Sialkot mutiny

Who: Sepoys of the 46th Bengal Native Infantry and the 9th Bengal Light Cavalry at Sialkot, and the station's British officers and civilians. After the rising, Brigadier John Nicholson and the Punjab Movable Column.

What: At about 4 a.m. on 9 July 1857, by one detailed account, the Sialkot garrison mutinied. The Movable Column had taken the station's European troops, the 52nd Light Infantry and the 35th Native Infantry away in late May, and Brigadier Frederic Brind had chosen not to disarm the sepoys who remained. Brind was shot in the back as he left his house for the fort and died there the next morning. Captain William Mosheim-Bishop of the 46th, the surgeon Dr James Graham, and the Reverend Thomas Hunter with his wife and infant son were also killed. Most of the Europeans reached the old fort.

The mutineers blew up both magazines, took about 14,000 rupees from the treasury, and freed the prisoners, who burned the courthouse. Later that day, about four o'clock in the afternoon, they set out for Hoshiarpur, hoping to join the 14th Native Infantry and go on to Delhi.

Nicholson left Amritsar by forced march on 10 July and reached Gurdaspur the next day. His column engaged the mutineers at Trimmu Ghat on the Ravi on 12 July and destroyed them in a second engagement on 16 July. FIBIwiki lists the column as the 52nd Foot, three horse artillery guns, a field battery, detachments of the 3rd and 6th Punjab Infantry, a police company and two newly raised cavalry squadrons, and records six British wounded. New World Encyclopedia puts the number of trapped sepoys at about 1,100.

Where: The Sialkot cantonment, now in Pakistan, and Trimmu Ghat on the Ravi near Gurdaspur.

Why it mattered: Sialkot shows how thinly the Punjab was held eight years after annexation. Once the Movable Column had gone, a brigade of sepoys was left without European troops, and the mutineers were stopped only when the column turned back and caught them on the river before they could reach Delhi. Nicholson then went on to Delhi, where the column reached the Ridge on 14 August.