SOTW Project: The Black Hole of Calcutta

We just did a fun, powerful (and tasty) project to go along with our Story of the World Vol. 3 chapter on Fort William's Dungeon, nicknamed the Black Hole.  This was in 1756 when a British fort was captured by Indian soldiers in Calcutta, India.  146 prisoners (145 men and one woman) were crammed into a single dungeon cell where it is said (by one survivor) that at least 120 of those died of suffocation.  Morbid, yes, but history often is and this project visually helped my kids imagine just how cramped those prisoners would have been.

The first thing we did was to create our scaled down Black Hole of Calcutta - out of a 9" x 10" rectangle of construction paper (the actual cell was 14 ft x 18 ft).  We went over some of the facts again and wrote them down on our dungeon cell.  Then we counted out 146 plain M&Ms and 146 peanut M&Ms (actually we ended up only getting 141 out of our medium-sized bag of peanut M&Ms but that was close enough).

The plain M&Ms represented standing prisoners and the peanut M&Ms represented sitting down prisoners.

I had the boys first put all of the plain M&Ms in the cell so we could see just how much room they would have had if everyone was standing up.  You can see, below, that it was pretty full but there would still have been room to move around.  However, it is highly unlikely that everyone would have been standing up at the same time.  So, what would it look like if everyone was sitting?

146 "standing" prisoners

141 "sitting" prisoners

It's very obvious that conditions just got a whole lot worse in our dungeon cell.  There is still room for all of the prisoners to sit at once but nearly everyone is being touched by several people.  One thing we talked about was how so many people could have died of suffocation.  For one thing, there was very little ventilation in this cell.  There were only two windows and they had thick bars covering them which impeded the ventilation further.  But even still, with this many people in such close proximity, that is a lot of carbon dioxide being generated!

106 sitting & 40 standing

So, we thought maybe if we could get some of our prisoners to stand up, that would give everyone a bit more room so that at least they weren't directly touching others.  I think we ended up swapping 40 sitters for standers and tried to separate them all so none were in direct contact.

The last thing we did, which was not something suggested in the project book, was to remove the 120 who were reported to have suffocated so the boys could see just how many were affected by these atrocious conditions.  When we removed the 120, these were all that were left....

Survivors

According to Wikipedia (and the Encyclopedia Britannica), there is a somewhat graphic account from one of the survivors that gives a clearer picture of the conditions - which was more than what was appropriate to delve into for our lesson.  I did learn that of the survivors, four, including the one who gave the account, were sent to be prisoners elsewhere and the rest were given their freedom.  The most chilling fact was that all of this occurred between 8pm one night and 6am the following morning!

So that was our Story of the World project for the day.  I don't think my kids will likely forget this particular event in history anytime soon.  M&Ms does tend to have a memorable impact on them and it was a light-hearted approach to a serious event that really helped them imagine the conditions better than just throwing a bunch of numbers at them to listen to.  :)