About this edition

This edition brings together every known surviving page of Hicky's Bengal Gazette (Calcutta, 1780 to 1782) in one place, in date order, with a transcription beside each scan. It is edited by Andrew Otis.

The collections

The scans come from these copies. Andrew Otis's full set of scans, by collection, can be downloaded from andrewotis.com.

• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Heidelberg
• University of Melbourne
• British Library, India Office Library collection
• British Library, formerly the British Museum collection
• National Library of India
• High Court of Calcutta

Where several copies of a page survive, the scan shown is the clearest one, in this order: Heidelberg, Berkeley, Melbourne, National Library of India, British Library (India Office), High Court. The British Museum copy has no page scans here yet, so those pages show the transcription alone.

How the transcriptions were made

48 pages come from Andrew Otis's transcriptions of the British Library (British Museum) copy. The other 418 pages were read from the scans with Google's Gemini AI model in 2026. Each AI page was matched back to the exact scan it was read from, and that scan is the one shown beside it.

AI transcriptions of eighteenth-century type are good but not perfect. Expect misread names, numbers and words, especially where the paper is torn, stained or faint. Always check the scan before quoting.

Rules followed

• Original spelling, capitals and punctuation are kept.
• The long s (ſ) is written as s.
• In the AI transcriptions, words broken across lines are joined. Andrew Otis's transcriptions keep the original line breaks.
• Uncertain readings are in [square brackets], and [ILL] marks an illegible word.

Corrections

If you spot a mistake, please tell Andrew Otis through andrewotis.com, with the date of the issue, the page and the correct reading.