Balaklava showing the state of the Quays and the Shipping in May 1855 (coloured lithograph)

‘Balaklava shewing the state of the Quays and the Shipping in May 1855’. Coloured tinted lithograph by R Bryson. One of 41 lithographs from 'The Seat of War in the East - Second Series', after William Simpson. Published by Paul and Dominic Colnaghi, 26 September 1855. Printed by Day and Son. The Times’ reporter William Howard Russell described the insanitary conditions of Balaklava in lurid terms: ‘As to the Town itself, words could not describe its filth, its horrors, its hospitals, its burials, its dead and dying Turks, its crowded lanes, its noisesome sheds, its beastly purlieus, or its decay. All the pictures ever drawn of plague and pestilence, from the work of the inspired writer who chronicled the woes of infidel Egypt, down to the narratives of Boccacio, Defoe, or Moltke, fall short of individual "bits" of disease and death, which any one might see in half-a-dozen places during half an hour’s walk in Balaklava’.