India – Indian Mutiny an archive of approx 42 issues of the Illustrated Times dated 1857/58 giving a detailed contemporaneous account of the Mutiny, the British response and reprisals, with hundreds of evocative steel engraved illustrations – including the atrocity in which British soldiers tied Indian rebels to cannons about to be blown away. There is also a battle panorama engraved by Gustave Dore. A fine and important archive. This contemporaneous account contains much detail that has not featured in subsequent histories which together with the many fine illustrations make this perhaps the most complete and important record of the Mutiny. The incident in which British soldiers tied Indian Rebels to cannons and then fired them is one of the most disgraceful incidents in the whole history of the British rule in India. This act of atrocity was carried out in reprisal for a guerrilla attack on a British Army unit by rebels. When they were eventually captured by the British they were made to lick up the blood of those soldiers they had killed before being executed. The Indian Mutiny took the British entirely by surprise, but after it was finally crushed, the simmering dissent which the uprising engendered in the Indian population let to a gradual erosion of British power in the subcontinent, eventually resulting in India’s independence in 1947. One of the issues in this archive also contains an account, will illustrations, of the first distribution of the Victoria Cross, carried out by Queen Victoria in Hyde Park.