At the Sandheads. The Pilot Brig. Calcutta

This lithograph depicts a moonlit view of an East Indiaman at the Sandheads, an area at the mouth of the Hooghly river in the Bay of Bengal, around 127 miles southeast of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Historically, this was where ships would wait to be guided up the river by pilots. A pilot brig with a bright navigation light appears on the right. The title, ‘At the Sandheads’, is printed beneath the image. The print is also inscribed in pencil ‘The Pilot Brig’ and ‘Calcutta’.

The print was plate 9 in John Corbet Anderson’s ‘To India and Back by the Cape, By a Traveller’, printed for the author in 1858. Anderson’s book was a self-published guidebook for travellers to India, featuring eighteenth lithographic plates including views of Ceylon [Sri Lanka], Madras [Chennai], Calcutta [Kolkata], Bombay [Mumbai], Mauritius, Madeira, Tristan da Cunha and the Cape Peninsula.