Devil’s Wind
“…we occasionally bagged a live prisoner or two, but whether from the fatal precision of our fire, or suicide on the part of the wounded, it was strangely rare to see them otherwise than quite dead. When we did bring them in alive they expressed sorrow for their conduct, and attributed the mutiny to the hawa, meaning thereby an invisible influence exercised over them by the devil. It is a curious circumstance that the Hindoos associate almost all calamity with the wind, and in not a few parts of India, the name by which the mutiny has been designated is the devil’s wind.
—Mowbray Thomson, one of only two survivors of the 1857 Cawnpore massacre
The Gods say that we will die
one day
—”Chanson du wabano,” cited in the
Journal of American Folk Lore
In which a Great Lakes steamboat called the Waubuno mysteriously vanishes in 1879 with everyone aboard, provoking a search by an enigmatic Englishman with an exotic and tragic personal history, rooted in imperial India and the Mutiny of 1857.
A work in progress by Douglas Hunter, author of God’s Mercies and Half Moon
