but Charnock was a bold fellow who
might easily have started many legends; and the poem remains, and if
there is a livelier, I should like to know of it. I have been at the
agreeable pains of reconstructing the verses as they were probably
written, so that there are two more than the Nilghai sang. The whole is
a very curious haunting ballad, leaving us with the desire to know much
more of the lives of both men--Job Charnock the frontiersman, and Joseph
Townsend, "skilful and industrious, a kind father and a useful friend,"
who could navigate not only the Ganges but the shifting Hooghli.
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