



Produced by Chris Curnow, Wayne Hammond, Sharon Joiner and
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  The History and

  Romance of

  Crime

  FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
  TO THE PRESENT DAY

  [Illustration]

  THE GROLIER SOCIETY
  LONDON

[Illustration]

_A Prison in Tangier_




  Oriental Prisons

  PRISONS AND CRIME IN INDIA
  THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS
  BURMAH--CHINA--JAPAN--EGYPT
  TURKEY

  _by_

  MAJOR ARTHUR GRIFFITHS
  _Late Inspector of Prisons in Great Britain_

  _Author of
  “The Mysteries of Police and Crime
  Fifty Years of Public Service,” etc._

  [Illustration]

  THE GROLIER SOCIETY


  EDITION NATIONALE
  Limited to one thousand registered and numbered sets.
  NUMBER 234




INTRODUCTION


It is as true of crime in the Orient as of other habits, customs
and beliefs of the East, that what has descended from generation to
generation and become not only a tradition but an established fact, is
accepted as such by the people, who display only a passive indifference
to deeds of cruelty and violence. Each country has its own peculiar
classes of hereditary criminals, and the influence of tradition and
long established custom has made the eradication of such crimes a
difficult matter.

Religion in the East has had a most notable influence on crime. In
India the Thugs or professional stranglers were most devout and their
criminal acts were preceded by religious rites and ceremonies. In
China the peculiar forms of animism pervading the religion of the
people has greatly influenced criminal practices. Murder veiled in
obscurity is frequently attributed to some one of the legion of evil
spirits who are supposed to be omnipresent; and to satisfy and appease
these demons innocent persons are made to suffer. So great, too, is
the power of the spirit after death to cause good or ill, that many
stories are related of victims of injustice who have hanged themselves
on their persecutors’ door-posts, thus converting their spirits into
wrathful ghosts to avenge them. The firm belief in ghosts and their
power of vengeance and reward is a great restraint in the practice of
infanticide, as the souls of murdered infants may seek vengeance and
bring about serious calamity.

Oriental prison history is one long record of savage punishments
culminating in the death penalty, aggravated by abominable tortures.
The people are of two classes, the oppressed and the oppressors, and
the last named have invented many devices for legal persecution.
In early China and Japan, relentless and ferocious methods were in
force. One of the emperors of China invented a new kind of punishment,
described by Du Halde in 1738, at the instigation of a favourite wife.
It was a column of brass, twenty cubits high and eight in diameter,
hollow in the middle like Phalaris’s Bull, with openings in three
places for putting in fuel. To this they fastened the criminals, and
making them embrace it with their arms and legs, lighted a great fire
in the inside; and thus roasted them until they were reduced to ashes.

The first slaves in China were felons deprived of their liberty. Later
the very poor with their families sold themselves to the rich. Although
slavery has never been largely prevalent owing to the patriarchal
nature of society, all modern writers agree that it exists in a
loathsome form to-day. Parents sell their children and girls bring a
higher price than boys.

Who does not know of the peculiar sufferings and wrongs inflicted
for so many generations on the gentle peasant in the proud land of
the Pharaohs, of whom it is said “that the dust which fills the air
about the Pyramids and the ruined temples is that of their remote
forefathers, who swarmed over the land, working under the fiery sun and
the sharp scourge for successive races of task-masters--the Ethiopian,
the Persian, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Arab, the Circassian and
the Turk.”

During the reign of Ismail Pasha we hear of 150,000 men, women and
children driven forth from their villages with whips to perform work
without wages on the Khedive’s lands or in his factories. It is a
heartrending picture.

In earlier times the administration of the country districts was in
the hands of governors appointed by the Pasha and charged by him with
the collection of taxes and the regulation of the corvêé, or system of
enforced labour, at one time the universal rule in Egypt. The present
system established by Great Britain is in striking contrast to past
cruelties.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                         PAGE

     I. PRISON SYSTEM IN INDIA                         9

    II. THE CRIME OF THUGGEE                          42

   III. CEREMONIES OF THUGGEE                         70

    IV. DACOITY                                       82

     V. CHARACTERISTIC CRIMES                        124

    VI. THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS                          148

   VII. PRISONS OF BURMAH                            170

  VIII. CRIME IN CHINA                               205

    IX. ENLIGHTENED METHODS OF JAPAN                 229

     X. THE LAW IN EGYPT                             243

    XI. TURKISH PRISONS                              269




List of Illustrations


  A PRISON IN TANGIER                _Frontispiece_

  EXECUTION IN INDIA                     _Page_ 124

  CHINESE PUNISHMENT                        “   217




PRISONS OF INDIA




CHAPTER I

PRISON SYSTEM IN INDIA

    Lord Macaulay’s work--Commission appointed to look into
    state of prisons--Appointment of an inspector-general of
    gaols--Charge of district gaols given into the hands of civil
    surgeons--Treatment of juvenile offenders in India--Prison
    discipline--The employment of convict overseers--Caste--Ahmedabad
    gaol--Prison industries--Alipore Gaol in Calcutta--Ameer Khan,
    the Wahabee--Description of the Montgomery gaol--The prison
    factory--Convict officials--The gaol of Sirsah--A native gaol of
    Orissa.


The prison system in India developed gradually under the British
rule. At first but little attention was paid to the subject of penal
discipline, and the places of detention were put in the charge of
judicial officers who had complete control of the criminals in their
districts. The judges and magistrates had but little time to attend
to the gaols; the administration was chiefly in the hands of native
subordinates, and abuses of every kind prevailed, as might have been
expected.

The first important step toward prison reform was initiated by Lord
Macaulay when a member of the Indian Law Commission in 1835. He
suggested that a committee should be appointed to look into the
state of the prisons in India and to prepare an improved plan of
prison discipline. This suggestion was readily acceded to by the
governor-general, Sir C. Metcalfe, and a committee composed of fourteen
able and distinguished men was selected for the purpose. An extract
from their report will best show the existing state of the prisons at
that time, and runs as follows:

“In reviewing the treatment of prisoners in Indian gaols, although on
some points which we have not failed to throw into a strong light the
humanity of it is doubtful, yet generally the care that is taken of the
physical condition of these unfortunate men in the great essentials
of cleanliness, attention to the sick and the provision of food and
clothing, appears to us to be highly honourable to the government of
British India. When fair allowance has been made for the climate of
the country and the habits of the people, we doubt whether India will
not bear a comparison even with England, where for some years past
more money and attention has been expended to secure the health and
bodily comfort of prisoners than has ever been the case in any other
country of Europe.... It appears to us that that which has elsewhere
been deemed the first step of prison reform has been already taken in
India. What after many years was the first good effect of the labours
of Howard and Neild in England has already been achieved here. There
is no systematic carelessness as to the circumstances of the prisoner,
no niggardly disregard of his natural wants; he is not left to starve
of cold or hunger or to live on the charity of individuals; he is not
left in filth and stench to sink under disease without an attempt to
cure him; he is not able to bribe his gaoler in order to obtain the
necessaries which the law allows him. With us in England, the second
stage of prison reform seems to be nearly the present state of prison
discipline in India. The physical condition of the prisoner has been
looked to, but nothing more, and the consequences here as in England
have been that a prison, without being the less demoralising, is not a
very pleasant place of residence.... The proportion of distinct civil
gaols to all other gaols is very honourable to the government. The
mixture of the two sexes in Indian prisons is unknown, and in general
the separation of tried and untried prisoners is at least as complete
in India as in other countries. We allude to these things, not to give
more credit to the Indian government in these matters than it deserves,
but to show that although we have found much fault and recommend many
reforms, we do not overlook the fact that much has been already done.”

The second stage in Indian prison reform was the appointment of an
inspector-general of gaols for every province. This was first tried as
an experiment in the North-western Provinces after some hesitation
on the part of the government, and it was proved conclusively by
comparison with the statistics of former years “that the prisoners were
generally more healthy, better lodged, fed and clothed, that the gaol
discipline had been much improved and that the expenditure had been
reduced” in those prisons which had been placed under the supervision
of an inspector. Upon this evidence the government decided to make the
office a permanent one, and it was finally established in 1850 in the
North-western Provinces and shortly afterward in the Punjab, Bengal,
Madras and Bombay.

The third important measure toward prison reform in India was
initiated in the North-western Provinces. Until 1860, the management
of the district gaols had been in the hands of the magistrates of the
surrounding country, but it was found that owing to the increased
pressure of work in the administration they were unable “to find
time to regulate the management, economy and discipline of the local
prison with the care and exactness which the pecuniary interests of
the government and the purposes of civil administration demand.”
Therefore the civil surgeon, who had formerly had charge of the medical
department only of the local gaol, was now given the entire management.
This change was finally sanctioned by the government in 1864, after
due trial which showed that there had been an improved discipline
and an improved economy in all the gaols in which the experiment had
been tried. In 1864 two other important reforms were introduced:
first,--that no central gaol (intended for all prisoners sentenced to a
term exceeding one year) should be built to accommodate more than one
thousand persons; and second,--that the minimum space allowed to each
prisoner should be 9 feet by 6, or 54 superficial feet, and 9 feet by 6
by 12, or 648 cubic feet.

Some of the many difficulties in the way of prison reform besides those
of finance are summed up in Lord Auckland’s resolution upon the prison
committee’s report.

“Every reform of prison discipline is almost of necessity attended at
the outset with extraordinary expense. To exchange the common herding
together of prisoners of all descriptions for careful classification;
to substitute a strict and useful industry for idleness or for a light,
ill-directed labour; to provide that the life which is irksome shall
not also be unhealthy, and that the collection of the vicious shall not
be a school of vice,--are all objects for the first approach of which
large buildings must be erected, machinery formed and establishments
contrived, and in the perfect attainment and maintenance of which great
disappointment has after every effort and expense in many countries
ensued. In no country is it likely that greater difficulty will be
experienced than in this for the mere locality of the prison; that
which is healthy in one season may become a pesthouse by a blast of
fever or cholera, in another. For its form--the close yard which is
adapted for classification and is not unwholesome in England, would be
a sink of malaria in India. For food, for labour and for consort there
are habits and an inveteracy of prejudice bearing upon health, opposing
the best management of prisons such as are not to be encountered
elsewhere, and superadded to all this is the absence of fitting
instruments for control and management, while it is principally upon a
perfect tact and judgment and an unwearying zeal that the success of
every scheme of discipline has been found to depend.”

The classification of the gaols in the North-western Provinces and Oude
is made according to the number of persons they can hold, as follows:
the central prisons of the first, second, third and fourth class;
the district prisons, and the lock-ups. In the central prisons, all
prisoners sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for any period exceeding
six months are confined; in the district prisons all prisoners
sentenced to terms not exceeding three months are sent for every kind
of crime, also civil prisoners and prisoners committed for trial at the
sessions court; in the lock-ups all prisoners under trial before any
court are lodged.

There are no reformatories for juvenile offenders in India. The
government has so far considered that there is no need for their
establishment. This conclusion has been arrived at by a comparison
between the state of civilisation in the European countries which have
adopted this plan of dealing with juvenile criminals and that of India.
In the former there is a large class of vagrant, deserted and neglected
children, which is quite unknown in the latter country. The following
figures will serve to show the truth of this assertion. In Ireland, in
1866, out of a population of 6,000,000, there were 1,060 juveniles,
under sixteen years, committed to prison for various offences; whereas
in the whole of India, with a population of more than 150,000,000, the
commitment of juveniles was about 2,000 in the same year.

In the presidency of Bombay there is an institution of very much the
same nature as a reformatory, called the David Sasson Industrial and
Reformatory Institution, which owes its origin to private benevolence,
but which now receives some support from public resources. It is quite
separate from the gaols and under different management and control.

In the North-western Provinces “all boys and lads under eighteen years
of age, sentenced to periods of imprisonment for three months, are
transferred as soon after sentence as possible to the nearest central
prison, where they are placed under a regular system of education with
training in industrial labour; they are confined in separate cells
at night wherever there are a sufficient number of these for their
accommodation, which is the case at Meerut, Agra and Gorruckpore,
and at all prisons they attend school and labour for fixed periods
during the day under directors specially employed for that purpose.
Boys, whether confined in separate cells or association, are kept, day
and night, entirely separate from the adult prisoners.” In the Punjab
there is a reformatory in connection with the gaol of Goordaspore to
which boys sentenced to more than six months’ confinement are sent.
This reformatory was first established in the Sealkote gaol in 1862,
but was subsequently removed to Goordaspore. The warder in charge,
the gaol officials, the inspectors and the teacher approved by the
educational department, are the only adults allowed to enter this
yard. In the majority of district gaols there is a special yard set
aside for juvenile prisoners, and in those gaols, where no such yard
exists, when juvenile prisoners are received they are placed in cells,
or other arrangements are made for separating them from the rest of
the prisoners at night, and during the day they are made to work in a
part of the yard by themselves. In the Lahore central gaol there is a
separate yard for juveniles under a specially selected warder.

Nearly every presidency and province of India has its gaol code,
drawn up under the sanction of the Prison Acts. That of Bengal was
compiled by Frederic J. Mouat, M. D., and was introduced in the year
1864. “It borrowed freely,” he says, “from all the existing European
and Indian rules which seemed to me to be suited for introduction in
lower Bengal, and contained some special provisions based upon my
personal experience, and study of prison systems at home and abroad....
It defined in considerable detail the duties, responsibilities and
powers of all classes of prison officers; contained provisions for
the classification and punishment of all classes of offenders; their
management in sickness and in health; their food, clothing, work,
instruction; and, in fact, every detail of discipline during their
residence in gaol, their transfer from one prison to another, their
discharge, and in the execution of capital sentences.” Since these
rules were framed a system of remission of sentence as the reward for
good conduct in gaol has been introduced, based on the principle of
what is known as the Irish system.

One of the chief peculiarities of Indian prison management is the
employment of convicts in the maintenance of discipline. From the
earliest days, prisoners were employed in the discharge of all the
menial duties of the gaols, cooking, washing, cleansing, scavengering,
husking rice, grinding corn and the preparation of food. The difficulty
of obtaining trustworthy warders on the salaries allowed, and the
impossibility of preventing the introduction of forbidden articles
through their agency, led to the trial in the gaol at Alipore of
well-behaved, long-term convicts as prison guards. They were found to
be more reliable than outsiders, and to discharge their duties more
efficiently. The practice was adopted in other prisons, and when
conducted with care and discretion, worked so well that the system
has been extended throughout India. Special provision for it has been
made in all the gaol codes. As a reward for good conduct and strict
obedience to prison rules, all convicts whose behaviour has been
exemplary throughout, and who have completed the prescribed term of
hard labour, are eligible for the offices of convict warder, guard and
work-overseer. The number employed in these offices can never exceed
ten per cent. of the criminals in custody. All such appointments are
made with great care and deliberation, and are subject to the sanction
of the head of the prison department, by whom they are closely watched.
They are liable to forfeiture for serious misconduct or breach of duty.

As a measure of economy in diminishing the cost of guarding
prisons, and as a means of reformation in teaching self-respect and
self-control, the plan has been successful everywhere in India,
contrary to the usual experience of penal legislators. The privilege
is much prized, and few prisoners who have held such offices have
relapsed into crime, while many have obtained positions of trust on the
completion of their sentences.

In the gaols of Bengal the privileges of caste are respected in
general, but no false plea of caste is permitted to interfere with
punishment. With care, tact and such knowledge of the people committed
to his charge as every officer in command of a prison ought to
possess, no great feeling of dissatisfaction is likely to arise or to
be created. But from the jealousy with which all proceedings within
the prisons are watched by the outside population, and the rapidity
with which intelligence regarding them is spread, it is evident that
extreme care must continue to be observed in the matter. While it is
well known that imprisonment with its enforced associations is always
attended with loss of caste, that, however, is readily restored by the
performance of slight penances on release. It is instructive to find,
on tracing them throughout the country, how the same castes, whatever
differences of names they bear, are most prone to the commission of the
same classes of crime.

Again, it is strange to discover that belief in witchcraft and the
existence of witch-finders is a source of crime in the East at the
present time. Among the Kols, an aboriginal race in the south-west of
Bengal, each village is supposed to have a tutelar divinity, generally
an evil spirit to whom is assigned all the sickness, epidemics,
diseases and misfortunes which occur in the village. To this spirit
certain lands are assigned, and the produce of this land is used in
propitiatory sacrifices. The existence of this superstition is said to
be a frequent cause of murder and extortion. The Kols believe in the
powers of divination of “witch-finders,” who are usually consulted when
anything untoward occurs in a village. This witch-finder, who often
lives at a distance, performs certain absurd ceremonials, and pretends
through them to discover who in the village has caused the anger of
the tutelar deity. The person denounced is generally called upon to
pay handsomely for the evil caused, and usually does so, but if he
refuses he is frequently murdered, and whether he pays or not, if the
misfortune does not cease he is driven from the village, if no worse
fate overtakes him. All this is done in the utmost good faith, faith as
absolute as that with which witch-hunting was pursued by the puritans
of Scotland and America.

Sir Richard Temple, one of the most famous of India’s recent
proconsuls, passes an approving verdict upon Indian prisons as they
existed to the date of his volume, “India in 1880.” He was of the
opinion that they were managed conscientiously and as far as possible,
with the means available, according to accepted principles. They erred
perhaps in construction, and showed many shortcomings as regards
sanitation and disciplinary supervision, but an earnest desire to
improve them has animated the Indian government and its officials.
Native states, a little tardily, perhaps, have followed suit, and
many possess prisons imitating some of the best points of the British
system. They long clung, however, to the old barbarous methods of
punishment, such as short periods of detention with flogging, various
kinds of fining, compensation to the relatives of murdered men, and
mutilation in cases of grave robbery. A capital sentence was very
rarely inflicted.

Gradually public opinion in India awoke to the belief that something
more than mere penal detention was needed for the treatment of
prisoners. Outdoor labour, chiefly employed hitherto, was deemed
injurious to health and demoralising to discipline, entailing undue
expense in staff and guards; and so employment within the walls was
substituted, with organised industries and manufactures by hand and
with the help of machinery. The work done includes the weaving of
carpets, which have a certain value and reputation, and much cotton
and other fibres are manufactured; and the prisoners work at printing,
lithography and other useful trades. The rules for wearing irons and
fetters have been revised, and a consistent attempt has been made at
classification by separating the old habitual criminals from the less
hardened offenders. The system of earning remission by industry and
good conduct, as practised in the British prisons, has been introduced
with good results. Sanitation and ventilation have been much improved,
so that mortality has greatly diminished. Solitary confinement is
enforced as a means of discipline, but the cellular separation of
prisoners by night makes only slow progress, and the association of all
classes, good, bad and indifferent has a generally injurious effect
upon prisoners.

According to Sir Richard Temple’s figures, there were in his time more
than two hundred prisons in all India, exclusive of 386 lock-ups, and
the daily average of inmates was 118,500, of whom only 5,500 were
females. The annual number of crimes committed and charged was 880,000,
and as more than one person is often concerned, the number of persons
tried amounted to 970,000, of whom 550,000 were convicted, the balance
being under trial or discharged. The labours devolving upon the police
were obviously severe, and the prisons were always full.

Among the leading Indian prisons of to-day, one of the largest, the
Ahmedabad gaol, was originally a Mohammedan college and was converted
to its present purpose in 1820. Miss Mary Carpenter, who visited
it in 1868, describes the gaol as follows: “It is a fine-looking
building and near the citadel, but not of course well adapted to its
present purpose, though the large space enclosed by the buildings
gives it great capabilities of improvement. The first thing which
struck us painfully was that the men had irons on their legs. This
barbaric custom, which has long been exploded in our own country,
is here preserved and is indeed general in India in consequence of
the usual insecurity of the premises. The prisoners were working in
large open sheds with little appearance of confinement. A number
were occupied in weaving strong cotton carpets which appeared well
calculated for wear. Others were making towelling of various kinds,
very strong and good, from the cotton grown in the neighbourhood,
while others were manufacturing pretty little cocoa mats and baskets.
There was in general a criminal look in the culprits; they were
working with good-will and appeared interested in their occupation,
as in an ordinary factory. Except the chains, there was nothing of a
penal description in the scene around us; and although this cheerful
open place, with work at useful trades, might not give the intended
feeling of punishment, still it was to be hoped that training these
men to useful labour, under good moral influences, must have a
beneficial influence on their future lives. On remarking this to the
superintendent, he informed me that the salutary effect of the day’s
work under proper supervision was completely neutralised, or even
worse, by the corrupting influences of the night.

“There are four hundred prisoners in this gaol, for whom the number
of sleeping cells is totally inadequate and three or four are
consequently locked up together in the dark for twelve hours. There
is no possibility during this period of preventing communication of
the most corrupting nature, both moral and physical. No man convicted
of a first offence can enter this place--which ought to be one of
punishment and attempted reformation--without the greatest probability
of contamination and gaining experience in evil from the adepts in
crime who are confined with him; no young boy can enter without his
fate being sealed for life.

“Juvenile delinquents, casual offenders, hardened thieves sentenced
to a long term of imprisonment, are all herded together without any
possibility of proper classification or separation. The condition of
the thirty-two whom I had seen at the court on the day before was
even worse than the others; they were all penned up together without
work. There they had been for many months; and still they all were
without any attempt being made to give them instruction, which might
improve their moral and intellectual condition. This state of things
was not owing to any neglect on the part of the superintendent, a man
of enlightened benevolence, who devoted himself heart and soul to
his work. The conditions of this gaol are such that though able and
willing to remedy all these evils if authority and means were given to
him, under the existing circumstances he is powerless. There is ample
room on the premises for him to construct separate cells for all the
prisoners with only the cost of material, but this is not granted to
him; he cannot therefore carry out the printed regulations that the
prisoners are not to be made worse while in custody. The regulations
direct that the juveniles shall be separated from the adults; this is
now simply impossible. Rules are made that the prisoners shall receive
instruction, but no salary is allowed for a schoolmaster; there is
no place appropriated for instruction and no time is granted for
schooling; there are ten hours for labour, two hours are requisite for
meals and rest and during the remainder of the twenty-four hours the
prisoners are locked up. It is indeed permitted by the regulations that
some prisoners may be employed as instructors but with the proviso
that their hours of labour shall not be abridged for the purpose. Such
instructors could not be expected to exercise any good moral influence
on the other prisoners; yet to commence with these, if any educated men
were among them, might lead to some better arrangement. The old college
hall might possibly be employed as a schoolroom for a couple of hours
after sunset; but light would then be required and oil did not form a
part of the authorised expenditure. There were, then, obstacles to any
kind of instruction being imparted to the prisoners which no amount of
earnestness on the part of the officials or the superintendent could
surmount.

“On inquiring whether there were any females in the gaol, we were
conducted to a small separate court where in a dismal ward there were
some miserable women employed in drudgery work. There were no female
attendants and indeed no attempt appeared to be made to improve their
wretched condition. I felt grieved and shocked that in any part of the
British dominions women who were rendered helpless by being deprived of
liberty, and thus fell under our special responsibility, should be so
utterly uncared for as to be left under the superintendence of male
warders and without any means of improvement. In all these observations
I found that I had the full accordance of the superintendent; who, so
far from being annoyed at the discovery of so many evils in this place,
only rejoiced that some one should add force to his own representations
by an independent testimony. He stated that he understood it to be in
contemplation to build a large central gaol for the long-sentenced
prisoners; the removal of these from his own gaol would of course
remedy the overcrowding, though it would not enable each prisoner to
have a separate cell. In the meantime the evils were very great from a
sanitary as well as from a moral point of view. On one occasion more
than a hundred had died owing to a want of good sanitary arrangements.
Immediate attention to the condition of this gaol appeared therefore
necessary. Considering this as a common gaol without long-sentenced
prisoners, the following points suggested themselves as necessary
to carry out the intentions of government. First, a number of
well-ventilated sleeping cells should be constructed without delay,
so as to enable every prisoner to have a separate cell for sleeping.
Second, a trained and efficient teacher should be engaged to carry
out instruction; arrangements should be made to provide a cheerful
and well-lighted schoolroom. Educated prisoners may be employed as
assistant teachers; these should be specially trained and instructed
by the headmaster in their labour hours so as to provide as efficient
a staff as possible. Third, the mark system and classification should
be carried out. Fourth, prisoners awaiting trial should be kept in
separation, but not under penal condition; the female department should
be completely remodelled under female warders; all the advantages
provided for the men should be given to the women.”

Mr. Routledge, speaking of the Alipore Gaol in Calcutta which he
visited in 1878, says:--

“It contained 2,500 persons when I saw it, and with a few exceptions,
as in the case of those undergoing punishment, all were employed
in remunerative labour. There were masons erecting buildings,
weavers making gunny-bag cloth of jute, a factory of jute-spinners,
lithographers, painters, carpenters, blacksmiths and many other classes
of workmen, all engaged in task work. If they exceeded the task a
small sum was carried to their credit to be paid to them on leaving
gaol. An amusing story was told of a shrewd Yorkshireman who when
sent out to “manage a jute mill” was faced by the reality of some
hundreds of criminals not one of whom knew anything of the work. First
he despaired; then he hoped a little; finally he succeeded and had a
capital jute mill. Dr. Faucus, the governor of the prison, told me that
the men they sent out with trades hardly ever had returned; and there
was an instance of a man whose time had expired begging permission to
remain a little longer in gaol to more completely learn his trade. It
was to my view a humane and judicious system.

“Eighteen months later I visited the Presidency Gaol in Calcutta, and
the governor, Dr. Mackenzie, kindly showed me the wonders of the place.
We saw in the yard, ‘a mild Bengalee,’ whom flogging, short diet and
even the dreaded solitary confinement had failed to compel to work.
‘He is one of the few prisoners who ever beat me,’ the governor said.
A hundred or so of the prisoners were breaking stones; some were on
the tread-mill, a frightful punishment under such a sun; some were
mat-making, on very heavy looms. We came to a separate cell, the inmate
of which was a loose-jointed, misshapen, weak-looking, thin-faced
native man, apparently about twenty-five years of age, though he
might, for anything one could judge, have been any age from eighteen
to forty. ‘That,’ said the governor, ‘was one of the most daring and
relentless Dacoits we have ever had.’ In a cell a few yards distant,
there was a grave and venerable looking old man who had attained the
very highest grade in a different profession--that of a forger. He had
been convicted in attempting to obtain money from an officer--I think
the head of the police--by means of a letter purporting to be written
by Mr. Reilly, the well-known detective. The forgery was perfect, and
no one would have disputed the letter but for one small mistake; the
two initial letters of Mr. Reilly’s Christian name were transposed.
This interesting old gentleman when questioned as to the amount of work
he had done, put his hands together and gravely confessed that it was
far short of the task. The governor spoke sternly and threatened short
diet. Evidently the old artist was out of his vocation when attempting
slow, patient work. When the same question was put to the Dacoit he
pleaded pitifully, ‘Only four bags, but I’ll do forty to-morrow.’ Forty
was the number required to be sewed per day.

“There were many wealthy natives among the prisoners; and I was
sorry to find a number of English sailors and soldiers committed for
deserting regiments or ships. It was impossible to look upon them as
criminals. They were kept apart from the other prisoners. Some of
them were very fine fellows, who probably never were in prison before
nor would be again. Another class was that of the vagrants, termed
‘loafers.’ There were some very respectable looking men among them,
‘turned away from the railways,’ they said, or ‘brought from Australia
in charge of horses and then dismissed’--the most prolific source of
‘loaferism’ in India.

“Six young native boys were separated from the rest. They had their
own yard and each a little garden and a division of work. One was
cook, another housemaid, and so on. They were drawn up in line and
questioned, the cook first.

“‘What are you here for?’

“‘Murder; I struck another boy on the head and killed him.’

“‘And you?’

“‘Murder; I threw a child into a well.’

“The answers were given as if they had related to common matters.
We went no further in the list. An Indian prison is marvellous for
its mixture of races. The Hindu cannot eat with the Mussulman. To
step inside a cookhouse is to defile it even for prisoners. Yet even
Brahmins, old offenders, had been known to beg for the office of
_mehtars_ (sweepers, lowest menials), so great was their dread of the
hard labour.

“What were called the ‘non-habituals’ were employed as at Alipore and
taught trades where necessary. I noticed particularly an intelligent
Chinaman busy at the lathe. I said, ‘He never gave you any trouble?’
‘No; he was entrapped into a robbery, caught and convicted, and he
immediately made the best of his position. He is a quiet, respectful,
intelligent man.’ He spoke English like an Englishman. There were
several Chinamen in the prison and all of the same class. We came to a
long line of men, seated on the ground, engaged in hand spinning; the
fourth from one end was old Ameer Khan, the Wahabee. He was a tall man,
I should say nearly seventy years of age, stout, with flabby cheeks, a
rather fine forehead and an extraordinarily furtive eye.”

The trial of Ameer Khan, the Wahabee, caused a great sensation in the
Indian law courts in the year 1870. The Wahabees were a sect founded by
a young Arab pilgrim of Damascus, named Abd-el Wahab, who endeavoured
to reform the Mohammedan faith by denouncing the corruptions that
had crept in and by calling upon Mussulmans to “return to their
primitive church with its simplicity of manners and purity of morals.”
The movement spread into India, where it gained great success with
the Sunnis, themselves puritans, but it was fiercely hated by the
Mohammedans, who had deteriorated greatly under the English rule, and
there was great danger of an insurrection. In 1858 Sir Sydney Cotton
had stormed the stronghold of the Wahabees at Sittana and razed the
villages of their allies to the ground. In 1869 the government received
information that the Wahabees had issued a propaganda from Sittana
and Patna which was to be spread throughout India, and again found it
necessary to take steps to suppress the Wahabees. Among others, Ameer
Khan, a Mussulman banker and money lender of Calcutta, was suddenly
arrested in July, 1869, on no stated charge. He applied for a writ
of habeas corpus, but was refused. He appealed to the Supreme Court,
and then began the famous trial which lasted six months. In December
Ameer Khan was released from Alipore gaol, but he was immediately
rearrested, as it had been discovered that he had been apprehended
by a warrant about which there was some question. He was then tried
before a civilian judge at Patna, where the offences were alleged to
have been committed, and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. He was
found guilty of acting as agent and supplying money for the Wahabee
propaganda.

The religious tenets of the Wahabees are still professed by many of
the Arabs and are admitted to be orthodox by the most learned of the
_‘ulamas_ of Egypt. The Wahabees are merely reformers, who believe all
the fundamental points of El-Islam and all the accessory doctrines
of the Koran and the “Traditions of the Prophets;” in short, their
tenets are those of the primitive Moslems. They disapprove of gorgeous
sepulchres and domes erected over tombs; such they invariably destroy
when in power. They also condemn as idolaters those who pay peculiar
veneration to deceased saints; and even declare all other Moslems to
be heretics for the extravagant respect which they pay to the prophet.
They forbid the wearing of silk, gold ornaments and all costly apparel,
and also the practice of smoking tobacco. For the want of this last
luxury they console themselves in some degree by an immoderate use of
coffee. There are many learned men among them, and they have collected
many valuable books, chiefly historical, from various parts of Arabia
and from Egypt.

The Montgomery gaol in the Punjab, one of the largest in India,
was recently visited by Captain Buck of the Indian army, and his
description of the details of prison life there is exceedingly
interesting.

Attached to the gateway are not only the prison offices, barracks for
the warders and an armory, but a queer looking room where well-behaved
prisoners may receive friends once in three months. The room is divided
by bars into three parts. In the portion at one end the prisoner
squats, his visitor stays in the part at the other end and a gaoler
or assistant sits in the middle space, where he can make sure that no
smuggling goes on or that no attempts at escape are made.

The prisoners become very clever and use all sorts of devices to
smuggle in coins, tobacco, opium and other drugs and dice. They are
allowed to wear their own shoes, but these are examined very carefully,
for the soles are frequently found to be made of tobacco, four-anna
pieces and other things than leather. “A common dodge,” says Captain
Buck, “among the prisoners for concealing coins and other small things
is to make a receptacle in the throat by means of a leaden weight about
the diameter of a florin and half an inch thick; this is attached to a
string some six inches long, a knot in the end being slipped between
two teeth to prevent it sliding down the throat. By holding the head in
a particular position for some time every day, ‘waggling’ the weight
about, and from time to time altering the length of the string, a pouch
can be formed in the throat suitable for holding as many as fifteen
rupees. The possessor of this strange ‘safe’ is able to put in and take
out his treasure with facility, but it is exceedingly difficult to
make a man disgorge the contents against his will, or even to find out
whether he possesses the pouch at all without the use of the Röntgen
rays.”

The Montgomery gaol is as large as a small town, and contains two great
enclosures surrounded by a high outside wall, three spaces at the back
for work shops, a separate yard for the female ward and such other
buildings as storehouses, pumping stations and granaries. All of the
buildings are constructed of burnt brick, but the walls are made of
sun-dried brick and are kept in repair and plastered by gaol labour.
The menial work is performed by the prisoners, and caste prejudices
have been consulted in apportioning this work to the different classes
of prisoners. The lower castes do scavengering and general cleaning,
while the dyer, washerman, barber, tailor, blacksmith and weaver are
all, as far as possible, employed at their respective professions.
Other prisoners who have worked at trades which the gaol does not
afford are given work in the factories.

The factories are the most interesting part of the gaol at Montgomery.
Carpets are made in many beautiful patterns. A carpet over fifty feet
wide can be woven on the largest loom, and it is an interesting sight
to see a row of twenty-five men engaged in pulling the threads from
the many  balls of wool above their heads, slipping them into
place and with a small curved knife cutting off the ends, pressing
down the stitches with a wooden fork, and never making a mistake. The
pattern is read out by convicts stationed behind a loom, sometimes
from patterns, sometimes from books and often from memory. To the
uninitiated these instructions are incomprehensible, for there is such
a confusion of sounds that it is difficult to distinguish any one
voice. The marvel of it is how each man knows what colours to use and
where. Somehow or other, in spite of all the noise and confusion, dust
and glare, these lovely carpets are produced. The ordinary woollen
carpet costs from sixteen to twenty-four shillings a square yard,
according to the number of stitches to the inch, but the prices range
higher for specially selected wool, while the price of a silk carpet is
almost a small fortune.

Another part of the factory contains the cloth looms. The weavers
rig up their looms in the same manner as they would in their native
villages, and consequently the yard appears to be in considerable
disorder; “each weaver sits at his own little loom with his legs in
a hole in the ground and flashes the spindle backwards and forwards,
seldom wasting his time for fear he may not finish his day’s job, and
thus lose marks or fail to gain any. One man, in training, has to
complete nine yards of the duster-cloth, three-quarters of a yard wide,
in a day; fifteen yards of blanketing four feet, eight inches wide, is
another task; while a man working on a carpet, ‘_munj_-mat,’ or cotton
mat, has to work on a width of two feet and complete four inches,
twelve feet and two feet respectively in one day.” If a prisoner is
able to do extra work he obtains marks and gains some remission from
his sentence.

The dormitories contain curious looking long rooms with passages down
the middle and on each side rows of couches made of hard baked mud. The
prisoners are provided with blankets and mattresses made of rice straw,
and they can be fairly comfortable. Even beds made out of such material
have been diverted to other uses by the ingenious inmates. A convict is
said to have made a pipe out of his bed. By hollowing out a place near
the head of the bed and plastering it over, he made two holes, one to
hold the tobacco and ashes, and the other to serve as a mouthpiece.

As an additional precautionary measure to prevent plague from entering
the gaol, every prisoner who catches a rat and produces it alive is
given a reward of ten marks. This is a distinct gain toward a shorter
sentence, for twenty-four marks means one day’s remission. It has
been surmised, as the rats are very numerous in the gaol in spite
of wire netting everywhere placed to keep them out, that either the
warders arrange to bring them in or the prisoners maintain reserves for
breeding purposes.

The cook-house is in the yard where the men are paraded. Two meals are
served daily, one at 7.30 A. M. and the other after 5 P. M., but in
addition a little parched boiled _gram_ is given to each convict in
the middle of the day, when there is a short recess from work. Besides
the large _chupattis_, made of wheat and Indian corn, a few ounces of
_dal_ are served in the morning, and vegetables with condiments in the
evening. All the vegetables and condiments are produced by the convicts
in the large garden attached to the gaol.

It is said that no convict has ever gotten away altogether, but that
those who manage to escape occasionally are always recaptured. As
the gaol is situated in a large desert, tracking the runaways is
comparatively easy. On one occasion, a man was apparently missing
at evening roll-call. For considerable time his identity could not
be ascertained, but after a thorough search and re-checking, it was
remembered that a murderer had been hanged that day, and the officials
had failed to strike his name from the roll.

The hospital is exceedingly clean and well kept. The routine of the
gaol generally runs smoothly, and the character of the treatment and
discipline in this typical prison of India will bear comparison with
that in many institutions of a like kind at home and abroad.

Some of the local gaols in India are worth a passing mention. A good
specimen was that of Sirsah on the confines of the Bikaneer desert.
Colonel Hervey visited it and speaks of it as a model gaol. He says,
“Its lofty walls are shielded by a covered way running round its top.
It has an outer and an inner ditch at the foot of the walls, and
upward-sloping towers at its four corners, resembling the castles of
a chess-board. The prisoners in it were warmly clothed and looked
sleek, and being told off to healthful although hard labour, they ate
with eagerness their diet of curried meat, curried _shorwah_, or soup,
and wheaten cakes. This was served out to them plentifully while I
was there. They sat down on the ground in lines without reference to
castes, and all promiscuously partook of the food set before them. I
was astonished at this, for there is generally so much difficulty in
the matter of food, owing to caste prejudices.”

Another interesting native gaol is that of Orissa, visited by Sir
William Hunter in 1872. He says: “It consisted of a courtyard with
low thatched sheds running round three sides and the guard-house on
the fourth. The shed roofs came so low that a child might have jumped
on to them and thus got over the wall. When the guard turned out,
moreover, we found it to consist of two very old men; and the Maharaja
was rather displeased to find that one of them had his matchlock under
repair at the blacksmith’s, while the other had left his weapon in his
own village, ten miles off, to protect his family during his period of
service at court. Inside were sixty-nine prisoners, and I asked how it
came that they did not, under the circumstances, all jump over the
wall? The question seemed to strike the Maharaja as a particularly
foolish one. ‘Where could they go?’ he said. ‘On the rare occasion that
a prisoner breaks gaol, it is only to pay a visit to his family; and
the villagers, as in duty bound, return him within a few days.’ The
truth is that the family instinct is still so strong in the tributary
states that imprisonment, or even death itself, seems infinitely
preferable to running away from kindred and home. There were no female
prisoners, and the Maharaja stated that crime among women had not yet
penetrated his country.

“I found the gang divided into two sections, each of which had a shed
to itself on the opposite sides of the court, the shed of the third
side being set apart for cooking. The one shed was monopolised by ten
men whose light complexion declared them to belong to the trading class
and who lolled at great ease and in good clothes in their prison house.
In the other shed the remaining fifty-nine were crowded, packed as
closely as sardines and with no other clothing except a narrow strip
round their waist. On expressing my surprise at this unequal treatment
and asking whether the ten gentlemen who took their ease were confined
for lighter crimes, the Maharaja explained: ‘On the contrary, these
ten men are the plagues of the state. They consist of fraudulent
shop-keepers who receive stolen goods, and notorious bad characters
who organise robberies. The other fifty-nine are poor Pans and other
jungle people imprisoned for petty theft, or as the tools of the ten
prisoners on the opposite side. But then the ten are respectable men
and of good caste, while the fifty-nine are mere woodmen; and it is
only proper to maintain God’s distinction of caste.’ All the prisoners
were in irons except one, a lame man, whose fetters had been struck
off on the report of the native doctor. They looked very fat and
comfortable, as indeed they well might considering that the sixty-nine
prisoners have an allowance of a hundred pounds of rice per diem, with
goat’s flesh once a fortnight, fish twice a month, besides the little
daily allowance of split peas and spices to season their food. It did
not seem to have occurred to any of them to feel in the least ashamed
on account of being in gaol. One of them had been imprisoned twice
before, and on my asking him what his trade was he explained that the
younger brothers of his family were husbandmen, but that for his part
he nourished his stomach by thieving.”

No European country can show anything like the immunity from crime
which the worst district in Orissa enjoys. In Balasor, the proportion
of persons in gaol is one to every 3,375 of the population, or one
female to every 121,278 of the population. Puri district, however, the
seat of the so-called “abominations of Jagannath,” would blush to own
such an overwhelming criminal population. Including both the central
and the subdivisional gaols, the proportion is one criminal always in
prison to every six thousand of the population and one woman to every
hundred thousand.

The gaol is a great institution in Indian and Burmese stations. Your
_syce_ breaks the shaft of your dogcart; send it round to the gaol to
be repaired. New matting is wanted for the veranda; you can get it in
the gaol. You want a piece of furniture; whether it be a wardrobe or
a whist table, you will find what you require in the gaol workshop,
and if there does not happen to be one ready, you can order it to be
made. They take a longer time to do it than free artisans, but you can
depend upon sound material, good workmanship and reasonable prices; so
the gaol industries flourish and the cost of supporting the criminal
classes falls with comparative lightness upon taxpayers.




CHAPTER II

THE CRIME OF THUGGEE

    Difficulties experienced in administering justice--Perjury
    common--Native officers delight in torture--Various devices used
    to extort evidence--Characteristics of the Indian criminal--Crime
    hereditary--Thugs’ method of strangling victims--Facilities
    afforded by the nature of the country--The river Thugs--Suppression
    of Thuggee gangs and their operations.


Crime in India does not differ essentially from that prevalent
elsewhere, although some forms are indigenous to the country,
engendered by special physical and social conditions. As a rule, the
people of India are law abiding, orderly and sober in character, but
there is an inherent deceitfulness in them that tends to interfere with
the course of justice. This is constantly seen in the untrustworthy
evidence so often given in court. Witnesses are either reticent or
too fluent; they will conceal facts or over-colour them according
as it serves their interests; they can be bought, or intimidated,
or easily persuaded. It has been said of India that perjury is the
rule and not the exception; it is a country in which no man desires
to tell the simple truth or the whole truth, where exaggeration is
perfectly natural and mendacity revels in the incredible minuteness
with which false statements are made, so perfect indeed as to cast
discredit on them at once when heard. Perjury has long been a flagrant
evil thwarting the administration of justice, and is still frequent,
although likely to decrease as social standards improve. The people
chafe at police investigation which worries and irritates them and
will say almost anything if it will rid them of the attentions of
the officers of the law. “They would condone even grievous wrongs,”
says Sir Richard Temple, “disavow the loss of property which they had
suffered, and withhold all assistance from their neighbours in similar
plights, rather than undergo the trouble of attending at police offices
and criminal courts.” In the old days police methods for the detection
and proof of crime were often reprehensible. Native officers were ever
eager to make a case complete and would go to any length in colouring
and creating evidence. An eminent judge in India found great fault with
the police who “would never leave a case alone, but must always prepare
it and patch it up by teaching the witnesses to learn their evidence
beforehand and to say more than they knew.” A village official would be
so eager to succeed when others had failed that he would threaten and
maltreat the witnesses till they invented merely imaginery evidence. It
was the frequent custom to drug prisoners about to be charged so that
they could make no defence, and when evidence was wanting, the witness
was subjected to actual torture until he promised to depose as required.

This use of torture, secret and unavowed, for the purposes of the
prosecution, prevailed until a recent date. Disgusted English officers
vainly sought to check the pernicious practice, which was common
throughout India among all sects and classes, though strictly forbidden
by law. According to one authority, “The poor practise torture on
each other, robbers on their victims; masters upon their servants;
zemindars on their ryots; schoolmasters on their pupils; husbands on
their wives and even parents on their children.” “The very plays of the
populace,” says another, “excite the laughter of many a rural audience
by the exhibition of revenue squeezed out of a defaulter, coin by
coin, through the appliance of familiar provocatives.” Some of these
as employed by the old police consisted of such devices as filling
the nose and ears of a prisoner with cayenne pepper, checking the
circulation of the blood with tight ligaments, suspending a person head
downward in a well and sometimes immersing the whole body in deep water
until insensibility but not actual drowning was caused.

Other processes are recounted by Dr. Cheevers. Torture by heat
consisted in applying to the naked flesh a lighted torch, burning
charcoal or red hot tongs, or by pouring boiling oil into the ears or
nose. Torture by cold was inflicted by exposure of the victim naked
in the night air and constantly sprinkling the body with freezing
water. Other methods were: suspension by the ears, wrists, feet, hair
or moustache, generally accompanied by severe beating with rods, wet
stinging nettles, bunches of thorns, or cudgels of split bamboo;
confinement in a cell containing quicklime; rubbing the face on the
ground so that the nose was wounded, the lips torn and the upper jaw
fractured; fastening offensive and gnawing insects under cover upon
the skin; sticking pins under the nails; beating the ankles and other
joints with a soft mallet. The bull’s hide torture showed devilish
ingenuity. The victim was sewed up in a newly flayed skin and exposed
to the torrid sun. The outer covering contracted with the heat, drawing
the live flesh with it, and the poor agonised creature died gradually
of hunger, thirst and putrifaction.

Milder tortures, as they were deemed, existed, in which the punishment
was more gradual but not less acute. Roasting by exposure to sun or
fire, running up and down or “walking about,” a process in which relays
of policemen keep a culprit on the move for hours and hours together,
so that, after a night’s unbroken promenade, the craving for rest and
sleep becomes intolerable, especially with people accustomed to sleep
for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch. The prolonged use of the
stocks was at one time very general in Bengal, sometimes with the
limbs enclosed in small apertures too tight for them, or when the
victim lay on his back with his feet raised high in the air for a
period of twenty-four hours.

Indian criminal annals record many curious forms of crime more or
less peculiar to the country, and it will be interesting to specify
some of the best known. Many are as old as the hills and are directly
traceable to the innate character and distinguishing traits of the
various races that people the great peninsula of Hindustan. There
is a family likeness in the offences against morality and the rules
generally binding upon the community at large, but some are encouraged
and facilitated by the condition and organisation of the daily life of
the people. Profound observers have penetrated to the darker and deeper
recesses of the criminal mind of the native, both Hindu and Mussulman.
Under the often placid, timid, civil-spoken and seemingly harmless
native there lies a strange but potent combination of sensuality,
jealousy and vindictiveness, backed by wild, ineradicable superstition,
absolute untruthfulness and ruthless disregard for the value of human
life. This is especially true of the Bengali, whose character has
been powerfully portrayed by Lord Macaulay. A feeble, effeminate
creature of sedentary pursuits, with delicate limbs, and without
courage, independence or veracity, he is full of tact, ready with
large promises, smooth excuses, elaborate tissues of circumstantial
falsehood. With all his softness, he is by no means placable in his
enmities or prone to pity, but is pertinacious in his purposes and
dominated only by the immediate pressure of fear.

Custom has been largely the parent of crime in India, and nowhere has
heredity exercised greater influence. A large proportion of offences in
India are committed by persons whose ancestors have done the same for
centuries. Strong belief in the strength of family tradition and the
potency of inherited traits and tendencies have long filled the Indian
gaols. To these causes we must trace the vitality of certain crimes; we
find in them the explanation of persistent gang-robberies, “Dacoity,”
the drugging and poisoning of travellers, the kidnapping of children,
the forgery, the forest frauds, the infanticide and secret murders; the
whole series of offences against which is directed the penal code of
India, originated by Lord Macaulay and praised by the highest experts,
including Sir James Stephen, as the best system of criminal law in the
world.

When England’s work in India is reviewed in the time to come, full
credit must be given to the humane administration which sternly
suppressed the atrocious malpractices that so long afflicted the land,
such as “Suttee,” or the burning of widows on the funeral pyre; the
human sacrifices to the bloodthirsty idol of Jagannath; “Thuggee,”
that vile organisation for secret murder which devastated the entire
continent and killed so many unsuspecting victims. No more terrible and
widespread crime has obtained in any age or country. It was fostered by
the prevailing conditions in a vast extent of territory, divided among
many princes and powers, each ruling independently and irresponsibly,
with many kinds of governments, and with their hands one against
the other, having no common interests, no desire for combination,
no united police, no uniform action in the repression of determined
wrong-doing. Everything conspired to favour the growth of these daring
and unscrupulous land pirates.

There were no roads in those early days, no public conveyances, no
means of protection for travellers. The longest journeys from one end
of the continent to the other were undertaken of necessity on foot
or on horseback; parties hitherto complete strangers banded together
for common security, and mixed unreservedly with one another. The
avenues of communication were at best mere tracks barely beaten down
by the passage of wayfarers across country and not always easily
distinguished, so that it was possible to wander into by-paths and get
lost among the forests, jungles, mountains and uncultivated tracts
where but few sparsely inhabited villages were scattered. Direct
encouragement was thus afforded to freebooters and highwaymen to make
all travellers their prey, and many classes of robbers existed and
flourished. Of these the most numerous, the most united, the most
secret in their horrible operations, the most dangerous and destructive
were the Thugs.

The origin of Thuggee, as it was commonly called, is lost in fable
and obscurity. Mr. James Hutton, in his popular account of the Thugs,
thinks that they are of very ancient date and says they are “reputed to
have sprung from the Sagartii who contributed eight thousand horse to
the army of Xerxes and are mentioned by Herodotus in his history. These
people led a pastoral life, were originally of Persian descent and use
the Persian language; their dress is something betwixt a Persian and
a Pactyan; they have no offensive weapons, either of iron or brass,
except their daggers; their principal dependence in action is on cords
made of twisted leather which they use in this manner. When they engage
an enemy they throw out this cord having a noose at the extremity; if
they entangle in this either horse or man, they without difficulty put
them to death.” There is some reason to believe that in later times
the descendants of these Sagartii accompanied one of the Mohammedan
invaders to India and settled in the neighbourhood of Delhi. In the
latter part of the seventeenth century Thevenot speaks of a strange
denomination of robbers who infest the road between Delhi and Agra and
who use “a certain rope with a running noose which they could cast with
so much sleight about a man’s neck when they are within reach of him,
that they never fail; so that they strangle him in a trice.” These
robbers were divided into seven principal classes or families from
which the innumerable smaller bands sprang.

Sir William Sleeman, a distinguished Indian official, whose signal
services in purging a large part of India of this terrible scourge
must ever be gratefully remembered, has conjectured that the first
Thugs were to be found among the vagrant tribes of Mohammedans who
continued to plunder the country long after its invasion by the Moguls
and Tartars. No historical mention is made of Thuggee until the reign
of Akbar, when many of its votaries were seized and put to death. From
that period until 1810, although known to some of the native princes,
who alternately protected and persecuted these criminals, it entirely
escaped the observation of the British rulers of India. But attention
was finally attracted to it by the strange disappearance of sepoys,
or native soldiers in the British service, when moving about the
country on furlough. In 1812 a British officer, Lieutenant Monsell,
was murdered by Thugs. A punitive expedition was immediately sent
against the village where the assassins were known to reside, and the
culprits, after some show of resistance, were ultimately dispersed. No
doubt the fugitives took with them their traditions and their homicidal
principles into new lands where they were probably unknown hitherto. As
early as 1816 the veil of secrecy which had concealed the organisation
was lifted, and a very complete and accurate account of the ceremonies
and practices of the Thugs in southern India was published by Dr.
Sherwood in the _Literary Journal_ of Madras. It is supposed that the
horrible story told was deemed too monstrous for belief, and it is at
least certain that no active measures were undertaken to suppress and
root out the offenders.

At all times many hundreds of predatory castes existed in India,
chiefly among the marauding hill and forest people, and some of them
are still recorded by name in the census papers. These people lived
openly by plunder, and were organised for crime, and for determined
gang-robbery and murder. There was no established police in those days
equal to coping with these gangs, and the government of the East India
Company had recourse to the savage criminal code of the Mohammedan
law. When Warren Hastings was governor-general, he decreed that every
convicted gang-robber should be publicly executed in full view of his
village, and that all of the villagers should be fined. The miscreants
retaliated by incendiarism on a large scale. One conflagration in
Calcutta in 1780 burned fifteen thousand houses, and some two thousand
souls perished in the flames. A special civil department was created to
deal with this wholesale crime, the character of which is described in
a state paper dated 1772. “The gang-robbers of Bengal,” it says, “are
not like the robbers in England, individuals driven to such desperate
courses by want or greed. They are robbers by profession and even by
birth. They are formed into regular communities, and their families
subsist on the supplies they bring home to them. These spoils come
from great distances, and peaceful villages three hundred miles up the
Ganges are supported by housebreaking in Calcutta.” Special laws were
passed to deal with the crime of Dacoity or robbery in gangs to the
number of five or more.

By this time the word “Thuggee” was becoming known and was applied
to the practice of “strangling dexterously performed by bands of
professional murderers disguised as pilgrims or travelling mendicants.”
These hereditary assassins prided themselves on their descent and
their evil reputations, which inspired an amount of awe in their
fellow countrymen hardly distinguishable from respect. “Yes, I am a
strangler,” one of them shamelessly told an English officer. “I and my
fathers before me have followed the business for twenty generations.”

These Phansigars, or “stranglers,” were thus designated from the
Hindustani word _phansi_, “a noose.” In the more northern parts of
India these murderers were called Thugs, from the Hindu word _thagna_,
“to deceive.” Europeans became aware of the existence of this class
of criminals with the conquest of Seringapatam in 1799, when about
a hundred were apprehended in the vicinity of Bangalore. Little
attention, however, was attracted to these depredators for a long
time; they carried on their abominable practices under the protection
of different native rulers and local authorities, with whom they
shared their spoils. But we read that, with the extension of British
rule and the subjection of the native rulers, active measures were
set on foot to suppress these professional murderers, who found it
necessary to engage ostensibly in agriculture or some other harmless
occupation so as to conceal their real business. One characteristic of
the Phansigars was that they never committed a robbery unaccompanied
by murder, their practice being first to strangle, then to rifle their
victims. It was also a principle with them to allow no one of a party,
however numerous, to escape, so that there might be no witnesses of
their proceedings; the only exceptions to this were in the case of boys
of very tender age, whom they spared and adopted in order to bring
them up as Phansigars, and girls whom they sometimes married. A gang
of Phansigars consisted of any number from ten to fifty men, or even
more, a large majority of whom were Mussulmans, but Hindus were often
associated with them, and occasionally Brahmins.

In common with brigands of all nationalities, the Thugs generally
frequented districts abounding in hills and fastnesses which afforded
a secure retreat in times of danger. Particular tracts were preferred
where they could murder their victims with the greatest security.
They lurked by the way in the extensive jungles which offered cover
and concealment, and where the soil was soft and easily turned up
for digging graves. The Thugs cherished pleasant memories of these
happy hunting grounds so often associated with their successes. To
reach the scene of action they often performed long journeys and were
absent from home for many months at a time. Their game was almost
invariably travellers whom they encountered on the road, or for whom
they frequently laid in wait outside towns and villages at the ordinary
resting places. Their method was to send scouts into the town to
find out whether persons of property were likely to be setting out
on journeys and with what possessions. Children were often employed
in this way. Each gang of Thugs was under a _jemadar_, or chief, who
directed their movements; they very seldom assumed any disguise, but
had the appearance of ordinary travellers or traders. They generally
put an end to their victims in the same manner, that of strangling,
and it was the custom to assign three of them to perform this deed.
While moving along quietly, one of the Thugs would suddenly throw a
cloth around the neck of the person doomed to death and retain hold
of one end of it while the other end would be seized by the second
accomplice; this was then drawn tight, the two Phansigars pressing
their victim’s head forward, and at the same time the third villain, in
readiness behind the traveller, seized his legs, and he was thrown to
the ground and despatched. Meanwhile, other members of the gang kept
watch in advance and in the rear to prevent interference; if they were
disturbed during their operation, a cloth was thrown over the victim,
and the company pretended that one of their comrades had fallen sick by
the roadside, and made great lamentations. The bodies of the victims
were carefully buried so as to escape observation and leave no clue for
detection.

In the early part of the nineteenth century the audacity and murderous
activity of the Thugs increased to such a fearful extent that the
British government was roused to serious consideration. It could not
remain indifferent to an evil of such magnitude. Startling cases began
to crop up and disturb the equanimity of the official mind. One of
the first revelations was secured in 1814 by an officer, Lieutenant
Brown, when appointed to investigate the circumstances of a murder
in the northern part of the province of Central India, at no great
distance from Jubbulpore, a city closely connected with Thuggee
from the subsequent trial and incarceration of a large number of
the ringleaders in the Jubbulpore gaol. Mr. Brown, when engaged in
his inquiry at a village named Sujuna, on the road to Hatta, heard
a horrible story of a gang-robbery in the neighbourhood. A party of
two hundred Thugs had encamped in a grove in the early morning of
the cold season of 1814, when seven men, well-armed with swords and
matchlocks, passed, conveying treasure from a bank in Jubbulpore to
its correspondent in Banda. The treasure was ascertained to be of the
value of 4,500 rupees, and a number of Thugs, well-mounted, gave chase.
Coming up with their prey at a distance of seven miles, in a water
course half a mile from Sujuna, they attacked the treasure-bearers
with their swords, contrary to their common practice of strangling
their victims, the latter plan being possible only when the objects
of their desire were taken unawares. Moreover, the robbers left the
bodies where they lay, unburied and exposed, which was also an unusual
proceeding. A passing traveller, who had seen the murderers at work,
was also put to death to prevent his giving the alarm. As much rain
fell that day, none of the villagers approached the spot till the
following morning, when the bodies were discovered and a large crowd
came to gaze at them. Great difficulty was experienced in bringing home
the crime to its perpetrators. This often happened in such cases from
the strong reluctance of people to give evidence and appear in court
for the purpose; even the banker who had lost his cash hesitated to
come forward and prove his loss, and this was no isolated case. Once
before, the wood at Sujuna had been the rendezvous of robbers, who had
slaughtered a party of treasure-bearers travelling between Jubbulpore
and Saugor. Sixteen were strangled, but the seventeenth escaped with
his life and running into the town, gave the alarm. The native rajah,
at that time supreme, hurried to the spot, but only came upon the
bodies abandoned by the thieves, who had made off with the treasure.

These depredations were greatly facilitated by the prevailing practice
of transmitting large amounts of cash and valuables from place to place
by hand. Remittances were made in gold and silver to save the rate of
exchange, although an admirable system of transfer by bank bills was
almost universal in India. Money carriers by profession were to be met
with in all parts of India, who were trusted by merchants to convey to
distant parts enormous sums in cash and large parcels of jewels; their
fidelity, sagacity and poverty-stricken appearance, natural or assumed,
were relied upon as a sufficient security, and it was attested by
Sleeman that although he had to investigate hundreds of cases in which
they had been murdered in the discharge of their duty, he had never
heard of one who betrayed his trust. The sums secured by the Thugs,
after murdering these faithful but unfortunate servants, were immense,
and amounted in the few years between 1826 and 1830 to hundreds of
thousands of rupees. They could not escape their fate, being constantly
watched and spied upon, and were often brought to light by customs
officers in the native states, from whom the lynx-eyed, keen-witted
Thug spies gained much information to assist in their robberies.

The discovery of this extensive organisation for murder was greatly
aided by the fearful disclosures made by some of the captured leaders.
The most noted of these informers was a certain Feringhea, who is
supposed to have been the original of the character of Ameer Ali, the
principal person and narrator in Colonel Meadows-Taylor’s “Confessions
of a Thug.” He had fallen into the hands of the famous Captain Sleeman,
then the political agent of the provinces bordering on the Nurbudda,
by whose untiring energy the whole system of Thuggee as then practised
was laid bare. Through his efforts large gangs were apprehended
which had assembled in Rajputana to pursue their operations in that
country, and among the great numbers committed to safe custody in the
various gaols, especially that of Jubbulpore, precise information was
obtained leading to the breaking up of the diabolical conspiracy. It
was then found that Thuggee was actively practised throughout India.
The circle, which seemed at first centred about Jubbulpore, gradually
widened until it included the whole continent, from the foot of the
Himalayas to the waters that wash Cape Comorin. From the Gulf of Cutch
to the tea plantations of Assam, every province was implicated, and the
revelations of the informers were substantiated by the disinterment of
the dead.

Sir William Sleeman has left a personal record of his own achievements.
“While I was in the civil charge of the district of Nursingpoor, in
the valley of the Nurbudda, in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824,” he
tells us, “no ordinary robbery or theft could be committed without my
becoming acquainted with it; nor was there a robber or a thief of the
ordinary kind in the district, with whose character I had not become
acquainted in the discharge of my duty as magistrate; and if any man
had then told me that a gang of assassins by profession resided in
the village of Kundelee, not four hundred yards from my court, and
that the extensive groves of the village of Mundesur, only one stage
from me, on the road to Saugor and Bhopaul, were one of the greatest
_beles_, or places of murder, in all India; and that large gangs from
Hindustan and the Dukhun used to rendezvous in these groves, remain in
them for days together every year, and carry on their dreadful trade
along all the lines of road that pass by and branch off from them, with
the knowledge and connivance of the two landholders by whose ancestors
these groves had been planted, I should have thought him a fool or a
madman; and yet nothing could have been more true. The bodies of a
hundred travellers lie buried in and around the groves of Mundesur; and
a gang of assassins lived in and about the village of Kundelee while I
was magistrate of the district, and extended their depredations to the
cities of Poona and Hyderabad.”

Similar to the preceding account, as showing the daring character
of the Thuggee operations, was the fact that in the cantonment of
Hingolee, the leader of the Thugs of that district, Hurree Singh,
was a respectable merchant of the place, with whom Captain Sleeman,
in common with many other English officers, had constant dealings.
On one occasion this man applied to the officer in civil charge of
the district, Captain Reynolds, for a pass to bring some cloths from
Bombay, which he knew were on their way accompanied by their owner, a
merchant of a town not far from Hingolee. He murdered this person, his
attendants and cattle-drivers, brought the merchandise up to Hingolee
under the pass he had obtained and sold it openly in the cantonment;
nor would this ever have been discovered had he not confessed it after
his apprehension, and gloried in it as a good joke. Many persons were
murdered in the very bazaar of the cantonment, within one hundred yards
from the main guard, by Hurree Singh and his gang, and were buried
hardly five hundred yards from the line of sentries. Captain Sleeman
was himself present at the opening of several of these unblessed
graves (each containing several bodies), which were pointed out by
the “approvers,” one by one, in the coolest possible manner, to those
who were assembled, until the spectators were sickened and gave up
further search in disgust. The place was the dry channel of a small
water course, communicating with the river, no broader or deeper than a
ditch; it was near the road to a neighbouring village, and one of the
main outlets from the cantonment to the country.

Some of the operations in which Thugs were concerned, and the nature
of their proceedings, are of especial interest. In the year 1827,
Girdharee Thug joined a gang of seven Thugs under Bukshee Jemadar ...
and set forth on an expedition. The party proceeded to Cawnpore where
they were joined by Runnooa Moonshee with nine Thug followers, so that
the gang amounted to eighteen Thugs, who all went on to Pokraya. At
this place they fell in with two travellers going from Saugor to the
Oude territory, who were decoyed by Runnooa Moonshee, and the next
morning, having been escorted about a couple of miles towards Cawnpore,
they were strangled by two Thugs, Oomeid and Davee Deen, who buried
the bodies in the bed of a stream. After this the gang proceeded on
the road leading to Mynpooree, as far as Bewur, where they found a
Kayet on his way from Meerut to the eastward, who was decoyed into
joining the company of the Thugs. After passing the night together,
the traveller was taken to a garden a short distance from the village,
where he was induced to sit down and was then strangled, his body
being thrown into a well. They went on to Sultanpoor and Mynpooree,
where the number of the gang was increased to twenty-one by three more
Thugs who joined them. The gang advanced on the same road as far as
Kurkoodda in the Meerut district, but meeting with no success in their
search for victims, they turned back toward Malagurh, and on arriving
there sent one of the gang as a scout into the town. He discovered two
travellers, a Brahmin and a Kuhar, who were proceeding from Kurnal to
the Oude territory, and whom he persuaded to join the Thugs. Early the
following morning the Thugs escorted these travellers about two miles
beyond the village, where they were strangled and their bodies buried.
After this affair the gang passed through Boolund Shuhur and stopped
to rest at a police station two miles from the town. A Chuprassee from
Meerut passed by on his way to Cawnpore. The Thugs addressed him and
persuaded him to join their band, and they all went to Koorja, where
they rested for the night in a caravansary. Long before daylight the
gang, accompanied by the traveller, proceeded on the road to Muttra,
and on the way one of the company found an opportunity to strangle the
Chuprassee.

The band next went to Secundra and while halting there decoyed two
Brahmins travelling from Kurnaul toward Lucknow. Runnooa Moonshee took
them under his own protection, and the next morning they were escorted
in an easterly direction and strangled. The bodies were thrown into a
dry well and the earth heaped over them. After this murder, the gang
went to Jullalabad, where they rested in the caravansary; and finding
that two travellers, a Brahmin and a Rajpoot, had previously put up
in the same place, a Thug was deputed to decoy them by inviting them
to join the band; the travellers agreed, and were put to death in the
usual manner and their bodies buried. In this way the expedition
proceeded for some weeks, the gang was joined by other Thugs until
it amounted to sixty in number; then it separated into two parties,
each going in a different direction, but they joined forces again
at Allahabad and commenced operations in the Cawnpore district.
Twenty-seven of the Thugs quitted the gang and returned to their
homes; the remainder went to Meetapore, where they met two travellers
on their way to Agra, whom they decoyed into their company. Two more
travellers were also persuaded to join the gang, and besides these
four others were also inveigled, among them two rich persons who were
staying in the same inn; the last named had engaged a carriage in which
to continue their journey, but the Thugs, anxious to get into friendly
relations, offered horses on more favourable terms. The proprietors
of the carriage, enraged at this proposition, threatened to have the
Thugs arrested, but the matter was arranged amicably and the travelling
party, with their Thug attendants, proceeded on their way. Their fate
was sealed, for on reaching a convenient spot in the Mynpooree district
they were strangled and their bodies rifled. The alarm, however, was
given soon afterward, and all the robbers were taken up by order of the
British magistrate and lodged in gaol. It was found that in the course
of this one expedition the Thugs had murdered fifty-two victims and
gained spoil to the value of 5,000 rupees.

The Thugs did not confine their operations to attacking travellers on
land. There were many gangs who worked on the rivers and kept their
boats on the Nurbudda and Ganges, into which they decoyed passengers
when bent upon their destruction. They resided chiefly in villages
along the banks and kept their boats at the principal ghats or points
of passage, as at Monghyr, Patna, Cawnpore and as far up the river as
Furuckabad. Their murders were always perpetrated in the day time. A
certain number of them were employed as actual boatmen, wearing the
dress and doing the work; others acted as decoys, having no connection
seemingly, but arriving at the banks as well-dressed travellers,
merchants or pilgrims bound for or returning from the sacred places
such as Benares or Allahabad. In the meantime the _sothas_ or
“inveiglers” sent out by the gang to bring in passengers, being well
dressed and respectable, would accost those they met upon the road and
invite them to join in the voyage by river. The boats in waiting at
the ghat were invariably kept clean and looked inviting, with other
respectably dressed travellers awaiting the moment of departure.
Often enough it was at first pretended to be inconvenient to take the
newcomers on board, the captain alleging that he was short of room,
but at last he would yield to the urgent request of the _sothas_,
and the trusting passengers would be taken on board and accommodated
below. After departure the disguised Thugs on deck would commence to
sing and amuse themselves noisily until a quiet spot was reached, when
the signal was given--the death-warrant in this case--by three taps
upon the deck above. The victims below were forthwith strangled by the
appointed stranglers, who were in close attendance upon their prey.
After death had been inflicted the murderers proceeded to break the
spinal bones of their victims by placing a knee in the back and pulling
over the head and shoulders; this was to prevent all possibility of
recovery. Then the bodies were stabbed through under the armpits and
thrown overboard, while the boat made its way to the next ghat, where
the “inveiglers” were landed to repeat their operations with others. No
part of the booty was retained, lest it might form a clue to detection,
except the cash found upon the dead or in their baggage. These river
Thugs often ran the risk of being captured, but they were generally
well known to the village watchmen on the river side, whom they were
ready to bribe.

Their extraordinary audacity and the success with which they murdered
their victims is recorded in the memorandum prepared in March, 1836,
by an officer, Captain Lowis, who did much to bring them to justice.
He speaks of repeated instances in which ten or a dozen persons were
put to death by boats’ crews, hardly more numerous than their victims.
In one case seven men were murdered at one and the same time by a crew
of nine Thugs. The victims were often men from the west country,
notoriously stronger and braver than the natives of Bengal. Strange
to say, the deadly business was often completed in small boats, in
which there seemed too little room to move or plan the fell purpose
unperceived. Frequently the Thug boatmen made friends with their
victims, as in the case of a boat laden with tobacco and hemp, when
the captain and crew persuaded their passengers to land on a sand bank
to cook and eat their dinner together. After the meal, the Thug leader
invited his friends to join in a song of praise to the Hindu divinity,
and while it was being sung the Thugs adroitly got behind their victims
and strangled them.

A shocking story was revealed in the trial of three Bengalis who were
arraigned at Berhampore on suspicion of having committed Thuggee. It
appeared that one of them, Madhub by name, had arrived at the Serai
with a large sum of money in the hollow of a joint of bamboo; two
others, Gunga Hurree Mitter and Kunhaye, quickly came upon the scene
in pursuit of the first whom they accused of having stolen the money
from their boat. Madhub retorted that they were Thugs and wanted to
murder him. This squabble excited suspicion and ended in the arrest
of all three. Within a few days two Bengali boats, full of suspicious
characters and laden with much money and property, were seized between
Monghyr and Patna and news came that four travelling merchants had
recently disappeared. It was strongly suspected that these merchants
had been murdered and great efforts were made to obtain a clue to the
guilty parties. Gunga Hurree Mitter, above mentioned, seemed willing
to turn approver, and although stoutly denying that he was concerned
in this particular crime he at length confessed to complicity in many
frightful murders as a river Thug and admitted as many as fifty murders
between Moorshedabad and Barr, where the boats had been seized. About
this time another very notorious Thug was arrested in the Burdwan
district who volunteered valuable information in exchange for his life
and confessed to being an accomplice in the murder of the merchants.

Accounts of such affairs, as found in contemporary records,
might be multiplied indefinitely. Colonel Sleeman’s report of
the Thug depredations for a year or two when they were most
virulent--1836-37--fills one large volume. On a map which he made of
a portion of the kingdom of Oude, showing a territory one hundred
miles wide from north to south, and one hundred and seventy miles from
east to west, are marked an endless number of spots between Lucknow,
Cawnpore, Manickpur, Pertabgurh and Fyzabad, all of them indicating
_beles_ or scenes of murders perpetrated. These places were pointed
out by captured Thugs and “approvers” who had been actively present
and taken part in the murders. There were some 274 _beles_ in all, or
one for about every five miles; the fact was proved by the continual
disinterment of skulls and skeletons of the often nameless victims.
Each recorded great atrocities and many wholesale murders. The number
of deaths for which each Thug miscreant was personally responsible
seems incredible. One man, Buhran by name, killed 931 victims in forty
years of active Thuggee, and another, Futteh Khan, killed 508 persons
in twenty years, making an average of two monthly for each assassin.

When the British government was roused to the determination to
suppress Thuggee, nearly every village was tainted with the system
and no district was without its resident gangs of Thugs, or free from
their depredations. The campaign once undertaken was prosecuted with
extraordinary vigour, and the pursuit organised was so keen that
very rapid progress was made in putting down this terrible scourge.
Whole gangs were arrested, one after the other; the ringleaders were
quickly tried and executed, or bought their lives at the price of
informing against and contributing to the capture of their fellows.
Difficulties often arose in securing conviction. Fear kept witnesses
from testifying; bankers were reluctant to acknowledge their losses;
relations were loth to identify corpses; and the revelations made
by the approvers could not always be corroborated. But the work of
extermination never slackened, and a few short years sufficed to
put down the seemingly hydra-headed evil. It is possible that some
more distant and inaccessible regions escaped, such as the Concan or
Malabar coast, to which the gangs never penetrated; and gangs were
not permanently located in such districts as Khandeish and Rohilcund;
but they were visited by robbers from other neighbourhoods, for a
gang generally avoided a district occupied by their own families and
friends. And the tide of murder swept unsparingly year after year over
the whole face of India from the Himalayan mountains in the north, to
the east, west and south as far as the most remote limits of Madras.




CHAPTER III

CEREMONIES OF THUGGEE

    Murder a religious rite--Consulting the omens--The sacred pickaxe
    or “kussee”--The “goor” or consecrated sugar--Certain castes
    under the protection of the goddess Bhowanee spared--Women seldom
    killed--Belief of Thugs that the neglect of omens and murder of
    women were the causes of arrest and downfall--The apprenticeship of
    a young member to the practices of Thuggee.


When and how Thuggee began may not be definitely known, but it is
certain that its votaries always attributed a divine origin to the
practice. They esteemed the wholesale taking of life to which they were
vowed a pious act, performed under the immediate orders and protection
of the Hindu goddess, indifferently called Devee or Durga, Kali or
Bhowanee. Murder was in fact a religious rite, the victim being a
sacrifice to the deity. The strangler was troubled with no remorse;
on the contrary, he gloried in his deed as the pious act of a devout
worshipper. He prepared his murders without misgiving, perpetrated them
without emotions of pity, and looked back upon them with satisfaction,
not regret.

The Thugs gave free vent to some of the worst passions of perverse
humanity; they were treacherous, underhanded, pitiless to those they
deemed their legitimate prey. But yet they were seldom guilty of wanton
cruelty; the pain they inflicted was only that caused by depriving
a human being of life. It was a rule with them never to murder
women, and they generally spared infant children whom they adopted,
bringing them up in their traditions. Even if a woman was doomed to
suffer she was most scrupulously preserved from insult beforehand,
either by act or word. In private life they were patterns of domestic
virtue, affectionate to their own families, fond of their homes; well
conducted, law abiding subjects of the state that gave them shelter.

For two centuries at least Thuggee flourished with rank luxuriance in
India, a soil exactly suited to its growth, fostered by the bigoted
adherence to its tenets and a firm faith in the rewards vouchsafed to
close observance of its rites and ceremonies. The Thugs were noted
formalists in the performance of their dread business. When they went
out to kill, they were governed by the strictest rules of procedure,
and steadfastly believed that the breach of any, even the smallest,
would entail discomfiture and misfortune. They gave the most unlimited
credence to superstitions, followed omens blindly and implicitly, and
undertook nothing without consulting their pundits, or wise men versed
in precedent and traditionary lore. No Thug, Sleeman tells us, who
had been fully initiated in the mysteries, doubted the inspiration
of the pickaxe (the sacred emblem in the faith of Thuggee), when
consecrated in due form, or doubted that the omens sought and observed
were all-sufficient to guide them to their prey or warn them from their
danger. They were satisfied that only by the neglect of these and the
careless worship rendered to the goddess could the suppression of
Thuggee have become possible to the British government.

The most portentous omen was that invited from the deity on the eve
of a new expedition for gang-robbery. When about to be undertaken, a
chief pundit was asked to name a day for departure and the road to
take. On the day suggested the _jemadar_, or leader of the party, would
start out holding in his right hand the _lota_, a brass pot filled
with water suspended by a string from his mouth; in his left hand he
carried the sacred pickaxe and a clean white handkerchief in which were
several coins. He proceeded a short distance along the road named by
the pundit and then paused to pray to the “great goddess and universal
mother” to vouchsafe some signal that the proposed expedition met with
her approval. The best possible omen was the braying of an ass and
if it was heard on the left, followed by a second bray on the right,
it was believed that the expedition would be an entire and lasting
success even if continued for years. The first, on the left, is called
the _pilhaoo_; the second, on the right, the _thibaoo_. The terms are
applied to the voices of any animals, but by far the most effective is
deemed the braying of the ass, whose voice is equal to any hundred
birds and superior to that of any other animal.

The initial ceremony, after the omen, proceeded by the leader’s
seating himself on the ground with the _lota_ before him. He remained
thus seated for seven hours while his followers brought him food and
made the necessary preparations for the journey. If the _lota_ should
have fallen from his hand terrible disaster might be anticipated and
the _jemadar_ would inevitably die during the year. If any one was
heard weeping as they left the village, great evil impended; the same
threatened if they met a corpse being carried out, or if they met an
oil vendor, a carpenter, a potter, a dancing master, a blind or lame
man, a _fakir_ with a brown waist band or a _jogi_ with long ragged
hair. A corpse from any village but their own was a good omen. The call
of a jackal, of which there were three kinds, threatened great evil,
and if at work the gang instantly quit the country leaving any victims
marked down for slaughter untouched. The call of the lizard was a good
omen, that of a wolf or a hare crossing the path, bad, entailing an
immediate halt and change of route. If a dog was seen to shake his head
operations had to be suspended for three days.

In all Thug ceremonies the sacred pickaxe or _kussee_ played a great
part. It was treated with the utmost respect and was so holy that to
be sworn upon it meant an oath more binding than on Ganges water, and
perjury on the pickaxe would entail the death of the foresworn within
six days. The superstition was that the perjurer would die horribly,
with his head turned round, his face toward his back, and writhing in
tortures till the end came. The oath on the pickaxe was in use when the
Thugs filled the gaols and it was made upon a piece of cloth fashioned
in the shape of the _kussee_. A legend existed that the _kussee_ was
the gift of the goddess herself when she had been greatly incensed
by the contravention of one of her laws. At first the Thugs did not
trouble about the corpses of their victims but blindly left them for
Kali’s disposal. One day a slave looked back and saw her throwing them
in the air, and in her rage the goddess condemned her votaries to
bury their bodies themselves, digging the graves with the consecrated
pickaxe. It was to be made by some blacksmith in the presence of the
_jemadar_. The consecration follows a long ceremony, including many
washings in water, sour milk and ardent spirits, and the pickaxe is
first used to smash a cocoanut, the kernel of which is eaten by the
assembled worshippers. The pickaxe was entrusted to the safe keeping of
the _jemadar_.

When on the road it was carried by the most sober and careful man of
the party. In camp he buried it in a secure place with its point toward
the intended route, but they believed that when unearthed, if another
direction was better, the point would be found supernaturally changed.
It was at one time the rule to throw the pickaxe down a well at the
nightly halt, and many witnesses declared that it used to spring up
spontaneously from the water in the morning to come into the hand of
its carrier at his call. Several of the Thug prisoners in Jubbulpore
gaol assured Sir William Sleeman that this was absolute fact, and
went so far as to declare they had seen it happen. The _kussee_ was
religiously worshipped every seventh day.

Another important agent in the Thug religion was the _goor_ or
consecrated sugar. It was an offering to Bhowanee, made as a sacrifice
of _tupounee_, to celebrate the commission of any murder. An exact
amount of coarse sugar was purchased to the worth of 1 rupee, 4
annas. A clean place was selected and the sugar laid out on a sheet
or blanket, on which were also put the sacred pickaxe and a piece
of silver coin. The leader of the gang having taken his seat on the
blanket, surrounded by the most notable stranglers, with the rest
outside, made a small hole in the ground for the _goor_ and then
dedicated it saying, “Great goddess, who vouchsafed 1 lac and 62,000
rupees to Toora Naig and Koduk Bunwaree in their need, so we pray
thee fulfil our desires.” (Toorah Naig was a celebrated _jemadar_
who, single-handed, with his servant, Koduk Bunwaree, killed a man
possessed of plunder, and bringing it home, divided it honestly among
their assembled comrades as though they had all been present at the
murder.) The Thugs fervently repeated the prayer and the _goor_ was
distributed, first to those on the blanket, who ate in solemn silence,
and when they had finished, it was given to the rest who were entitled
by their rank to receive it. No one but a man who had strangled his
victim was suffered to partake of the _goor_, which had a miraculous
effect; and the Thugs were persuaded that if any human being tasted it
he would take forthwith to the trade. The Thug chief Feringhea told
Sir William Sleeman that the _goor_ completely changed a man’s nature,
adding,--“It would change the nature of a horse. Let anyone taste it
and he will be a Thug, though he know all the trades and have all the
wealth in the world. For my own part I was well to do; my relations
were rich and I held high office myself in which I was sure of
promotion. Yet I was always miserable when absent from my gang. While
I was still a mere boy, my father made me taste that fatal sugar, and
if I were to live a thousand years I should never be able to follow any
other trade.”

There was a hierarchy in the caste of Thuggee. The first grade was
the _kuboola_, or “tyro,” who after initiation was first employed as
scout, then as grave-digger, _lughae_; next in rank was the _shumseea_,
whose duty it was to hold the hands and feet of the victim when being
strangled by the _bhurtote_, who is of the highest grade in the
organisation. The initiation was made early; a Thug parent apprenticed
his son at thirteen or fourteen years. The candidate having bathed and
dressed in new clothes, which had never been bleached, was led by his
_guru_, or spiritual director, into a room where the leaders of the
band were assembled seated on a white cloth; the sacred pickaxe was
placed in his right hand, and raising his left on high, he repeated
a fearful oath dictated to him and sworn on the Koran, after which
he ate a small piece of the consecrated _goor_. He pledged himself
to be faithful, brave and secret, to pursue to destruction every
human being whom chance or his own ingenuity threw into his power.
Only he was forbidden to kill the members of certain castes, such as
sweepers, oil-vendors, blacksmiths, carpenters, professional musicians,
any maimed or leprous persons, the carriers of Ganges water or any
man travelling accompanied by a cow. As a general rule women were
spared, and many cases are quoted of the misfortunes that overtook
those who disregarded this regulation. Feringhea stated that his gang
after killing many women had no luck, and his family fell into great
misfortune. Sometimes when they encountered a rich old woman, she was
sacrificed, and even youth and beauty did not always escape; but the
consequences were always the same. After the murder of the woman Kalee
Bebee, who was travelling with a gold _chudur_ for a sacred tomb, the
perpetrators were severely punished by fate. One got worms in his body
and died barking like a dog; others died miserably in gaol or after
crossing the black water (transportation to Penang). The families
concerned became extinct. Thugs who had slain women admitted that they
deserved the worst evils that could befall them.

The crime of killing women was sometimes aggravated by the murder of
their children. In the case of the murder of Bunda Alee, Moonshee of
General Doveton commanding at Jhalna, his wife and daughters were
strangled. One of the Thugs would have adopted the infant child and was
carrying it off, when a comrade pressed him to kill it also lest they
should be detected on crossing the Nurbudda. Whereupon the miscreant
threw the living child on the heap of dead bodies in the open grave,
and the child was buried alive.

The apprenticeship to murder was gradual. The young members saw and
heard nothing of the first affair after their initiation; they were
ignorant of the exact business, but grew to like the life as they were
mounted on ponies and received presents purchased out of their share of
the booty. On the second expedition they began to suspect that murder
was committed, and on the third they witnessed the actual deed. They
accepted the horrible situation, and were seldom much shocked. But
in one case told by Feringhea, a lad of fourteen, out for the first
time and mounted on a pony, was committed to the charge of a young
comrade, who was to keep him in the rear out of sight and hearing of
the affair when the signal was given. Unfortunately, the boy broke
away and galloped up in time to witness the scene; he heard the screams
and saw them all strangled. He fell off his pony and became delirious,
screaming and trembling violently if anyone touched him or spoke
to him. They sat by him when the gang went on and vainly attempted
to pacify him, but he never recovered his senses and died the same
night. A somewhat similar case is told by Sleeman of an affair near
Shikarpore, where the place selected for the murder was in an extensive
jungle by the river side, and a party of travellers were strangled,
all but two young boys who were to be saved for adoption. One of them,
when the bodies were being thrown into a ditch covered with earth and
bushes, began to scream violently, and the Thug who had intended to
adopt him, finding it impossible to pacify him, seized him by the legs
and dashed his brains out against a stone. The dead boy was left where
he lay and his body was found by a fisherman, who gave the alarm which
led to the pursuit and arrest of the Thugs.

Colonel Meadows-Taylor in his “Confessions of a Thug” graphically
pictures the sufferings of his hero after the first affair he
witnessed. “Do what I would,” the Thug confesses, “the murdered father
and son appeared before me; the old man’s voice rung in my ears, and
the son’s large eyes seemed to be fixed on mine. I felt as though a
thousand _skitans_ (devils) sat on my breast, and sleep would not come
to my eyes. It appeared so cold-blooded, so unprovoked a deed, that I
could not reconcile myself in any way to having become even a silent
spectator of it.” Next day his father reasoned with him, making him eat
the _goor_, and explaining that having put his hand to the work he must
not turn back. As soon as the _kuboola_ has got over the first feelings
of disgust and his courage is equal to the blood-thirsty business, he
becomes the disciple of some renowned and experienced member of the
gang, and instruction is given in strangling. He is entrusted with
the handkerchief, _roomal_, and taught how to make the knot with a
piece of silver inserted. When he has fully learned the process, one
of the travellers at the next affair is entrusted to him, and with a
_shumseea_ at hand to assist, he regularly graduates as a _bhurtote_
and is eligible to become a leader of a gang of his own.

The stern resolve of the British government to suppress Thuggee, and
the energetic assistance of the agents employed were no doubt the true
cause of its being stamped out. The neglect of omens, the signs sent by
Bhowanee to warn her votaries of threatened dangers, and the murder of
women and persons of the protected castes, brought down upon the Thugs,
in their own opinion, their deserved retribution. One leader of a gang
was arrested with seventeen others because, as they said, he persisted
in his purpose when a screaming hare had crossed his path. They pleaded
that an omen was an order, and disobedience brought its own punishment.
We may accept such explanations for what they are worth, and may
assign to a more reasonable cause the activity in the years between
1826 and 1840, when no less than 3,689 Thugs were arrested and tried.
Of these a large number were hanged, transported or imprisoned for
life. A few were acquitted or died before sentence; a certain number
became approvers or informers, and no doubt a fatal blow was struck at
these horrid crimes which had been so long fostered and supported by
nearly all classes in the community; landowners, native officers of the
courts, police and village authorities.




CHAPTER IV

DACOITY

    Commission appointed in 1837 to consider means for the suppression
    of Dacoity--Story of a daring attack upon government--Disguises
    assumed by Dacoits--The Brinjaras--The “Byragee” or religious
    devotee--Professional poisoners and highway robbers--The
    datura--Its action and employment--Hereditary descendants
    of Thugs--Predatory tribes of criminal instinct--Some noted
    Dacoits--Female leaders--Theft of government treasure in a British
    garrison--A Dacoit’s revenge.


It has been asserted that although Thuggee has been ostensibly stamped
out in India, road murders are still committed in considerable numbers
by the agency of poison administered to travellers, and that this is
the work of Bhowanee’s votaries carrying on the old business, still
impelled by their horrible religion. This impression is believed to be
erroneous. There is no evidence that the gang-robbers who undoubtedly
use poison such as opium, arsenic, datura and other drugs to stupefy
or kill their victims, belong to the fell organisation so long a
scourge in Indian society; or that the worship of Bhowanee, observed
with such murderous rites, still exists in India. Nevertheless, the
administration of poison by professional robbers, who infested the
main roads and lurked in the vicinity of large towns, was largely
and for the most part mysteriously practised until a comparatively
recent date, if it is not indeed still prevalent. It was one of the
forms of Dacoity, a crime akin to Thuggee, but without its religious
pretensions, and ever one of the most serious evils combated by the
British government. This widespread plague throve and prospered by
reason of the fierceness and audacity of certain classes and the
timidity and submissiveness characteristic of others. “In Bengal
proper,” says Sir Richard Temple, “it was a crime with an extensive
organisation, having professional ringleaders followed by gangs of
enrolled men.” It was repressed and to a great extent broken up by
the strong administrative machinery of the British government, but
the crime still crops up in a milder form and is “one of the earliest
symptoms of impending scarcity, political excitement or any social
trouble.”

We may pause to examine some of the earlier records of Dacoity. A
commission to consider its suppression was instituted in India in the
year 1837. Hitherto but little had been ascertained of the character
or methods employed by this class of criminal. Although Dacoities were
every day committed and reported by the magistrates, it was thought
that these gangs resided for the most part between the Ganges and
Jumna rivers and in the kingdom of Oude, but information regarding
their habits and location was vague and uncertain. Everyone talked of
Budhuk Dacoits and their daring robberies, but no one knew who or what
they were, whence they came or how their system was organised. In the
course of this inquiry, the magistrate of the Gorruckpore district,
which borders on the kingdom of Oude, informed the government that the
Dacoits were not inhabitants of any part of the British territories
but organised banditti from Oude, and that to deal effectively with
this crime was altogether beyond the power of the magistrates of the
district and the local police. He instanced in proof of the strength
and daring of the Dacoits the details of an attack made upon a party
of government treasure-bearers in 1822. This story was related long
afterward to an English official by one of the Dacoits concerned in the
affair and is given in his own words as follows:

“About eighteen years ago Lutee Jemadar sent a messenger to me to say
that he should like to join me in an expedition, and I went to him with
Jugdeum and Toke to settle preliminaries. The first day was spent in
feasting and nothing was settled about business. On the following day
he told me that remittances of government treasure went every month
from Peprole to Gorruckpore, and if we were prudent we might get some
of it. It had, however, become known that an escort of troopers and
foot-soldiers always accompanied these remittances and unless the
attack was in the nature of a surprise some casualties were likely to
occur. After exploring the ground, it was seen that the way passed
through an extensive jungle, so thick that horsemen could not safely
leave the high road.” A point in this jungle was selected for the
attack and to facilitate it strong ropes were fastened across the
road ahead, while other ropes were in readiness to block it behind
so soon as treasure and escort had passed through. A gang of forty
was collected for the robbery, ten matchlock-men, ten swordsmen and
twenty-five spearmen, who proceeded to lie in ambush awaiting news of
the approach of their prey. On the third morning it was near at hand,
the ropes ahead were fixed and a number of men posted, armed with
matchlocks loaded with shot, as the Dacoits did not desire to take
life. As soon as the trap was laid and the time of retreat intercepted,
fire was opened from all sides. The escort was thrown into confusion,
the foot soldiers sought refuge in the bush, the horsemen tried to
escape by jumping over the ropes, while the thieves broke in upon the
treasure and took possession of some 12,000 rupees.

Daring attacks of this kind by gangs drawn from this great family
of professional and hereditary robbers were frequent in all parts
of India. No district between the Berhampootra, the Nurbudda, the
Sutlej and the Himalayas was free from them, and no merchant or
manufacturer could feel himself secure for a single night from
the depredations of Budhuk Dacoits. In 1822, in the district of
Nursingpoor in the Nurbudda valley, in the dusk of evening, a party
of about thirty persons, apparently armed with nothing but walking
sticks in their hands, passed the picket of Sepahees, who stood with
a native commissioned officer on the bank of a rivulet separating
the cantonments from the town of Nursingpoor. On being challenged
by the sentries, they said they were cowherds who had been out with
their cattle which were following close behind. They walked up the
street, and having arrived in front of the houses of the most wealthy
merchants, they set their torches in a blaze by a sudden blow upon the
pots containing combustibles; everybody who ventured to move or to make
the slightest noise was stabbed; the houses were plundered, and in ten
minutes more the assailants fled with their booty, leaving about twelve
persons dead and wounded on the ground. A magistrate close at hand
despatched large parties of foot and horse police in all directions,
but no one was seized nor was it discovered whence the gang had come,
or any particulars as to their identities. This occurred in the month
of February, when marriage processions take place every day in all
large towns; the nights are long, and much money is circulated in the
purchase of cotton in all cotton districts like that of Nursingpoor.
There was a large police guard within twenty paces of the Dacoity on
one side, and this picket of Sepahees within a hundred paces on the
other. Both saw the blaze of the torches and heard the noise, but both
mistook it for a marriage procession, and the first intimation given
of the real character of the party was by a little boy, who had crept
along a ditch unobserved by the Dacoits, and half dead with fright,
whispered to the officer commanding them that they were robbers and had
killed his father. Before the officer could get his men ready, all were
gone and nothing more was heard of them until twenty years later, when
the perpetrators of the attack were detected and brought to justice.

The Dacoits sometimes assumed disguises to hide the real nature of
their business. In 1818 a notorious leader named Maheran with a gang
of fifty Budhuks, set out from Khyradee in the Oude Terai under the
disguise of bird catchers. They had with them falcons, hawks of all
kinds, well-trained, also mynas, parrots and other varieties of
speaking and mocking birds. At Bareilly, in Oude, they were joined
by another small gang, and all proceeded in pursuit of some treasure
on its way from Benares westward, carried by ponies under charge of
twenty-four _burkundazes_, “native watchmen,” and policemen. They
determined to attack the treasure party at their halting place between
Allahabad and Cawnpore. A boat had been purchased to keep along the
bank of the river, ready to help the party across after the attack,
and by this the women and children were all landed on the Oude side
of the river opposite the Serai. Maheran with two or three selected
men in disguise remained with the treasure until they saw it safely
lodged for the night, when he returned to his gang to make arrangements
for the attack. Ladders, torches and handles for the spear-heads and
axes had been provided in the usual way, and two hours after dark they
scaled the wall of the Serai. Meanwhile confederates within broke open
the gate from the inside and stood over it to prevent interruption,
while the rest attacked the escort and secured the treasure. They
killed six persons of the guards, wounded seventeen and secured 70,000
rupees.

Maheran was captured in a later expedition and hanged, but his widow
Moneea took his place as leader of the gang and shortly afterward
fitted out another expedition to Junnukpoor in the Nepal territory
several hundred miles to the east of their bivouac, to intercept
some treasure on its way to the capital, Khatmandu. This expedition
consisted of eighty chosen men and seven women. After taking the
auspices they set out in small parties toward the appointed place
of rendezvous. On the way, one of the parties, under a leader named
Johuree, fell in with fifteen bullocks laden with treasure under the
charge of eighty Gorkhas. The Dacoits, being in disguise, managed
to join the escort without exciting suspicion and ascertained that
they were carrying a treasure to the value of 64,000 rupees from the
collector’s treasury in the plain to the capital. Johuree ordered two
of his men to continue with the escort and went on himself with the
rest to join the other leaders at the appointed place and to consult
with them. He found that only a part of the gang had arrived and these
thought it wiser to postpone an attack until the rest came up, saying,
“If we succeed in taking the treasure, many of our friends must be
seized on suspicion and beaten into confessions that may lead to the
ruin of all, whereas if we forbear this time we shall be all collected
before the next monthly remittance goes up, and we may secure it with
little hazard to our friends or to ourselves.”

Johuree urged that one bird in the hand was worth two in the bush
and at length prevailed upon the others to accept his counsel. They
mustered fifty men and prepared to follow the treasure. The two scouts
continued with the treasure escort in the disguise of pilgrims, and
when they had seen it safely lodged at a spot under the first range of
hills and had carefully reconnoitred the position, one of them hastened
to Johuree with his report. All now set out and reached the village
of Bughalee in the evening. From this place Johuree went forward to
reconnoitre and found the treasure lodged in a fortified place with a
wall and ditch all around it. A party of four or five hundred traders
who carried goods from the plains to the hills were encamped on the
edge of the ditch. After carefully surveying the position, Johuree
returned to his friends and ordered that a couple of stout ladders
twenty feet long should be made out of wood cut in the forest.
Advancing in silence, they placed these ladders and got over the ditch
and wall close to where the treasure lay. It was about midnight, with
a good moon and clear sky, but still they thought it necessary to
light their torches, and under the blaze they commenced the attack.
The escort was taken by surprise and made but a feeble resistance. The
gang took the whole amount of 64,000 rupees and effected their retreat
without losing a man. On reaching a retired spot two or three miles
from the scene of action, they divided the spoil, but every man had
too much to admit of rapid travelling, so 17,000 rupees were buried at
this place, and with the remaining 47,000 rupees the party moved on
through the forest. As soon as news of the loss of the treasure reached
the Nepal cantonments at Jalesar, whence it had been despatched, every
suspicious person that could be found was seized. Two regiments then
stationed at Jalesar were despatched through the forest to the westward
to intercept the robbers, and fell in with some of Johuree’s party,
from whom they recovered a portion of the treasure, while Johuree got
safely home with the rest.

The precision with which veterans remembered and described Dacoities
at which they had assisted during their lives was often wonderful. One
of the leaders of the Oude Terai gangs named Lucke, when arrested,
described forty-nine Dacoities at which he had been present during
his career of twenty-five years. The local authorities to whom his
narratives were sent endorsed his account of forty-one as having been
perpetrated precisely as he described them, though many of them had
taken place near Calcutta, some four or five hundred miles from the
bivouac in Oude forest from which the gang had set out.

Reference has been made to the disguises assumed by the Dacoits. The
most suitable to the locality in which they were about to work were
as a rule selected. Thus, north of the Jumna they became carriers of
Ganges, or holy water, because men of that class were continually to
be met with on those roads. South of the Jumna they pretended to be
pilgrims journeying to some sacred shrine, or relatives sadly conveying
the bones of the departed to the banks of the Ganges, or the friends
of a bridegroom sent to fetch and bring home his bride. The rôle of
funeral mourners was very popular because out of respect for their
sorrowful business they were treated with much deference and subjected
to no inconvenient inquiries as to whence they came or whither they
were going. The bones they carried were commonly those of inferior
animals, wild or domestic; they were kept in bags,--red for male
bones, white for female,--and at their halting places these bags were
suspended from the apex of a triangle formed by three stout poles, to
be used later as the handles for the spear-heads concealed in their
waistbands. Another favourite disguise was that of the Brinjaras, the
traditional carriers of grain and salt, who travel long distances
conveying the grain to the sea coast and returning with the salt. These
Brinjaras were a peculiar and distinct race, who were much employed by
the Duke of Wellington (when Sir Arthur Wellesley) as food-carriers
in his Indian campaigns. Their appearance was distinctive and their
costume peculiar; of intelligent countenance and strongly knit, wiry
frames, they dressed--the women especially--in fantastic parti-
clothes; the women’s arms were completely encased from shoulder to
wrist in bracelets of bone or ivory; they wore coins round their
necks and curiously interwoven in their hair, which gave a strange,
flighty, wild air to their always expressive and sometimes good-looking
faces. The Brinjaras strictly adhered to certain customs; they did not
intermarry, and lived in no fixed abode, although they halted often
in the same encampment for some time; they observed the stars and
scrupulously followed omens; they spoke the languages of most of the
places they visited, but had a peculiar dialect of their own. They had
no defined religion.

A good account of the Brinjaras is given by Reginald Heber, Bishop of
Calcutta, in his “Indian Travels.” “We passed a large encampment of
‘Brinjaras,’” he writes, “or carriers of grain, a singular wandering
race, who pass their whole time in transporting this article from
one part of the country to another, seldom on their own account, but
as agents for more wealthy dealers. They move about in large bodies
with their wives, children, dogs and loaded bullocks. The men are all
armed as a protection against petty thieves. From the sovereigns and
armies of Hindustan they have no apprehensions. Even contending armies
allow them to pass and repass safely, never taking their goods without
purchase, nor even preventing them, if they choose, from victualling
their enemy’s camp. Both sides wisely agree to respect and encourage a
branch of industry, the interruption of which might be attended with
fatal consequences to both.”

The Brinjaras’ disguise not only served as a convenient cloak for
the Dacoits, but they sometimes followed the nefarious business on
their own account. The larger number no doubt were fairly honest and
industrious people, but some succumbed to the temptation of their
roving life and the facilities offered for criminal acts in their
extensive wanderings, taking to Dacoity and to the kidnapping of
children, a profitable business, especially of female children for
whom there was a ready sale. General Charles Hervey, the famous Indian
police officer, had but a poor opinion of the Brinjaras, whom he called
formidable robbers. His account of them is, however, interesting as
supplementing Bishop Heber’s. He came across them in large numbers
at the Sambhur Salt Lake not far from Jeypore, which they visited
from the most distant regions, with immense droves of pack bullocks,
bringing grain and taking away salt. He says: “Their animals may be
seen tethered in hundreds on the wide shores of the extensive lake,
each _tanda_ or company of their sort being camped under a distinct
Naik, or headman, in the centre of the drove appertaining to it, with
their bullock packs or panniers neatly collected in piles of hundreds
in their midst. In the daytime, when halted, their cattle are taken
out to pasture wherever pasture may be obtained, tended by the fewest
men, often mere lads, and not infrequently by girls; at evening they
are driven home, when a piece of oil-cake is given to each animal,
called by name, and it is curious to watch the process, how well each
animal knows its name and waits expectantly for its turn to be called.
At night the bullocks are tethered by means of a rope passed round
their front feet and entwined with another rope fixed to the ground
with strong stakes. They are picketed in this manner with their heads
turned inwards, in a circle round the resting place of their owners in
their midst, and fires are kept burning throughout the night to scare
away tigers or other beasts of prey. I have come upon the encampments
of these roving people, in the wildest jungles, or threading their
way with their long straggling lines of laden cattle through the most
intricate ground, whether of rock, forest, sand-hills, or marsh, and
have been quite fascinated by the strangeness of their manner and their
quaint wild ways.”

Another successful disguise made use of by the Dacoits in Central
India was that of the garb and appearance of Alkuramies, a peculiar
class of pilgrims who travelled in small parties accompanying a high
priest, who was represented as the leader of the gang. “They had four
or five tents, some of white and some of dyed cloth, and two or three
pairs of _nakaras_, or ‘kettle drums,’ and trumpets, with a great
number of buffaloes, cows, goats, sheep and ponies. Some were clothed,
but the bodies of the greater part were covered with nothing but shoes
and a small cloth waistband. Those who had long hair went bareheaded
and those who had nothing but short hair wore a piece of cloth round
the head.” The pretended Alkuramies always took the precaution of
hiring the services of half a dozen genuine Byragees or ascetics, whom
they put forward in difficult emergencies.

They are strange people, these Byragees, or religious devotees, whether
pretended or real. There are many classes of them with various names:
Jogis, Sunyasis, Byragis, Aghunhotas, and mostly all incorrigible
rogues. When travelling in bands they are stalwart naked fellows,
strong-limbed and sturdy, unpleasant to meet abroad despite their sham
sanctity. Their solicitation of alms is more like a threat as they
offer their begging bowls, peremptorily demanding contributions. They
do not whine or fawn like ordinary beggars, but lift their voices in
execration when their appeals are not readily met and with their naked
slate- bodies raised to their full height, they cast dust into
the air to emphasise their maledictions. Whether by alms or thefts, the
mendicant leads an easy, lazy life, his needs are well cared for by the
charitable who firmly believe they “acquire merit” by ministering to
them.

General Charles Hervey has given a graphic account of a Byragee he
came across at Thunjna on the edge of Rajputana, whose lair or _mhut_
was on one of the hills above the town. It was “erected nearly at
the very top of it among several overhanging rocks, and reached only
by a long parapeted causeway, all substantially constructed of solid
masonry, but not yet completed. The ascetic in possession was in the
usual nude condition, four square inches of rag forming his entire
personal apparel. His body was covered with ashes, his head folded
round and round with his own braided hair like a tall tiara, and
his face and forehead plastered with white symbolic daubs. Sleek he
was, and in good condition withal--not at all a starving mendicant,
whatever his penances; and he had a fat pony too, in a well-littered
shed close by his own comfortable den, to get up to and scramble into
which must cause the good little beast some trouble. I asked the man
why thus disfigure himself? I was rebuked for the impertinence by no
reply, as, silently beholding me, he squatted on his upraised hams
on the stone-built terrace of the lofty spot.... He had, like most
of his kind throughout India, wandered to many distant regions and
sacred spots, famed from olden times as places to be visited, whatever
the difficulties of the pilgrimage.... He had, indeed, been a mighty
traveller and persistent pilgrim, this nude, besmeared gymnosophist,
of small wants and great energy, and the naked hermit became quite
attractive, rapt as he was, however unclothed and unbeauteous, as he
narrated his ‘painful marchings’ and the wondrous sights he had beheld
and bowed down to.

“Other equally devoted and fanatic individuals, leading, like this man,
eremitical lives in caves and hovels in wild and unfrequented spots and
inaccessible places on crags or rocky eminences by side of river or
sea, or on temple-topped hill or difficult mountain peak, held sacred
as the abode of their Devi and not to be profaned, may be met with,
... but few so observant or so communicative and friendly.... Many
are their devices of evil-doing when abroad; and here I confine the
remark to those who are not what they seem to be. Thugs, poisoners and
kidnappers are to be found among Jogis. When visiting Dwarka many years
ago, I was loudly cursed by a Byragee for not readily enough yielding
to his demand for alms, and as I put off from the shore, to give
point to his execrations, the angered fellow, stark and gray, seemed
a very blue devil, as, standing to his full height and with both arms
stretched upwards, he flung dust into the air while uttering his direst
maledictions.”

Professional poisoning in carrying out highway robbery was at one time
spread over every portion of the province of Bengal, and there is no
doubt it was equally prevalent in Bombay and Madras. Murders were
constantly committed along the road upon unwary travellers who rashly
joined company with strangers deliberately purposing to kill and rob
them; and numbers of thefts were also perpetrated by the administration
of drugs to render their victims insensible and at their mercy.

The crime was greatly aided by the facility with which poison in some
form or other could be obtained. Many shopkeepers traded in poisons,
selling these goods openly and with the most reckless indifference.
Even when the law laid restrictions on the sale of poisons, the evilly
disposed could provide himself from the roots of trees in the jungle,
garden or wayside, or they might be bought from the numerous travelling
quacks, and the local _hakims_ or “native doctors” were often not
unwilling to supply the noxious drugs. Moreover, in almost every
village some hag of evil repute, half-witch, half-midwife, given to
criminal practices and commonly believed to be a professional poisoner,
did a systematic business in supplying drugs. Upon one old woman, who
was arrested near Sasseram in 1835, were found letters and credentials
from numerous members of the poisoning community at large who dealt
with her.

The drug most commonly used by the road poisoners is produced from
the datura plant, _stramonium_, both the purple flowered and the white
flowered, and is prepared from the seeds or the leaves. Its noxious
effects were well known to the ancients. In “Purchas: His Pilgrimage,”
that most famous series of seventeenth century travels, we read, “They
have (in India) an Herbe called Durroa which causeth distraction
without understanding anything done in a man’s presence; sometimes
it maketh a man sleepe as if hee was dead for the space of four and
twenty hours and in much quantity it killeth.” It is referred to in
Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” Garcias ab Horto makes mention of
“an herbe called daturah, which if it be eaten, for twenty-four hours
following takes away all sense of grief, makes them incline to laughter
and mirth.” As an instrument in facilitating theft and other criminal
designs its properties were widely recognised. In Bengal it was usually
given as an ingredient of sweetmeats, or mixed with bread or coffee,
sherbet, milk, _tari_, “native spirits,” or introduced into tobacco.
It was relied upon to stupefy; not necessarily to kill, but to produce
intoxication or delirium, or profound lethargy resembling coma, with
dilated pupils but natural respiration. Even when life is not seriously
endangered, the effects of the poison upon the person are such that
they seldom recover their bodily vigour. One was still a <DW36> after
a dose taken seven years before; another continued unable to articulate
and was like a man stricken with paralysis. Memory is long impaired
and often never recovered; idiocy sometimes supervenes. The detection
of the crime is thus prevented. If death occurs, it may be attributed
to disease, suicide or wild beasts; if the patient survives, he has no
clear idea what has happened to him.

The action of datura is generally an indication that it has been
administered. It is not only a powerful narcotic, but there are quite
unmistakably characteristic symptoms. The patient, if not incapable
of movement, will perform the most fantastic antics, will exhibit
great excitement, ramble in his talk, fly into a violent rage when
questioned. As it takes effect, the sufferer grows very thirsty, and
dry in the throat. There are three stages or sets of symptoms observed:
First, headache, dryness of the mucous membrane, difficulty in walking,
languor, impairment of vision, with the pupils greatly dilated; second,
maniacal delirium, flushed face, eyes glistening, violent perspiration
from incessant motion; third, insensibility, coma and possibly collapse
with fatal results. In the last condition the sufferer becomes giddy,
staggers, falls and dies.

Some of the cases of poisoning by datura may be quoted here to show the
boldness with which it was practised. One crime was committed in a Jain
temple near Bhagalpur in Bengal, where the victims were the priest and
two of his attendants. The latter were found one morning in a state of
mad intoxication, reeling about the ground, and the priest was missing,
but his body was picked up three days afterward in a dry well. It was
the work of a gang of professional poisoners who had visited the temple
ostensibly to make an offering to the god but in reality to murder the
priest. One of them bought sweetmeats which were doctored with powdered
datura-seed, and handed them over to the priest for presentation.
According to custom, he ate some of the sweetmeats, giving a part also
to the two temple attendants. The poisoners waited till the drug had
taken effect and then attacked the priest who was lying unconscious
near the shrine; one of them throttled him; a second sat heavily upon
his chest; a third held his hands, and a fourth trampled him underfoot.
The helpless victim soon died in convulsions. The next act was to rifle
the secret treasury kept in an inner chamber, and the plunder was
stowed in sacks and carried away in a cart. In the end by the aid of
“approvers” seven of the robbers were arrested. Three were sentenced to
death, and the others to transportation for life to the Andaman Islands.

Numerous victims of the crime of road poisoning were found among the
Powindahs or Afghan traders who travel down every year from above the
passes on the northwest frontier and who brought their strings of
camels laden with merchandise and products of the soil, or drove a good
business in horse-dealing. They sold cloth and shawls, condiments,
sun-dried fruits, sweetmeats, valuable furs, long-haired Persian
cats, strong, surefooted little horses called _yaboos_. They visited
all parts of India as far as Cape Comorin, and when their goods were
sold, congregated at certain points for the homeward journey, and with
their wallets well-lined, they were a likely prey for the poisoners.
Although shrewd bargainers, they are an unwary lot not difficult to
dupe and cajole. These “Cabulis,” as they were styled, were at one time
the constant victims of datura poisoning in Bombay, where they often
collected to enjoy the proceeds of their trading and purchase goods to
carry home. Numbers of them were admitted to the hospital suffering
from poison, the fatal effects of which they had escaped, thanks to
their robust constitutions.

Once at Patna, in Bengal, a horse-dealer from Cabul, who had disposed
of his stud profitably, rashly made friends with a couple of rogues
whom he met by the way and who had so ingratiated themselves with him
as to be accepted as travelling companions. On reaching Benares one of
them, who passed as the other’s servant, went on ahead to a Serai to
prepare food, which was ready on the arrival of the party and of which
the Afghan partook with the others. All were seized with the usual
symptoms, and while insensible the horse-dealer was robbed. Again, a
party of five, travelling from Calcutta, were beguiled on the way by an
obliging stranger whom they presently engaged to go out and buy food
for them in the bazaar and prepare it for them. They left the Serai
with him to continue their journey by rail, but were found unconscious
on the way to the station, having been robbed of their money and most
of their apparel.

General Hervey quotes a curious instance of the heredity of the
criminal instinct which showed itself in the descendants of the old
Thugs settled at Jubbulpore, in the days of the active pursuit of these
murderers by Sir William Sleeman. A generation of young Thugs had
grown up around the School of Industry, a kind of reformatory for the
offspring of the captured criminals, and the careers of some of these
have been followed. Many of the youths found employment with European
gentlemen as private servants, and in one particular instance the
inherited propensity was curiously illustrated. A railway engineer, Mr.
Upham, employed in the construction of the Indian Peninsula Railway,
was stationed at Sleemanabad near Jubbulpore. Returning home one
evening, much fatigued after a long tour of inspection, he lay down
to rest on his bed and from his tent, the curtain of which was raised
for ventilation, he saw two of his table servants--both of them lads
from the reformatory--engaged in cooking his dinner. He presently
noticed that they squeezed into the pot on the fire certain green pods
they had plucked from a neighbouring bush, and presuming they were
herbs of some sort added for flavour, he said nothing, but he was
curious and having little appetite he dined very lightly, chiefly on
rice and milk. He picked some of the pods, however, and put them in
his pocket, where they remained till next day, when he became ill and
rode over to see the doctor. He fainted when he reached the doctor’s
office. Restoratives being promptly applied, he so far recovered as to
be able to produce the pods which the doctor at once pronounced to be
of datura. Suspicion thus aroused, the two servants were arrested and
brought to trial, when the head cook was convicted and sentenced to six
years’ imprisonment. This boy was of the old Thug stock, and obviously
the desire to destroy human life was in his blood, brought out by
greed; for the object was, of course, to rob Mr. Upham while he was
unconscious.

They were apparently irreclaimable, these Thug children. One boy was
detained in prison until grown up in the hope that he would prove
well-conducted. All his relations had been Thugs; his father (who
had been executed), his uncles, brothers and forebears for several
generations, and numbers of them had suffered the extreme penalty. He
was cognisant of their misdeeds and the retribution that overtook them,
but his own inclinations lay the same way, and no sooner was he at
large than he embraced the evil trade and was soon known as a _jemadar_
with an increasing reputation as a daring leader of Dacoits. Eventually
he was won over to the side of justice and did good service as an
“approver.”

A noted Thug poisoner of later days was a certain Rora, the Meerasee--a
class of hereditary singers--who was long criminally active and
in the end was sentenced to transportation for nineteen years on
several counts. His favourite victims were the drivers of bullock
hackeries, which with an accomplice he would hire, and after they
were taken several stages, he would become friendly with the driver,
offering food, drink or tobacco, which was, of course, drugged and
produced the usual narcotic effects. When the driver fell off his box
insensible, they left him to lie there and made off with the vehicle
and its beasts, disposing of them at the first chance. This process
was repeated with other carts and conveyances plying for hire, and in
all cases datura was the drug employed. This Rora was arrested on one
occasion, and having to pass his own house got permission to go in;
after which he came out with a gift of poisoned sweetmeats for his
escort, and easily escaped when his custodians yielded to the potency
of the datura.

A form of highway robbery was the “Megphunnah Thuggee,”--the poisoning
of parents to remove them and allow of the kidnapping of their deserted
children. The motive of this crime was to become possessed of the
jewels and ornaments worn by the children, or to sell the latter
at distant places or to wanderers who would carry them to far-off
countries for questionable purposes. Brinjaras bought male children
to bring up in their trade, and nomadic gipsies with travelling shows
wanted females to be reared to their performing business. Thus a gang
of Megphunnah thieves assembled for a feast fell upon a family of Yats,
father and mother, with two girls and a boy, and having strangled the
parents in good old Thug fashion and sold the children, repeated the
process continually as they wandered on. The gains were small, but the
murders were many and numbers were sold into slavery of the worst sort.

Dacoity was practised on a large scale in many districts by whole
gangs under well-known leaders with adherents or well-wishers and
informants in every village. At each religious festival in the autumn,
the band assembled at the summons of its acknowledged chief in some
deserted fort or temple, and settled a plan for the coming season,
when operations were discussed; the names of the selected victims,
the nature of the expected booty, the chances of resistance or the
interference of the authorities. New members were affiliated and sworn
in at these meetings and the work went on gaily by the various parties
till the approach of the monsoon, when the whole band reassembled,
divided the spoil and went into winter quarters. One member of the gang
was always a goldsmith, who melted down the ornaments acquired, while
silks and clothes were disposed of to friendly shopkeepers.

A long list might be drawn up of the predatory peoples of India. “These
criminal tribes,” says Sleeman, “number hundreds of thousands of
persons and present a problem almost unknown in European experience.
The gipsies, who are largely of Indian origin, are perhaps the only
European example of an hereditary criminal tribe. But they are not
sheltered and abetted by the landowners as their brethren in India
are.” Most prominent among these peoples were the Meenas, or Meena
Rhatores, who were found chiefly in Rajputana, but who practised
their infamous trade in many parts of India. The name Rhatore is
synonymous with Rajput and signifies “of royal race,” but the blue
blood was drawn from a family living by plunder and Dacoity. They
were settled in considerable numbers at Shajanpore near Gurgaon, and
lived outwardly respectable lives, but their propensities were well
known. Although they went far afield to carry out their robberies, they
occupied substantial stone houses, cultivated the soil and possessed
large flocks and herds with many swift camels, mostly hidden away
till the time arrived for an expedition to pilfer and despoil. These
Meenas were rich and prosperous and wanted nothing but to be let
alone; they habitually lived well, ate flesh, drank much, wore fine
raiment, and their women disported many trinkets and gorgeous clothes;
their rejoicings and festivals were celebrated with much feasting and
revelry. They followed no ostensible occupation; they hired servants
to till the ground, and their villages had often a deserted appearance
because most of the men were absent on some raid. The remaining few,
wary and watchful, looked out for possible detection and interference;
the women, even when drawing water at the well, were ready to give the
signal of alarm or send a word of warning to their friends engaged in
some illegal pursuit. The Meenas hung closely together, and if any one
was by mischance arrested, he might count upon assistance and upon
funds raised by subscription to provide bribes to secure his release,
if in the native states, or for the payment of fees for his defence.

Another criminal class very formidable in their time were the Moghyas,
whose home was in Meywar in and about the direction of Neemuch. They
were notorious for the wide range of their depredations, and being of
a treacherous character, they inspired great dread in the regions they
infested. They did not confine themselves to their own country, but
spread far and wide, and their robberies were so repeated that at one
time the high road between Indore and Gwalior was patrolled by parties
of irregular cavalry in support of the inefficient local police. These
Moghyas came from a common stock of tribal thieves, such as the Budhuks
and Khunjurs, and were notable for their favourite custom of taking
service as village watchmen or _chowkeydars_, a strange practice very
general throughout India and based upon the old idea of setting a
thief to catch a thief.

The Budhuks were professional Dacoits who always murdered their
victims; the Khunjurs were wanderers who robbed in many widely
separated districts both in Madras and Bombay, and in times far back in
Jalna, Bolarum near Secunderabad, at Bellary (Madras) and Sholapore.
The Mooltani robbers were assiduous in attacks on convoys of cargoes of
piece goods, opium and sugar. There were also Bedowreahs, freebooters
and desperados of the North-western Provinces, Kaim Khanees, camel
postilions, who were also Dacoits, and Khaikarees and Lambanees, much
given to crime in the Dharwan district and so determined in their
misdeeds that no severity short of perpetual banishment had any effect
on them. After a large capture, the native magistrate sentenced every
offender to have his right hand chopped off. Yet they at once resumed
their depredations when set free and were long recognised as members of
the “lop-handed” gang.

The Ooreahs, or men of Orissa, were poisoners by descent, adepts
at dissimulation and low cunning, much given to the despoiling of
unsuspecting females of the oldest profession in the world, the
hereditary dancing girls who were brought up to the business by their
mothers. A troupe of these girls were often maintained privately by
rajahs and wealthy natives, and for ceremonial purposes at Hindu
temples. Despite the taint of ill-repute attaching to their trade,
they were often modest in manner and of refined tastes, very much like
the old Grecian “Hetæræ”; but when living at large in their public
capacity, they were often the victims of greedy miscreants who coveted
their possessions, their plentiful ornaments and jewelry, for many
were personally rich. The Ooreahs worked in gangs and three of them
visited the house of some of these women in Dum-Dum and brought with
them a present of food, curry cooked by themselves and drugged. This
had the usual effect and ended in a great robbery. Again, four Ooreahs
took lodgings with a woman in the Sham Bazaar, near Calcutta, and
established friendly relations, exchanging sweetmeats. Those given by
the Ooreahs soon produced insensibility, and the poisoners cleared out
the place.

In 1869 information reached a gang of Dacoits on the look-out for booty
that a large consignment of treasure had been received at Agra by
railway from Calcutta. It was to be transferred at Agra to camel-back,
to be forwarded to its destination at Jeypore. The leader of the
Dacoits and many others were lurking around drawn by the scent of rich
prey on the skirts of the great Durbar then in progress. They prudently
resolved to delay attack until the spoil was upon native territory,
and it was watched from stage to stage until the convoy had entered a
pass or hilly gorge one march from Jeypore. The party halted for the
night to bivouac in the bazaar of a place called Molumpoona, where they
were challenged by pretended revenue officers, who were Meena Dacoits
disguised, and accused of trying to evade the transit dues. The real
character of the officials was soon made manifest when the escort, who
were soldiers or policemen, ran off, and the plunder was secured. It
consisted of a large amount in rupees and silver in bricks, coral beads
and other valuables.

The audacity of these Dacoits reached to greater heights. The royal
mails were not safe from their interference. By maintaining spies
in the various post-offices, news was always forthcoming of the
approaching despatch of a valuable prize by the government mail carts
or Dak runners from Agra to the adjacent native states. Almost at the
same time as the last named robbery took place, a detachment from the
main gang stopped the mail cart and seized its contents, carrying off a
quantity of bullion in British sovereigns. A second similar robbery was
also effected on the Ajmere frontier, in which the post-office employee
was wounded. These treasure Dacoities were no doubt facilitated by the
niggardliness of the transmitters, who sought to save the expense of
hiring a special escort notwithstanding the enormous amount at stake,
as much as thirty lacs of rupees, or £300,000, having been passed at
times from Bombay to Indore.

On one occasion in 1864, a police confederate gave notice of a
consignment of treasure, 30,000 rupees, from Bombay, passing through
Berar, which was intercepted and attacked in a ravine near Mulkapore.
The mail cart arrived about dusk, when the robbers fell upon it and the
drivers, and the small escort of four matchlock men fled. The bullion
was loaded quickly on camels, carried away and buried in the jungle
before the news of the theft reached Mulkapore. A month later, when the
booty was about to be divided among the different gangs engaged, they
quarrelled fiercely over the shares and one of the party stole away and
brought the police upon the scene. The treasure was thus recovered and
many important arrests were made.

This money had been forwarded up country to be employed in the purchase
of cotton at a time when the great American War of Secession had
paralysed the cotton industry, and great enterprise was being shown in
obtaining the scarce commodity. This “cotton hunger” extended to India,
and the productive cotton fields there were being despoiled to meet
the demand. Heavy remittances in cash were in consequence constantly
transmitted up country, and the temptation was great to highway
robbers. It was the same with regard to opium, largely produced in the
province of Malwa. Not only was the drug itself plundered in transit to
Bombay, but the purchase money of the goods was intercepted on its way
to pay the cultivators.

Many noted Dacoits rose into prominence when the crime was most
prevalent. One was Jowahirra Durzee, a thief of the boldest type who
wandered through Central India planning and executing robberies. There
were thirteen such crimes to his credit in the province of Berar and
eight more around Poona. He was a fine-looking man who was caught by
the Nizam of Hyderabad and sentenced to be beheaded, but who escaped
from gaol with the connivance of the native guard. He renewed his
activity and made a great haul in Berar, robbing a couple of country
carts conveying cash to the value of 66,000 rupees sent from Bombay for
the purchase of cotton. The thieves had only time to bury their plunder
and disperse, but returned a month later to dig it up and divide it.
After making Poona the centre of operations, he was again arrested and
committed to the British lock-up at Jalna, from which he was rescued by
a daring comrade, Kishen Sing, who forced an entrance into the prison
by climbing the wall and overpowering the sentry.

Afterward Jowahirra, when retaken, described what had occurred. Two
steel clasp knives with file blades had been conveyed from Bombay and
smuggled into the prison. With these the prisoners cut through their
leg-irons in six days, after which their friends came and carried them
off to where three swift camels were waiting for them outside the town.
The Indian criminals are ingenious in dealing with their fetters to
compass escape. They are independent of files. Thirty of the worst
prisoners confined in the central gaol of Agra contrived to cut through
their irons by means of threads manufactured from their clothing and
thickly coated with pounded glass or emery powder. The threads were
first anointed with gum to which the powder adhered, thus forming a
sawing instrument equal to a file. Jowahirra’s subsequent depredations
were on a large scale. He was often associated with the notorious
Dacoit Jeewun Sing, (of whom more directly), and they controlled large
numbers of tribal thieves, Meenas and Rhatores and Rohillas, who were
at one time computed to amount to nearly four hundred. Jowahirra was
in due course tried as a professional Dacoit and sentenced to fourteen
years’ transportation to the Andaman Islands.

Jeewun Sing was a native of Bikaneer and a camel carrier who conveyed
specie and other consignments for the bankers of Berar, and as such he
enjoyed a reputation for honesty and fair dealing in the delivery of
goods entrusted to him. Yet he was in collusion with Meena Dacoits who
came down from the country in quest of plunder, and whom he harboured
and hid in two temples near Oomraotee until news came of treasure on
the move. Jeewun Sing, who had taken service with the Mypore police for
his personal safety, secretly directed these gangs and was concerned
in several of the heaviest robberies, receiving always his share of
the proceeds,--a fourth or fifth. He did not join personally in the
work, but sent agents to represent him. He was a general carrier, whose
camels travelled to Bombay, Indore, Jeypore, Jubbulpore, and who was
true to his employers as a cloak to his proceedings against others.
This police inspector, so long the confederate of robbers, lived under
a cloud and his arrest was often strongly urged, but he was spared
through the protection of his police superiors, and not a little on
account of his usefulness in securing the conviction of others. But
this double traitor, disloyal to his sect and the betrayer of his
confederates, was in the end dismissed from the service.

Kishen Sing, the noted Rhatore leader of Dacoits who rescued Jowahirra
Durzee, was one of the chief agents of this same Jeewun Sing. Kishen
Sing was informed against by his confederate, Choutmull, for declining
to submit to his demands and was supposed to have died in custody at
Aboo. The story of this fictitious death so admirably illustrates
Eastern duplicity that it deserves mention. Kishen Sing was a desperate
character whose crimes were many and atrocious. He murdered one of his
associates in a mail cart robbery; he attacked two sepoys going on
furlough, and in the fight which ensued slew one while he himself was
wounded; and he was in the habit of disguising himself as an officer
in the Nizam’s cavalry in order to carry out his robberies. One of
his most daring deeds was rifling a treasure convoy on the high-road
between Sholapore and Hyderabad. The money was 30,000 rupees in
specie and some chests of bullion, and was carried in the wagons of a
transit agency under escort of some Arab mercenaries. A fierce conflict
was fought, but the Dacoits got the best of it and carried off the
treasure. Later Kishen Sing was arrested and laid by the heels at Mount
Aboo to await trial.

He was resolved to escape his fate of certain transportation. First
he tried to commit suicide with a piece of glass, then he simulated
madness and at last took to malingering. He was seized with a terrible
hacking cough and grew visibly worse, so that his release as incurable
was all but recommended. Then he apparently died. Leave was sought from
the local authorities to bury him and not burn him as was the usual
procedure with a Hindu corpse. His body was handed over for interment
to four or five low caste men engaged by an old and faithful follower
of his who had taken the garb of a mendicant and occupied a small
hut just outside the gaol gates. The undertakers were in the secret,
and they placed the living corpse in a shallow grave face downward,
covering it with thorns and brushwood, on the top of which a thin
layer of earth was laid. The defunct made no move, and after dark
the faithful Gosaen, who had been on the watch, came and dug up the
“dead” Kishen Sing. It was thus clearly proved that burial did not mean
death and that, provided a person is placed faced downwards with no
superincumbent weight of earth, life may be safely prolonged for hours.
The escape of Kishen Sing was not realised until he was discovered
alive and well in his native village. How he imposed upon the medical
officer whose duty it was to furnish a certificate of death does not
appear upon the record.

A curious feature in Indian Dacoity was that gangs were led in more
than one instance by female _jemadars_ or captains. One of the most
notable was a certain Tumbolin whose husband had met his deserts in
the Madras territory and had been executed. After his death, his wife
was installed in his place by the universal acclaim of his followers,
and she fully justified her appointment. She became a most capable
chief, ably managed all the affairs of the gang, sought out the needful
information as to the promise of spoil, the best methods of attack,
and settled every preliminary. She went with her men to the point of
action, but did not join personally in the fray, leaving the actual
command to a trusty lieutenant, by name Himtya, chosen by herself, and
who became her right hand man.

One of the boldest operations ever attempted by Dacoits was the
attack made by Tumbolin’s gang upon a military treasure in the heart
of the military cantonments of Sholapore. In quest of booty, she had
brought her party down in person from Central India and had encamped
at Nuldroog, about fifteen miles from Sholapore, a wild spot within
the territory of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Accompanied by her faithful
Himtya and others, disguised as wandering minstrels, she explored the
neighbourhood and penetrated the military quarter of Sholapore. They
sang their songs before the officers’ bungalows and at last boldly
entered the general’s garden in which a sentry was posted. Over the
hedge they saw a sentry, and more to the purpose, saw that he was in
charge of the treasure chest of the military force. Meanwhile Himtya
had gone off independently and had marked down as a hopeful prey the
house of a wealthy tobacconist and banker in the town of Sholapore.

The two enterprises were discussed that night on return to camp, and
although the banker’s promised to be the easiest job, an attack upon a
military force was the most audacious and, if successful, would secure
the largest prestige. It was decided to attempt the latter enterprise,
pausing for a day or two in order to reconnoitre their ground, the
best means of approach, and the surest line of retreat if pursued. The
British garrison was large and consisted of a native infantry and a
troop of European horse artillery. It was an important station where
many high officials resided, judge, collector and magistrate, and a
local gaol was established within the fort. It was a hard nut to crack,
but Tumbolin did not despair. First removing their encampment to some
distance, the rendezvous was fixed on some broken ground near the
deposited treasure, which was last seen by Himtya when being locked up
in the right hand compartment of the tumbril.

At nightfall the sepoy sentry guard retired into their guard room,
leaving a double sentry to guard the treasure. Himtya’s first step was
to secure the guard by locking them into their quarters; then he and
his men crept up under cover of a tall cactus hedge until they reached
the tumbril, when two of the Dacoits rushed simultaneously upon the two
sentries and speared them, while a third robber broke off the padlock
of the tumbril and laid open the right compartment of the treasure
chest. It was empty, for the money had been transferred that very day
to the other side. By this time, the alarm had been raised. The sentry
in the general’s garden adjoining opened fire, and some of the officers
ran up with shot-guns, by which one of the robbers was wounded. The
attack had failed and the tables were turned. The bugles rang out with
a general call to arms and the baffled Dacoits hastily decamped.

Pursuit followed, but the robbers were fleet of foot and arrived safely
at their encampment, where all was in readiness for flight, ponies were
mounted, Tumbolin astride on her favourite piebald, and they galloped
away through the night and the next day until the party reached and
crossed the Kistna, after which they were beyond pursuit. Great
commotion had been caused in Sholapore. The troops stood to their arms
all night and patrols of cavalry scoured the whole country round. The
English general in command reported that Sholapore had been attacked
by a numerous and well-organised banditti, but, as a matter of fact,
Tumbolin’s whole gang numbered no more than sixteen persons.

Tumbolin long continued her depredations and her success was great. Ten
years after the attack on Sholapore, her gang visited the city of Poona
at a moment when the chief of police was being married and the entire
force was in attendance upon the marriage procession. Himtya seized the
occasion to break into the house of a rich Marwaree merchant and rifle
his strong room. The attack was made with flaring torches and a great
outcry and succeeded, but two of the robbers were captured as they fled
through the town, one of them Himtya himself. Tumbolin escaped and was,
indeed, never taken, although a large price was put upon her head. She
retired at length at a good old age to die peacefully among her own
people in the fastnesses of the Oude Terai.

Grassia was a famous leader of Khunjur Dacoits who had become an
approver after capture. When he died his widow, a woman of fine
presence and masculine gait, consecrated her children by a solemn oath
to their father’s profession. She seemed to anticipate that the boys
would be worth little at the work, but relied upon her one girl to
turn into a capable leader such as Tumbolin. Grassia’s daughter grew
up into a fine woman, with no particular good looks, but of imposing
aspect. She never married, bearing in mind her mother’s injunctions to
devote herself to the care of her brothers, and to keep Tumbolin before
her as a model for imitation, and she no doubt led her gang with much
energy and success. In older times there were female Thugs, women who
accompanied their husbands on expeditions, and one is mentioned by
Sleeman who was the _jemadar_ of a gang of her own.

A horrible story of a Dacoit’s revenge is told by Mr. Arthur Crawford.
After an outbreak of the Bheels in October, 1858, which was commenced
by one of their number, Bhagoji Naique, shooting the superintendent
of the police near Sinnur, the majority of the Bheels took to Dacoity
under the leadership of Bhagoji. At this time an old Bheel named
Yesoo, a friend of Bhagoji’s, was living in the same neighbourhood
in a village which was a favourite camping ground for Europeans on
account of the facilities it offered for sport. Yesoo was on very
friendly terms with the sportsmen and endeavoured to dissuade Bhagoji
from his traitorous designs, but without success. After the murder of
the police official, Yesoo refused to join the rebels, and was excused
on account of his age and lameness and left to live in peace in his
village, Bhagoji little thinking that all the while he was secretly
supplying the English with valuable information concerning the plans
and whereabouts of the Dacoits. When the disturbance had been quelled
and an amnesty proclaimed, one of Bhagoji’s most faithful adherents
returned to his home and settled down quietly in his native village
not far from Yesoo, who by this time was well known to have been a
government informer and was very proud of the fact. This apparently did
not affect Hanmant, who tried to be on good terms with the old man,
and frequently visited him, inviting him to bring his family over to
his (Hanmant’s) village. But Yesoo was wary and kept the young man at
arm’s length. Hanmant, finding all attempts to lure the old man away
from the security of his own village in vain, conceived a diabolical
plot to bring about his revenge. “Taking some fifteen or twenty of
his own people and a few more Bheels who had sworn to be revenged on
Yesoo, he repaired one night to Yesoo’s village, silently surrounded
the Bheel quarter, and then sent one of his men to fire the village
stackyard at the other side of the village. Just as he anticipated, the
alarm was no sooner given than every male Bheel in the ‘Warra’ (their
quarters outside the village proper), including Yesoo and his two sons,
went off at best speed to the fire, the women and children collecting
outside their huts to view the blaze. In an instant the revengeful
gang surrounded the ‘Warra,’ and with his own hand Hanmant cut down
and horribly mutilated Yesoo’s two wives and daughters, the other
women were gagged and bound, and then Hanmant and a select few, armed
with matchlocks, lay in ambush by the path Yesoo and his sons must
return by. Yesoo he shot with the muzzle of his gun nearly touching
his body, and the sons and one Bheel who showed fight were disposed
of by his comrades; the other Bheels dispersed, while Hanmant and his
gang quietly returned home. Suspicion, of course, immediately fell upon
Hanmant. One of his confederates peached. Hanmant escaped into the
jungle, but was caught half-famished about a week afterward. Ultimately
he and two accomplices were executed at the scene of the murder,
Hanmant exulting up to the last moment in the dreadful deed, which he
had been brooding over for nearly five years.”




CHAPTER V

CHARACTERISTIC CRIMES

    Extended use of poison--Horrible stories--The Gaekwar of Baroda
    charged with attempted poison of British resident, Colonel
    Phayre--Diamond dust--Modern instances in Bombay--Murders
    numerous--Police practices tending to concealment of
    evidence--Decapitation--Strangulation--Stinging to death--Crushing
    to death by an elephant--Leading traits in Indian criminals--Frauds
    and forging--Story of the Black Hole of Calcutta.


The crime of secret poisoning as a lethal agent has ever largely
prevailed among a timid and deceitful people inclined to prefer
treachery to open violence. Under the Mussulman dynasty, assassination
by poison flourished exceedingly. It was effective in removing a
pestilent competitor or a too ambitious minister, a jealous or
untrustworthy wife or a hateful husband. The action of poison was
often mysterious and its symptoms obscure in countries where the light
of medical knowledge burned dimly, and when fatal might easily be
attributed to the noxious effect of the narcotics so largely indulged
in. The facility with which poison could be administered is constantly
indicated in the ancient writings; the Shastras or sacred books of
the Hindus, illustrating and explaining the Vedas, enlarge upon
the precautions that should be taken to protect the life of the rajah
or ruler from the subtle attacks of those around him. The danger of
death by poisoning lurks commonly in the domestic relations; a great
crowd of servants fill the purlieus of the palace, actively engaged
in the preparation of food and often at liberty to pass freely to and
fro. One Shastra lays down the necessary qualities of a cook as skill,
cleanliness, good character and even temper so that neither greed nor
revengeful feeling should incite him or her to mix something poisonous
in the pot. Another goes further and enlarges thus upon the methods
of detecting the personal characteristics of any one likely to give
poison,--“He does not answer questions, or only gives evasive answers;
he speaks nonsense; rubs the great toe along the ground and shivers;
his face is discoloured; he rubs the roots of the hair with his
fingers; and he tries by every means to leave the house.”


_Execution in India_

    A common mode of execution in India, for which the elephant is
    easily trained. In the early times of uprising or rebellion,
    elephants were also used against the enemy, and would make short
    work of piling up great pyramids of human heads.

[Illustration]

Some horrible stories are preserved of the ruthless administration
of poison by the Mohammedan sovereigns in India. Thus Tavernier, the
French traveller in the seventeenth century, says of the great state
prison of Gwalior that the emperor Aurungzeb was so sensitive lest he
should be stigmatised as a cruel prince he never suffered any great
subject to survive long in prison; at the end of the ninth or tenth
day the captive was removed by poison. No doubt Hyder Ali poisoned
a number of his English prisoners, and the inhuman murder of General
Mathews by Tippoo Sing is told by James Bristowe, who suffered a long
captivity under the same merciless monarch. The general was poisoned
under the most abominable circumstances. He was starving himself to
death rather than partake of the food issued to him, which he had
discovered contained poison. He studiously abstained from food for
several days until at length, tortured by overmastering hunger, he
devoured a plate of poisoned victuals and expired a few hours later in
violent convulsions. Another officer, Captain Romley, who saw himself
constrained to swallow poison, preferred to commit suicide by some
other means. Yet again, Lieutenant Fraser had poison forcibly poured
down his throat.

The traditions of the native states as to poisoning were preserved in
at least one till a late date in the last century. In Baroda, a Rajput
ruler, the Gaekwar Mulhar Rao, was the centre of a nest of criminal
intrigue rivalling anything in the past, as great a miscreant as any
one in his depraved court and more guilty than any of his subjects
in the use of his despotic power. Crime was the very breath of his
princely house; its members hated one another with bitter animosity;
assassination, largely by secret poisoning, was the chief avenue to
the throne, but all kinds of flagitious means were employed to secure
succession; charges backed by elaborate perjury were as often used to
upset a rival aspirant, as powdered arsenic or diamond dust to remove
him permanently to another sphere.

In the generation to which Mulhar Rao belonged, violent deaths had
constantly paved the way to the throne. One of five sons reigned in
1847. Two of his brothers died suddenly, and the prince himself a few
years later. He was succeeded by the fourth brother, Khander Rao, whom
the fifth, Mulhar Rao, at once attempted to poison, but he was detected
and taken into custody. Then Khander Rao sought to protect himself by
appealing to sorcery and black arts, and finding no certain security,
consulted a Brahmin who strongly recommended human sacrifices.
Whereupon Khander Rao selected thirty-five prisoners in his gaol of
Baroda, whom he ordered for execution at the rate of five daily.
Twenty-five had suffered before the butchery ceased. Mulhar Rao still
lived, and recourse was had to simpler methods; his cook was suborned
and provided with powdered arsenic, the most commonly tried drug, but
the poison failed in effect because, although the noxious food was
consumed, remedies were applied in time.

False testimony was next adduced, and Mulhar Rao was accused by
perjured witnesses of plotting to have his brother Khander Rao shot
by a European soldier, and on this flimsy pretence he was closely
confined in the prison of Cadra. He had sympathisers and they soon felt
the weight of Khander Rao’s hand. Four of them were seized, accused
of holding secret communication with the prisoner, and sentenced to
various forms of capital punishment. One was hanged, another beheaded,
a third blown from the mouth of a gun and the fourth was thrown under
the feet of an elephant to be trodden to death. Suddenly Khander Rao
himself died, not without suspicion of foul play, and Mulhar Rao walked
straight from the gaol to the throne, where he was soon to emulate the
misdeeds of his predecessors.

The new Gaekwar had no claims upon the regard of his subjects. Almost
wholly uneducated and with no mental gifts, he failed to inspire
respect or devotion. He was not without astuteness, but was obstinate
as a mule and fierce as a tiger. His person was unattractive; he was
undersized, of mean appearance, with a coarse, swarthy complexion;
he squinted, and from his large sensual lips black teeth protruded
savagely. Unlike his brother Khander Rao, he had no taste for field
sports, and he had converted the race course at Baroda into a carriage
drive for the ladies of his zenana.

Mulhar Rao’s private life was desperately evil. In his early years
he was often thought to be mad on account of his passionate and
ungovernable temper. Even as a child he committed crimes, impelled by
fierce hatred and lust for revenge. His youth was made up of poisonings
and attempts to poison. When he came to power he destroyed his
enemies, real or fancied, wholesale. His gaolers collected victims in a
row, and one by one poison was poured forcibly down their throats. One
of those he most cordially detested was offered poisonous pills, and
when he refused to swallow them he was despatched in a more expeditious
fashion by being squeezed to death in a special machine. This man’s
chief crime was that he had been a creature of Khander Rao’s.

The new Gaekwar’s victims were so numerous that it was a current phrase
in the city, “Has he killed many to-day?” He spared no man in his
anger, no woman in his lust. Justice was bought and sold, the claimant
who had the longest purse always won his case; public business was
neglected; the most unworthy were advanced; bribery and corruption
were the rule in every branch of administration. The crown and finish
to Mulhar Rao’s offences was his alleged plot to poison the British
resident, Colonel Phayre.

There had long been distrust between the Gaekwar and the representative
of the British government, whose profound disapproval of the prince’s
proceedings was soon made manifest. A more serious difference arose
when the Gaekwar insisted that his infant son, born of his latest
marriage, should be recognised as the next heir to the throne. There
were grave doubts of the child’s legitimacy. His mother, Luxmeebee, had
been forcibly abducted from another husband who was still alive at the
time of its birth. Colonel Phayre refused to acknowledge the child and
Mulhar Rao vowed vengeance. One of his first dastardly attempts was to
poison all the inmates of the residency by causing a pound of arsenic
to be mixed with the ice sent in for daily consumption. This device
failed, and the next attack was aimed directly at the resident through
his own body servants.

Colonel Phayre was in the habit of drinking a glass of sherbet every
morning when he came home from an early walk. It was awaiting him on
the hall table and was prepared with sugared water and fresh pumelo
juice. One day he swallowed only a mouthful of this drink, disliking
its taste, and threw the rest out of the window, when he detected a
small amount of sediment in the bottom of the glass. When analysed
subsequently, this was found to contain arsenic and diamond dust.
Suspicion was at once aroused, and the possession of the powder charged
with these ingredients was traced to a _havildar_ of the military guard
of the residency, who kept it concealed in his waist belt. It was
not believed that any subordinate and impecunious person could have
afforded to buy diamond dust, and attention was at once diverted from
the _havildar_ to the prince, whose bitter feeling toward the resident
was well known.

Evidence so damnatory against Mulhar Rao was collected that the
government of India attached his person and decided to prosecute him.
A special court of inquiry was appointed, composed of three English
and three native commissioners, the first three leading lights on the
Indian bench, the second three Maharajas of the highest rank. The
Gaekwar was permitted to engage counsel, and was defended by one of the
most eminent of British barristers at that time, Sergeant Ballantine.
The arraignment of a reigning prince for the crime of murder by the
supreme power to whom he owed allegiance caused a great sensation in
India, and the issue of the protracted trial was watched with great
interest at home. In the end the three English commissioners were of
opinion that the Gaekwar was guilty through his paid agents of an
attempt to poison Colonel Phayre, and on the other hand, their three
native colleagues considered that the charge was not proved. The result
was much criticised and indeed condemned, but the adverse finding was
accepted by the then viceroy, Lord Northbrook, who forthwith deposed
Mulhar Rao and deprived him and his issue of all rights to the throne.
The decision was based upon “his notorious misconduct, his gross
misgovernment of the state and his evident incapacity to carry into
effect the necessary reforms,” the chief of all being the reform of his
own evil nature and personal character.

Sergeant Ballantine dissented from the view taken by the English
commissioners and disapproved of Lord Northbrook’s action. Following
the old legal axiom that the best course of an advocate whose case is
bad is to abuse the other side, the learned counsel threw the blame
chiefly upon Colonel Phayre. “He (Colonel Phayre) was fussy, meddlesome
and thoroughly injudicious,” the sergeant wrote in his memoirs. “There
were two adverse parties in the state, and instead of holding himself
aloof from both, he threw himself into that opposed to the Gaekwar and
was greedy to listen to every accusation and complaint that with equal
eagerness was gossiped into his ears.” But these last were by no means
imaginary. Mulhar Rao’s vile conduct was never in doubt, and it was
clear that he had tampered with the resident’s servants.

As regards the diamond dust which played a somewhat exaggerated part
in the affair, there is nothing to substantiate the common belief
that it is a deadly poison, any more than ground glass, which has an
equally bad name. It is an old and exploded superstition. The notorious
“succession powder” of the old Italian poisoners was supposed to be
diamond dust. Voltaire tells us that Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans,
died of acute irritant poisoning, the poison being diamond powder mixed
with pounded sugar and strewn over strawberries.

It may be noted here that the abominable practice of widow-burning
seems to have originated as a check upon the wife’s desire to get rid
of her husband. The practice dates back to the time of Strabo, who
gives the above origin for it. It was so common, says Mr. William
Methold, that a law was passed insisting that the wives should
accompany their deceased husbands to the funeral pyre. According to one
authority, poisoning by wives was so frequent that, in any one year,
four men died to every woman. Originating as a deterrent, the burning
of widows became in due course an act of pious devotion, a deed of
self-immolation acceptable to their bloodthirsty gods. But the original
reason is often quoted in the ancient writings, and the remarks of
a traveller, Robert Coverte, may be quoted in point. “The cause why
this law was first made was for that the women there were so fickle
and inconstant that upon any slight occasion of dislike or spleen they
would poison their husbands; whereas now the establishing and executing
of this law is the cause that moveth the wife to love and cherish her
husband and wisheth not to survive him.” It is very much to the credit
of the old East India Company that it sternly suppressed the practice
of _suttee_ with the other iniquitous forms of wrong-doing, such as
Thuggee, sacrificial suicide, infanticide and so forth. A crime so
largely practised through the ages by rulers and prominent personages
was likely to be generally imitated by commoner people.

The general use of drugs to compass murder which still commonly
obtains is not a little due to the facilities with which poisons may
be procured, not only from the unchecked sale, but because they may
be picked up, so to speak, on every hedge. Quoting Dr. Cheevers, the
varieties of poison used are very limited and may be briefly described.
The most common are the preparations of arsenic, aconite, nux vomica,
opium, oleander, datura and ganja, or Indian hemp. Many more drugs are,
however, procurable in Indian bazaars, and Dr. Cheevers has compiled a
list, more or less incomplete, of upwards of ninety, including those
already mentioned. Of late years the large increase in dispensaries and
the wide importation of chemicals has led to poisoning by sulphate of
zinc, Prussic acid, strychnine, cyanide of potassium, belladonna and
chlorodyne.

Some remarkable cases of poisoning were brought to light in Bombay
a few years ago, chiefly through the strenuous efforts of highly
intelligent native detectives. A diabolical plot to destroy a whole
family, of which four died and several were nearly killed, was the
so-called De Ga conspiracy in 1872. An unknown messenger delivered two
confectionery cakes as a gift with the compliments of a near relation.
Fatal results ensued with all who partook of the sweets. Suspicion at
last fell upon a brother of the De Ga family who hated his relations
and who accomplished the deed, assisted by an accomplice and especially
by his father who pretended to invoke the aid of sorcery.

Twenty years later a family of five persons was destroyed by one of the
sons, Bachoo, a spendthrift and gambler, who wished to expedite his
inheritance. Strychnine was the drug used, and it was administered
by the cook in the food he prepared. Bachoo’s father was the first to
succumb, and he was quickly followed by the rest of the family. When
the strychnine was found in the exhumed bodies, the police cleverly
traced its purchase by Bachoo from the druggists, and he and his
confederate were tried, convicted and hanged.

The quick-witted Hindu criminal soon adopted the European method of
securing ill-gotten gains by the insurance and murder of unsuspecting
victims. Palmer of Rugeley and La Pommerais of Paris had many imitators
in the East. A poor creature of weak intellect, Anacleto Duarte by
name, was done to death in this way by a friend and patron who pandered
to his vices and often lent him small sums to be spent in drink.
At last the latter, who was a bailiff in one of the Bombay courts,
contrived that Duarte should be insured in the Sun Life Office of
Canada for the sum of 10,000 rupees. Fonseca, the bailiff, paid the
premiums and was named in the policy as the beneficiary to receive the
amount insured if it became payable. After Duarte’s death the agent of
the insurance company, suspecting foul play, refused to hand over the
amount and the police were called in. It now appeared that Fonseca and
Duarte had visited a liquor shop together; that when two glasses of rum
were served to them, Duarte complained that his had a bitter taste,
caused no doubt by the addition of a pill which he had seen Fonseca
put into his glass. When Duarte’s body was exhumed, the existence of
strychnine in the viscera was verified, and it was shown that Fonseca
had bought it ostensibly as a poison for rats. Fonseca was found guilty
and duly hanged.

The criminal operations of the Dacoits who relied upon datura have
been already detailed. There were also gangs in Bombay who made it
their business to arrange marriages for well-to-do men with suitable
spinsters of great attractions supposed to belong to respectable
families. After the marriage the happy bridegroom found to his cost
that he had been deceived, and he woke up one fine morning without
his wife, who had fled with her accomplices, carrying off all his
jewels. In these cases datura again had been the drug used. A company
of poisoners long flourished in the province Scinde. These villains
were in the habit of disguising themselves as _fakirs_ who visited
people of known wealth and offered them food in God’s name. It was
generally accepted and piously consumed with fatal results, after which
their houses were plundered. The impunity with which this crime was
everywhere perpetrated was one of the greatest evils from which India
has suffered.

It is generally believed that many more brutal murders are committed
than are actually brought to light. The police custom of dragging
witnesses from their houses for long periods encouraged those dwelling
in the neighbourhood of the crime to combine in concealing the
circumstances and, if possible, the actual fact. It was the habit
of the police at one time to pounce down upon a suspected village,
assemble the residents, and harangue, browbeat and threaten them with
pains and penalties to extort unwilling confessions. Worse still,
these witnesses were dragged great distances, a hundred or a hundred
and fifty miles, to appear before the courts to give evidence. A great
improvement has, however, taken place in recent years. Good roads and
railways have greatly facilitated communication, the magistracy is
active and efficient and criminal sessions are held monthly even in the
most remote districts.

Murder by violence was quite as common in India as by poisoning and
committed often by peculiar and unconventional means. Various kinds of
weapons were employed. Among them were the bludgeon and the club or
_lathi_, the stout and weighty bamboo staff which, when the thick end
is bound with iron, becomes a tremendous weapon of offence. The head
is most frequently assailed, and deadly blows result in broken scalps
or crushed-in skulls with frightful injuries affecting also the heart,
liver and spleen. The club is made of hard wood and in shape is not
unlike an exaggerated rolling pin. In one case a stone pestle was used
to pound in the victim’s head.

The favourite cutting weapon was the _tulwar_, or curved sword, which
could slash a person almost to pieces with clean-cut saucer-shaped
wounds. The _tulwar_ has a sharp point, but was seldom used to stab.
The halberd had a crescent blade set in a heavy wooden handle. A
chopper could do terrible mischief, the axe likewise, and the bill or
hatchet with a hooked point. Death could be given with a spear head,
arrow or dagger, the kris or the _aro_, a three-pronged striking
instrument like a trident. Fatal wounds have been inflicted by a strip
of split bamboo long and sharp pointed.

Strangulation has been practised in other ways than by throttling with
the handkerchief. It was the custom when killing children for their
ornaments to squeeze or compress the throat with the hands, assisting
the process with the pressure of the knee or foot, and more violence
was often employed than was necessary to cause death. Sometimes one
bamboo stick was placed over the throat and another under, so that the
compression between became fatal.

Suicide by hanging is common in India, and sometimes murderers, having
accomplished their purpose by cruel blows, have been known to suspend
their victims by the neck to give the impression of self-destruction.
Murder by hanging is not unknown in India. There are several cases on
record where persons, after being cruelly misused, were hanged while
still alive.

Homicide by exposing the victim to be bitten by poisonous snakes
was practised in the olden times and was known to the penal code
as a method of inflicting capital punishment. “Witches were crammed
into a small chamber full of cobras, where they first half died of
fright and then quite died of snake bites.” A Gentu prisoner in 1709,
after inconceivable torture in the scorching sun by day, was cast by
night into a dungeon with venomous snakes to keep him company. It is
mentioned in history that Hannibal during a naval action with the
Romans launched earthen pots filled with snakes into the enemy’s ships.

The high intelligence of the elephant enabled the native to train it
to become the executioner of criminals in India. The great beast would
obey the orders of his _mahout_, whether to kill instantly by the
pressure of his foot or to protract the culprit’s agony by breaking his
bones one by one and leaving him to die by inches. A parricide, bound,
was fastened by his heels with a small iron chain to the hind leg of an
elephant and dragged two miles across country till all the flesh was
worn from his bones. At Baroda, in 1814, a slave who had murdered his
master was similarly made fast to the right hind leg of an elephant,
and at every step of the beast it jerked the victim forward so that
in a few moments every limb was dislocated. He was as much broken as
on the wheel after being dragged five hundred yards. The man, covered
with mud, still showed signs of life, and was suffering excruciating
tortures. In the end the elephant, as he had been trained to do,
placed his foot on the criminal’s head and at once killed him.

The criminal records are full of the forgery of banknotes, the coining
of false money, of daring robberies committed when houses are broken
into, bank premises invaded and iron safes are forced. Sharpers and
swindlers, rivalling the most astute in Europe or America, have
flourished and defied the pursuit of the police. Some very notable
manufacturers of spurious currency notes have spread dismay in
financial circles. One of the most active and successful was a certain
Vancutta Chellummyab, whose arrest in Madras in 1872 caused a great
sensation throughout India. A vast amount of false Madras currency
notes were in circulation in the three presidencies, to the total face
value, it was said, of four lacs of rupees. The fraud was discovered at
Benares, when a pretended agent of a Madras rajah paid for extensive
purchases of jewelry with spurious notes. The chief forger, Vancutta
Chellummyab, when finally arrested in Madras, had notes in his
possession concealed in an old portmanteau to the value of upwards of
two hundred thousand rupees. A few years later Bombay was the centre of
operations, and a large quantity of the most perfectly imitated notes
were fabricated and in circulation. Information was given by one of
the principals in the fraud to divert attention from himself, and a
descent made by the police secured a quantity of tools and materials
for engraving counterfeit notes and coining bad Australian sovereigns.
There were dies, moulds and stamps and a number of coins, foreign and
native, manufactured out of the baser metals.

One of the most expert forgers of any age or country was a man named
Govind Narayen Davira of Bombay. He came of a family of forgers, the
son and grandson of forgers, and did a large business in his nefarious
art. A single scrap of handwriting sufficed to enable him to fabricate
a whole document. He knew all about the action of chemicals on paper
and could erase all traces of original writing to give a clean sheet
for a fresh fraudulent statement. He was known to have converted a
government promissory note of 5,000 rupees into one of double the
amount. His frauds extended over a period of five or six years and were
finally exposed by the failure of an attempt to blackmail.

Davira was a popular person because he was liberal to his poorer
confederates. But he fell at last into the hands of the police and was
lodged in Poona gaol. Here, being resolved to avoid trial, he compassed
self-destruction in a very reckless fashion. A kerosene oil lamp was
kept constantly burning in his cell, rather rashly. He contrived to
saturate his clothing with the oil and then set fire to himself with
the result that he was practically burned alive.

One of the cleverest frauds was the forgery of postage stamps in
Bombay. A forged stamp came into the possession of a London collector,
by whom the fact was reported to the postmaster-general in Bombay.
The forgery was the work of one of Davira’s gang and was traced to a
Brahmin, Shrida, who had succeeded in producing an excellent imitation
with the clumsiest implements. He first printed the stamp on a
lithographer’s stone and then  it so exactly that it deceived
even experts. Many hundreds of these stamps were seized when Shrida was
arrested.

The ingenuity of the cheats and swindlers in planning their frauds
was only equalled by the simplicity of their victims. Over and over
again the revelation of hidden treasure was made to dupes, who paid
for the knowledge of the whereabouts of the secret hoards, said to be
the property of dead rajahs, or the proceeds of great robberies which
had to be temporarily abandoned. Credulous fools were imposed upon
by fictitious _fakirs_ claiming the alchemist’s power to transmute
the commoner metals into gold and silver, or religious impostors
played upon their superstitious disciples to acquire a similar power.
There were at one time thirty-five different gangs of swindlers who
preyed upon goldsmiths, pawnbrokers and money changers. One of these
confederacies was called the “golden gang,” the members of which
uttered false money or made large purchases of jewelry for imaginary
governors and rajahs, for which they evaded payment, or raised money
upon sealed packets, the valuable contents having been spirited away by
sleight of hand.

Until the middle of the last century very extensive frauds were
practised by the misappropriation of timber in the large forests of
India. The natives seemed to have believed in their prescriptive rights
to what was really the exclusive property of the state. Thousands of
people were engaged in cutting down trees for firewood, when it was
within paying distance of removal by road or rail to some neighbouring
city. These depredations have now been checked by the establishment
of an effective, well-organised forest department, the officers of
which control and supervise large tracts of timber, cutting down when
desirable and planting afresh to ensure future supply. The reader will
remember Rudyard Kipling’s graphic account of the Indian forest officer
and his remarkable native assistant, Mowgli, of the story, _In the
Rukh_, in the volume entitled, “Many Inventions.”

Housebreaking is among the minor crimes of India which is especially
troublesome. Earthen walls and foundations facilitate the operations
of the thieves who are commonly known as “wall-piercers.” These
depredators are in the habit of making a hole through the walls,
driving a gallery, in fact, into the interior of a house through which
they can wriggle into the strong room, generally situated about the
centre. As it is always understood that the owner of the house may
be on the alert and in waiting to receive the thief, as a matter of
precaution he will either emerge feet foremost or push before him an
earthen vessel having something of the shape of a man’s head to receive
the first blow of the _tulwar_, or other defensive weapon. The Indian
housebreaker is a slippery customer, difficult to seize, for he is
usually naked, and has carefully oiled his person so as to easily slip
through the fingers of any one who lays hold of him.

I cannot bring this account of crime in India to a close without
mention of an atrocity which is unequalled in the annals of human
oppression.

What imprisonment may mean in the East, when inflicted in defiance of
the most elementary conditions of health in a tropical climate, has
been recorded in letters of blood in the awful story of the Black Hole
of Calcutta. The miscreant responsible for the crime was the Nabob of
Bengal, Surajah Dowlah, who had gained a fleeting triumph over the
early English settlers, and having captured Fort William at the mouth
of Hugli, and made all the occupants prisoners, he turned them over
to his savage followers. For security they were incarcerated in one
small room or chamber some eighteen feet square. The season was the
height of summer; the room was closed to the eastward and southward by
dead walls and to the northward by a wall and door, so that no fresh
air could enter save by two small windows, strongly barred with iron.
Into this limited space 146 human beings were crammed, already in a
state of exhaustion by a long day spent in fatiguing conflict, and
several of them seriously wounded. Piteous entreaties were made to the
guards on duty to diminish the numbers imprisoned by removal elsewhere;
large sums were offered as the price of this boon, but with no effect.
No step could be taken without the permission of the Nabob, who was
asleep, and none dared wake him. After vain attempts to break open the
doors and fruitless appeals to the mercy of the sleeping Nabob, “the
prisoners went mad with despair.” The rest of the story can best be
told in the words of one of the masters of the English language, Lord
Macaulay. “They trampled each other down, fought for the places at the
windows, fought for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of
the murderers mocked their agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored
the guards to fire among them. The gaolers in the meantime held lights
to the bars, and shouted with laughter at the frantic struggles of
their victims. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and
moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and
permitted the door to be opened. But it was some time before the
soldiers could make a lane for the survivors, by piling up on each side
the heaps of corpses on which the burning climate had already begun to
do its loathsome work. When at length a passage was made, twenty-three
ghastly figures, such as their own mothers would not have known,
staggered one by one out of the charnel house. A pit was instantly dug.
The dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into
it promiscuously and covered up.

“But these things which, after the lapse of more than eighty years,
cannot be told or read without horror, awakened neither remorse nor
pity in the bosom of the savage Nabob. He inflicted no punishment on
the murderers. He showed no tenderness to the survivors. Some of them,
indeed, from whom nothing was to be got, were suffered to depart; but
those from whom it was thought that anything could be extorted were
treated with execrable cruelty. Holwell, unable to walk, was carried
before the tyrant, who reproached him, threatened him, and sent him
up the country in irons, together with some other gentlemen who were
suspected of knowing more than they chose to tell about the treasures
of the Company. These persons, still bowed down by the sufferings
of that great agony, were lodged in miserable sheds, and fed only
with grain and water, till at length the intercessions of the female
relations of the Nabob procured their release. One Englishwoman had
survived that night. She was placed in the harem of the prince at
Moorshedabad.”

It is told in history how the merciless Nabob was eventually called
to strict account. The English at Madras vowed vengeance, and an
expedition was forthwith fitted out for the Hugli, small in numbers,
but full of undaunted spirit, and led by one of the most famous
of British soldiers, Lord Clive. The victory of Plassy, which
consolidated the British power in India, overthrew Surajah Dowlah, who
expiated the crime of the Black Hole when captured and put to death by
his successor Meer Jaffier.




CHAPTER VI

THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS

    Revived as a penal settlement after the Indian Mutiny in
    1857--Now holds some twelve thousand convicts--Port Blair system
    established--Graduated treatment--Well-selected marriages--Lapses
    from good order--Cases and causes--Assassination of Lord Mayo--The
    aboriginal Andamanese--The Tarawas--Escapes constantly effected
    by Burmese prisoners--General results achieved--Development by
    cultivation--Clearance of forests--Tea plantation--Numerous
    exports--Deportation from the Straits Settlements to
    Bombay--Ratnagiri gaol.


The Indian government long practised transportation beyond the seas
as a punishment for the most determined criminals. The terrors of
crossing the “black water” were very potent to the native mind,
although the effect of the penalty as a deterrent was never marked
and the practice gradually fell into desuetude. But it was revived in
1857 as a solution of the difficulty in dealing with the great body
of rebels and mutineers in custody charged with participation in the
great Indian Mutiny, a special commission was despatched to visit the
Andaman Islands and report upon their fitness for the establishment of
a great penal settlement. To the student of penal science, the results
achieved in the Indian Ocean, or more exactly, the Sea of Bengal, must
be extremely interesting. The system of transportation has succeeded
better there than anywhere else, whether in the Australian colonies,
where it resulted in the creation of a great nation at the cost of much
human misery, or in the French experiment in New Caledonia. Russia has
also tried transportation on a gigantic scale with the most deplorable
results in Siberia and on the island of Saghalien.

The settlement on the Andamans, or more precisely upon the northern
and principal island, has by this time accomplished a very distinct
work in penal colonisation. Many causes, natural and artificial, have
contributed to this gratifying result: a fertile soil, a good, albeit
tropical climate; an intelligent administration, which has been backed
up by the willing efforts of convict labourers, alive generally to
their own benefit in making the best of the system in practice. The
force available for the cultivation and development of the main island
has always been large.

It is an industrious, self-supporting and for the most part peaceable
population, where good order and a quiet demeanour are enforced by
stringent discipline, although the inherent evil nature of so many
criminals cannot be invariably held in check, and ghastly occurrences
have from time to time been recorded in almost every nook and corner
of Port Blair, the headquarters of the penal settlement. The Andaman
convict has committed some heinous offences; he is a murderer in some
form or other, deliberate, vindictive, or moved by sudden ungovernable
passion; he has been a highway robber or persistent Dacoit; he has
forged notes or securities on a great scale. He has betrayed a
serious trust, has been a wrecker and desperado, and has more than
once deserved the extreme penalty of the law. Beneath the surface the
community is a seething mass of depravity, of wickedness, generally
latent, but breaking out often in the most violent and bloodthirsty
excesses.

To have held the dangerous elements continually in check, to have
largely modified and counteracted their evil tendencies, and to have
returned the worst characters to their homes cured and reformed is
a subject for congratulation by those who achieved it, and some
account of the system employed at the Andamans is worth giving here.
It is right, however, to admit that this system is not entirely
efficacious. All are not amenable to better influences and a certain
small percentage remains incorrigible. Some four per cent. of the total
population have shown themselves so desperately bad that it has been
deemed unsafe to suffer them to leave the precincts of the gaol.

Every convict on first arrival is relegated to the close confinement
of the cellular prison by way of breaking him in, and he is detained
there under the most irksome conditions for an unbroken period of six
months. He remains in his cell all day and all night, save for a brief
space spent at exercise with others, but in strict silence. His next
step is to an associated gaol where gang labour of a severe character
is enforced, and is imposed for a year and a half. Then come three
years of unremitting toil, the exact counterpart of penal servitude as
understood in Great Britain--hard labour under supervision, unpaid,
unrewarded, but he is well fed, well housed and cared for, and always
closely guarded. Five years have thus elapsed in a painfully monotonous
and irksome existence, after which his employment is pleasanter and his
personal capacity is studied; the more intelligent are selected for
positions of trust and authority.

Comparative freedom comes at the end of ten years, the convict gains
his ticket-of-leave and is called in local language a “self-supporter.”
He has done, more or less, with prison restraints; he lives in some
small village in a house of his own and earns his living his own
way; he farms; he keeps cattle; he moves about freely unguarded and
unwatched; he sends home to the mainland for his wife and children;
or, if single, he may marry a female convict in the same position as
himself. His condition is to a certain extent enviable. If industrious,
he may make and put by money, but still he is tied and bound by
regulation; he has no civil rights, and is in the hands of a paternal
authority which prescribes his place of residence and will suffer him
to move to and fro within his village, if well conducted, but he cannot
leave the settlement and he must not be idle under pain of the loss of
privileges and relegation to enforced labour. Existence nevertheless is
tolerable, and in this way he completes ten or fifteen years more until
at length the time for absolute release arrives. In the earlier period
of this last stage he has received assistance in the shape of free
gifts of food and tools and a roof to cover him, but his self-reliance
is stimulated by the obligation in later years to fend for himself
and accept all the public burdens of the community. He must pay rent
and taxes and all charges exacted from the free population. All the
disabilities are equally imposed upon female convicts with permission
to marry or enter domestic service after five years of conditional
liberation.

We see in this system a consistent effort to encourage self-help and
self-restraint. Moral improvement is its great aim; good conduct is
encouraged; retrogression, or lapse into wrong-doing, is punished by
the withdrawal of privileges and a return to irksome restraint. On
the other hand, substantial reward is offered to those who have made
the best use of their ticket-of-leave, and the old convict, purged
of his original offence, emerges, and, backed by the small capital
he has saved, has become an orderly and reputable member of society,
thoroughly reformed, broken to harness and reasonably certain to
continue in the straight road. He is neither pauper nor gaol-bird;
he is no unwelcome burden on his relatives, no menace to public
security, but a source of strength rather than weakness to the body
politic. Penal exile has never before achieved such excellent results.
Steady industry, as we have seen, is the general rule, and morality is
greatly encouraged. Convict marriages, such a fruitful source of evil
elsewhere, as in New Caledonia and Saghalien, where they have fallen
largely into disuse, are preceded by so many precautions that the bond
when entered into is seldom broken. The fitness of the contracting
parties is personally inquired into by the chief authority of the place
who must give his sanction or no marriage can take place. Permission
is refused in certain cases as when a husband in India declines to
divorce his convict wife, or when the applicants are of bad character
or the male is an hereditary Dacoit, or when there is a difference in
caste. Great care is also taken of the children when any are born.
The young are well cared for; primary education is compulsory and
technical instruction is free to all. Thrift is steadily inculcated in
the rising generation and stimulated by the example of the elders. No
institution is more flourishing at Port Blair than the savings bank,
and the self-supporting convicts are often considerable depositors from
the economies made in their allowance and the profits on their labour.
Sanitation receives the very best attention in the islands, and both
death and sick rate are, for the East, exceptionally low. The public
health is seldom, if ever, affected by malignant epidemic disease;
cholera is a rare visitant, and small-pox is constantly kept in check.
There is an abundant and most efficient medical staff, and the convicts
at large, as well as those actually in durance, can count upon the
official doctor’s unremitting care.

Although the general tone of the settlement is excellent, and good
order is preserved, there are occasionally lapses among the convicts
whose manners and dispositions are by no means mild and submissive, nor
can their evil impulses be easily repressed, or still less entirely
stamped out. The convict temper is irritable and breaks out often into
resistance to authority and bitter quarrels of one with another which
sometimes end in murderous affrays. There is a seamy side to Port
Blair which is often shown in resistance to authority exercised, as
it mostly is, by fellow convicts advanced to positions of trust; for
some six per cent. of well-conducted convicts are regularly employed
as warders, guards and overseers. This is in accordance with the
general practice in India, although entirely condemned by modern penal
science. Nevertheless, mutiny and insubordination are uncommon on any
large scale, although vindictive feelings are aroused and cherished at
real or fancied injustice and oppression, and in the annals of murders
committed one or two convict officials killed by comrades figure
annually.

The causes of murder in the Andamans hardly differ from those inciting
to it elsewhere. Murderous passion is swiftly aroused among men with
savage, irritable tempers, quick to quarrel, quicker still to strike;
consuming thirst for revenge will be slaked only in blood; and greed
and covetousness are easily awakened in people whose self-control
is weak. A small reason often suffices for the infliction of death.
A convict asked a village woman to be allowed to husk his rice in
her mortar and killed her brutally with an axe when she refused.
An old Dacoit, who had been refused permission to marry, killed a
more fortunate rival to whom the woman of his choice was given. Two
convicts, about to be granted tickets as self-supporters, were eager
to obtain sufficient funds to give them a good start; they discovered
that a convict, who was a notorious miser, had a secret hoard, and
his fate was sealed. His body was picked up in a running stream with
his head broken in. A somewhat similar case was that of a labouring
convict who was in possession of a sum of money lent by a friend; he
first was inveigled into a lonely spot and there knocked down by a
blow on the eye, after which he was strangled. A convict employed as
a petty officer in hospital incurred the deadly enmity of a patient
for reporting him to the doctor, and the patient gave vent to his
hatred by killing his enemy with a thrust of a pointed bamboo. The
same weapon was used by another convict who beat out the brains of a
petty officer for slapping him on parade in the presence of a hundred
men. One convict had caught another hanging about the barrack room bent
upon thieving, and having expressed his intention of denouncing him was
murdered while asleep on his bed. A convict warder supervising a party
of sail-makers had reason to find fault with one of his charges for
idling, and at the first opportunity, before anyone had time to suspect
or prevent him, the labourer picked up a knife and stabbed the overseer.

Any weapon would serve to give effect to the homicidal frenzy;
sometimes it was a rice pounder, sometimes a wooden crutch, sometimes
an axe for cutting firewood, sometimes a heavy mallet used in
wool-teasing. The convicts were known to commit the capital offence
in order to draw down the death penalty when they were tired of life
from long brooding over fancied unjust treatment. Sentence of death by
hanging was the invariable requital of murder when clearly proved, and
it was passed by a sessions’ judge, subject to subsequent confirmation
by a court of reference. Lesser punishments were sometimes imposed,
such as prolonged transportation or relegation to the chain gang, while
corporal punishment was ordered for lesser offences.

An atrocious murder which echoed through the whole world was that of
the viceroy of India, Lord Mayo, who was killed by an Andaman convict
in 1872. The viceroy had visited Mount Harriet, a finely wooded
<DW72> rising above Port Blair and looking out over Viper Island with
a glorious view eastward, in order to judge of its suitability as a
sanatorium. He had just finished the descent. “The ship’s bells had
just rung seven; the launch with steam up was whizzing at the jetty
stairs; a group of her seamen were chatting on the pier-end. It was
now quite dark, and the black line of the jungle seemed to touch the
water’s edge. The viceroy’s party passed some large loose stones to
the left of the head of the pier, and advanced along the jetty; two
torchbearers in front.” The viceroy, preceding the rest, stepped
quickly forward to descend the stairs to the launch. The next moment
the people in the rear heard a noise, as of “the rush of some animal”
from behind the loose stones; one or two saw a hand raised and a
knife blade suddenly glisten in the torchlight. The viceroy’s private
secretary heard a thud, and instantly turning round, found a man
“fastened like a tiger” on the back of Lord Mayo.

“In a second twelve men were on the assassin; an English officer was
pulling them off, and with his sword-hilt keeping back the native
guards, who would have killed the assailant on the spot. The torches
had gone out; but the viceroy, who had staggered over the pier-side,
was dimly seen rising up in the knee-deep water, and clearing the hair
off his brow with his hand as if recovering himself. His private
secretary was instantly at his side in the surf, helping him up the
bank. ‘Burne,’ he said quietly, ‘they’ve hit me.’ Then, in a louder
voice, which was heard on the pier, ‘It’s all right, I don’t think I’m
much hurt,’ or words to that effect. In another minute he was sitting
under the smoky glare of the re-lit torches, on a rude native cart at
the side of the jetty, his legs hanging loosely down. Then they lifted
him bodily on to the cart, and saw a great dark patch on the back of
his light coat. The blood came streaming out, and men tried to staunch
it with their handkerchiefs. For a moment or two he sat up on the cart,
then he fell heavily backwards. ‘Lift up my head,’ he said faintly, and
said no more.”

The assassin, Sher Ali, was a very brave man belonging to one of
the Afridi tribes, who had done excellent service to more than one
commissioner at Peshawar and distinguished himself as a soldier. He
was completely trusted by Colonel Reynolds Taylor, one of the best of
our Indian officers, when at Peshawar, and was often in attendance on
his family; in fact, he was the confidential servant of the house.
This man, however, belonged to a society in which tribal feuds were
a hereditary custom. Some such feud existed in his family and he was
called upon to take his part in exacting a bloody vengeance for a
quarrel. Had he committed the murder on his own side of the frontier,
no notice could have been taken of it; and it would have been esteemed
a legitimate deed sanctioned by the religious feelings and customs
of the tribe; but his offence was committed within British territory
and must be tried by British laws. He was convicted and sentenced to
transportation to the Andamans instead of death, which he would greatly
have preferred. Continually brooding under a sense of wrong, he took
the first opportunity that offered for murderous retaliation and found
the death he desired, on the gallows.

Attempts to escape from the islands were at times frequent, encouraged
by the easy access to the sea and the facility with which boats
could be seized. But recaptures were also constantly made, and there
were other chances against the fugitives, especially that of being
run down by the aboriginal Andamanese. The natives of these islands
are savages of a Nigrito race allied to the Papuans, but who, from
having had no connection with the outer world for several centuries,
have kept their blood absolutely pure. They are of small stature,
the males a little under five feet in height, but finely made and
well proportioned. In colour they are a jet black, and are among
the darkest hued specimens of mankind. They are inveterate smokers,
men, women and children, and are bright and intelligent, somewhat
childish, petulant and quick tempered, but merry and light-hearted.
They constitute a good unofficial guard, and as they constantly prowl
round the convict settlements are a great deterrent to escape.
Being well used to jungle life, they are very successful trackers,
who frequently bring back fugitives dead or alive. If by chance the
evading convicts fall into the hands of the Jarawa tribe, their fate is
sealed. These Jarawas are and always have been utterly irreclaimable;
neither kindness nor force has had any appreciable effect in overcoming
their unconquerable dislike to strangers, even of their own blood
belonging to other tribes. Armed with bows and arrows, they show fight
whenever encountered, and when pressed and punishment is attempted,
they retire into the impenetrable jungle. With the exception of these
irreconcilables, the Andamanese have been trained, like other wild
animals, by patience and kindness to treat us with entire confidence
and trust.

The strong yearning to escape torments more especially the natives of
Burmah, a large number of whom are deported to the Andamans. They are
a semi-amphibious race, largely brought up to a life on the water,
expert boatmen and tireless swimmers. Precise rules are in force at the
Andamans that only a limited number of Burmese may be included in any
one boat’s crew. More than half the escapes by water were accomplished
by Burmese, who boldly ventured out into the open sea, risking all
its perils to win across to their dearly loved native land. It is a
curious fact that the Burmese Dacoit, who would face the death penalty
with fortitude, has always dreaded imprisonment or deportation with
overmastering terror. One explanation of this consuming dread is the
not uncommon fear of the unknown. Again, the treatment of prisoners in
Burmah under the native régime was merciless; the most excruciating
tortures were the rule, and protracted life was worse than a thousand
deaths. Exile to the Andaman Islands was anticipated with nameless
apprehension. The case of a famous Dacoit may be quoted in proof of
this. He had been long in custody; he awaited his trial with patience
and resignation, and he would have heard a sentence of death unmoved,
but he was quite overcome when a short term of transportation to the
Andamans was passed upon him, although it was accompanied by a promise
of early conditional liberation. When the time came for his departure,
he refused to move off with his escort, kicking and even biting
everyone within reach, and eventually he had to be tied with ropes and
carried along.

In this connection, Major E. C. Browne, in “The Coming of the Great
Queen,” tells the following:

“It was the same with other Dacoits who had been taken red-handed.
Two or three were shot, others flogged and released and several were
detained for deportation. These were the gloomiest of all and begged
to be killed or released. One fellow actually succeeded in evading his
sentence. He had got hold of a soldier’s boot-lace and with this he
strangled himself during the night. I should scarcely have been able
to credit this story if the witness of the dead man in the morning,
with the boot-lace drawn so tight that it had actually penetrated the
skin, had not been an officer of my own regiment whose veracity was
unimpeachable.”

The best general account of the results obtained in the Andamans is
found in the address to the Society of Arts by Colonel Temple, sometime
chief commissioner to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Andaman
penal system “is the result of the constant attention of the government
which created it, and is the outcome of the measures of practical men,
devised to meet the difficulties with which they have found themselves
face to face, and reduced to order and rule by some of the keenest
intellects that have worked in India for many years past.” Repeatedly
tinkered and patched and recast and remodelled though it has been, the
Andaman system is still inchoate, still on its trial, as it were. It
could not well be otherwise, for in dealing with the criminal we are
attempting to solve a mighty problem as old as criminality itself.

From the best estimates at hand we may take it that the permanent
convict strength of the settlement may be placed at about twelve
thousand, of whom about eight hundred are women, and the rule is that
only life convicts are sent from India and life and long-term convicts
from Burmah. The people received, therefore, are the murderers who
have for some reason escaped the death penalty, and the perpetrators
of the more heinous offences against person and property, the men of
brutal violence, the highwaymen, the robbers, the habitual thieves and
the receivers of stolen goods, the worst of the swindlers, forgers,
cheats, coiners and, in fact, the most unrestrained temperaments of
a continent. These considerations show the scale of the work and the
nature of the task. Any one observing the work of the English in
the East may possibly be struck with the idea that the reason for
the acknowledged capacity of the race for colonial enterprise and
the maintenance of empire is the ability and the willingness of the
average Englishman to put his hand to any kind of work that may come
his way, without any special training, from framing suitable laws and
regulations and creating suitable organisations to making roads and
ditches, building houses and clearing land and ploughing it. Here in
Port Blair, the officers entrusted with the creation and organisation
had no training for the work and were without any special guidance
and teaching, yet they managed, with the worst possible material to
work upon, to create in little more than forty years, upon primeval
forest and swamp, situated in an enervating and, until mastered, a
deadly climate, a community supporting itself in regard to many of its
complicated wants.

They began with the dense forests, the fetid swamps and the
pestilential coral banks of tropical islands, and have made out of
them many square miles of grass and arable lands, supporting over
fifty villages besides convict stations. Miles upon miles of swamp
have been reclaimed, the coral banks have been controlled and a place
with regard to which the words climate and pestilence were almost
synonymous has been turned into one favourably spoken of as to its
healthiness. The settlement now grows its own vegetables, tea, coffee,
cocoa, tapioca and arrowroot, some of its ordinary food grains and most
of its fodder. It supplies itself with the greater part of its animal
food and all its fuel and salt. In other lines of work, it makes its
own boats and provides from its own resources the bulk of the materials
for its buildings which are constructed and erected locally. Among
the materials produced are all the timber, stone, bricks, lime and
mortar, and most of the iron and metal work are made up there from raw
material. In the matter of convict clothing, all that is necessary to
be purchased elsewhere is the roughest of cotton hanks and wool in the
first raw condition, every other operation being performed on the spot.
It provides much of its own leather.

In achieving the results, the officers have had first to learn for
themselves as best they could how to turn out the work to hand and then
to teach what they had learned to the most unpromising pupils that can
be imagined for the work required of them in Port Blair. And they have
been hampered all along by the necessities of convict discipline, by
the constant release of their men and their punishment for misconduct.
It is under such conditions that the corps of artificers and other
convicts have had to be utilised. Nevertheless, the roads and drains,
the buildings and boats, the embankments and reservoirs, are as
good and durable as are the same class of structures elsewhere. The
manufacturers are sufficient for their purpose, and there are among the
taught those who are now skilled in the use of many kinds of machinery.
Cultivation is generally fair and some of it very good; the general
sanitation is literally second to none.

First of all the industries of the Andamans is that of timber, and
to accelerate and increase it a steam tramway has been instituted
and there are now some fourteen miles of line connecting the forests
with the shores of Port Blair. As a further adjunct steam saw-mills
were erected in 1896 and a forest department that employs from five
to six hundred men daily under its own officers, not only supplies
the settlement with all of its requirements in timber from the local
forests, but also exports timber and forest produce to various places
in India and Europe. Of these latter exports, rattans and gurjun oil
are the chief; other natural products of the islands are trepang,
tortoise-shell and edible birds’ nests, but they are collected only
in small quantities. The principal cultivations in which convicts
and ex-convicts are engaged are paddy, sugar cane, Indian corn and
turmeric; cocoanuts have during the past thirty-five years been
extensively planted, and besides the agricultural products previously
mentioned, vegetables and fruits of various kinds are grown. The larger
industries in which the penal community is engaged have already been
alluded to, but there are many minor employments, the products from
which also go toward making the settlement self-supporting. Among these
are to be found the manufacture of all kinds of furniture, cane chairs,
baskets, many varieties of bamboo work and ornamental woodcarving,
woven articles from serviettes to saddle-girths, and blankets, pottery,
rope and mats, silver, tin, brass and iron work, shoes, rickshaws and
carts, besides the production of such materials as lime, bricks and
tiles. Port Blair is in communication three and often four times a
month with Calcutta, Madras and Rangoon by the vessels of the Asiatic
Steam Navigation Company. The distances between the settlement and the
ports named are 796, 780 and 387 miles respectively.

The earliest penal settlement on the Andamans was in the southern
island, where it was founded on the present site of Port Blair in 1792.
It was known as the “old harbour.” After three years the establishment
was moved to the present Port Cornwallis on the northern island, but
this proved to be most unhealthy and it was closed, the convicts,
numbering some two hundred and seventy, being removed to Penang, at the
extremity of the Malay Peninsula. In the early “fifties” the Straits
Settlements sometimes sent their long-term convicts to Bombay, from
where they were usually drafted to such moist and congenial climates as
Tannah and Ratnagiri. By good behaviour they earned tickets-of-leave to
the hill stations, Mahabuleshwar and Matheran, where they became the
market-gardeners of the place, many preferring to remain after their
time had expired, respected and respectable citizens, often possessed
of considerable wealth. At one time the Ratnagiri gaol contained about
three hundred and sixty convicts; “at least two-thirds were Chinamen
and Malays from the Straits, great ruffians, each with a record of
piracy or murder, or both combined. Many of them were heavily fettered
and carefully guarded by armed police when at their ordinary work in
the ‘laterite’ quarries, for they were mostly powerful men;” the tools
they used were formidable weapons and as there were known to be deadly
feuds always present among them, serious disturbances and outbreaks
were constantly dreaded. Nevertheless, misconduct was exceedingly rare;
breaches of gaol discipline were much fewer among these desperadoes
than among the milder Hindus in the work-sheds within the gaol. The
fact having in due course created much surprise, inquiries were
instituted as to why pirates and murderers, usually so insubordinate in
other places, were so well-conducted and quiet at Ratnagiri.

The riddle was presently solved. “For some years one Sheik Kassam had
been gaoler. Belonging to the fisherman class and possessed of very
little education, he had, nevertheless, worked his way upward through
the police by dint of honesty, hard work and a certain shrewdness
which had more than once brought him to the front. At last, toward
the end of his service, the gaolership falling vacant, he was, with
everyone’s cordial approval, nominated to the post.” With comparative
rest and improved pay, the old gentleman waxed fatter and jollier
and was esteemed one of the most genial companions the country could
produce. The cares of state, and the responsibility of three hundred
murderous convicts, weighed lightly on Sheik Kassam. He developed a
remarkable talent or predilection for gardening, almost from the first.
“He laid out the quarry beds, brought water down to irrigate them,
produced all the gaol required in the way of green stuff, and made
tapioca and arrowroot by the ton. The better plot of land belonging
to the gaol lay between Sheik Kassam’s own official residence, a
tiny bungalow-fashioned dwelling, and a walled courtyard near to the
highroad. The sheik had no difficulty in obtaining permission to erect
a high wall of rubble from the quarries along the whole road frontage,
so that, as he urged, the convicts at work in the garden would not be
gazed at by passers-by, and that forbidden articles, such as tobacco,
sweetmeats, liquor, and the like, should not be passed or even thrown
over to them.”

Presently this favourite slice of garden was safely boxed in from the
public view by an enclosure some eight feet high, extending from the
gaol itself round to the gaoler’s house, the only entrance to it being
a little wicket-gate by the side of the sheik’s back-yard.

At last the head-superintendent of the Bombay prison heard that
Sheik Kassam’s disciplinary system consisted in his bringing the
most dangerous of the Chinamen and Malays quietly into his back-yard
from the adjoining garden, and there regaling them with plenty of
sweetmeats, sugar, drink in moderate quantity, and adding even the
joys of female society of a peculiar sort. If any one became unruly
or saucy, he was liable to get a dozen lashes, but if they behaved
decently they all had their little festivals with regularity. After
this discovery, poor old Sheik Kassam’s character as a model gaoler was
gone; he was dismissed, but with a full pension which he did not live
long to enjoy.




CHAPTER VII

PRISONS OF BURMAH

    British acquisition of Burmah--Quarrels with the king in 1824--His
    reprisals--British subjects seized and sent to prison--Mr. Henry
    Gouger’s narrative--The “Death Prison”--Gigantic stocks--Filthiness
    of prison--Tortures inflicted--Barbarous trials--Horrible
    life--Rats and vermin--Smallpox--Tobacco a valuable
    disinfectant--Another “Black Hole”--Chained to a leper--Released
    by the advance of British troops--Penal code of Burmah--Ordeals
    and punishments--Treading to death by elephants--Dacoity the last
    form of resistance to British rule--Prison life--The Burmese
    gaol-bird--An outbreak.


The acquisition and annexation of Burmah by Great Britain, first the
lower province with three-fourths of the seaboard, and then the entire
kingdom, were accomplished between 1824 and 1886, in a little more
than half a century, that is to say. Until this took place the country
was generally in a state of anarchy, the king was a bloodthirsty
despot, and the state council was at his bidding no better than a
band of Dacoits who plundered the people and murdered them wholesale.
The ruling powers were always anxious to pick a quarrel with their
powerful British neighbours, and were so unceasingly aggressive that
they brought on a war in 1824, which ended in the capture of Rangoon
and the occupation of Pegu and Martaban with the cession of the coast
province of Aracan.

The outbreak of hostilities led to cruel retaliation by the king of
Burmah upon all Europeans who resided in the country, whether as
missionaries or merchants engaged in trade. One of them, an Englishman,
Mr. Henry Gouger, was arrested as a spy and arraigned before a court
of justice with very little hope of escaping with his life. He was
fortunately spared after suffering untold indignities and many positive
tortures. Eventually he published his experiences, which remain to this
day as a graphic record of the Burmese prisons as they then existed.
He was first committed to the safe keeping of the king’s body guard,
and confined with his feet in the stocks; then he was transferred to
the “death prison,” having been barbarously robbed and deprived of his
clothing. He was not entirely stripped, but was led away with his arms
tied behind his back, bare-headed and bare-footed to the _Let-ma-yoon_,
the “antechamber of the tomb.”

Let me proceed now in the narrator’s own words:--

“There are four common prisons in Ava, but one of these only was
appropriated to criminals likely to suffer death. It derived its
remarkably well-selected name, _Let-ma-yoon_, literally interpreted,
‘Hand, shrink not,’ from the revolting scenes of cruelty practised
within its walls. This was the prison to which I was driven. My heart
sank within me as I entered the gate of the prison yard which, as it
closed behind me, seemed to shut me out forever from all the interests
and sympathies of the world beyond it. I was now delivered over to
the wretches, seven or eight in number, who guarded this gaol. They
were all condemned malefactors, whose lives had been spared on the
condition of their becoming executioners; the more hideous the crime
for which he had to suffer, the more hardened the criminal, the fitter
instrument he was presumed to be for the profession he was henceforth
doomed to follow. To render escape without detection impossible, the
shape of a ring was indelibly tattooed on each cheek, which gave rise
to the name they were commonly known by, _pahquet_, or ‘ring-cheeked,’
a term detested by themselves as one of reproach and one we never
dared to apply in addressing them. The nature of his qualification
for the employment was written in a similar manner across the breast.
The chief of the gang was a lean, wiry, hard-featured old man whom we
taught ourselves to address under the appellation _aphe_, ‘father,’
as did all his subordinates. Another bearing an appropriate motto had
murdered his brother and had hidden his body piecemeal under his house.
A third was branded _thoo-kho_, ‘thief.’ This troop of wretches were
held in such detestation that the law prohibited their entering any
person’s house except in execution of their office. It happened, soon
after I entered, that the exigencies of this brotherhood were great
from an increase of business, and no brave malefactor (inhumanity
was always styled bravery here) being ready to strengthen the force,
a young man convicted of a petty offence was selected to fill the
vacancy. I beheld this poor youth doomed to the most debasing ignominy
for the rest of his life by these fatal rings, his piteous cries at the
degradation he was undergoing being drowned by the jeers and ridicule
of the confederates. They soon made him as much a child of the devil as
themselves.

“The ‘father’ of this interesting family received me at the gate with a
smile of welcome like the grin of a tiger, and with the most disgusting
imprecations hurried me to a huge block of granite embedded in the
centre of the yard. I was made to sit down and place my ankles on the
block of stone while three pairs of fetters were struck on with a maul,
a false blow of which would have maimed me forever. But they were too
expert for this, and it was not a time to care for minor dangers. Thus
shackled, I was told, as if in derision, to walk to the entrance of the
prison-house not many yards distant; but as the shortness of the chains
barely permitted me to advance the heel of one foot to the toe of the
other, it was only by shuffling a few inches at a time that the task
was accomplished. Practice, however, soon made me more expert.

“It is not easy to give a correct idea of the prison which was
destined to be my dwelling place for the first year of my captivity.
Although it was between four and five o’clock on a bright sunny
afternoon, the rays of light only penetrated through the chinks and
cracks of the walls sufficiently to disclose the utter wretchedness
of all within. Some time elapsed before I could clearly distinguish
the objects by which I was surrounded. As my eyes gradually adapted
themselves to the dim light, I ascertained it to be a room about forty
feet long by thirty feet wide, the floor and sides made of strong
teak-wood planks, the former being raised two feet from the earth on
posts, which, according to the usual style of Burmese architecture,
ran through the body of the building, and supported the tiled roof as
well as the rafters for the floor and the planking of the walls. The
height of the walls from the floor was five or six feet, but the roof
being a sloping one, the centre might be double that height. It had no
window or aperture to admit light or air except a closely woven bamboo
wicket used as a door, and this was always kept closed. Fortunately,
the builders had not expended much labour on the walls, the planks of
which here and there were not very closely united, affording through
the chinks the only ventilation the apartment possessed, if we except
a hole near the roof where, either by accident or design, nearly a
foot in length of decayed plank had been torn off. This formed a
safety-valve for the escape of foul air to a certain extent; and, but
for this fortuitous circumstance, it is difficult to see how life could
have been long sustained.

“The only articles of furniture the place contained were these:--First
and most prominent, was a gigantic row of stocks similar in its
construction to that formerly used in England, dilapidated specimens
of which may still be seen in some of the market places of our country
towns. It was capable of accommodating more than a dozen occupants.
Several smaller varieties of the same species lay around, each holding
by the leg a pair of hapless victims consigned to its custody. These
stocks were heavy logs of timber bored with holes to admit the feet
and fitted with wooden pins to hold them fast. In the centre of the
apartment was placed a tripod holding a large earthen cup filled with
earth oil to be used as a lamp during the night watches; and lastly, a
simple but suspicious looking piece of machinery, whose painful uses
it was my fate to test before many hours had elapsed. It was merely a
long bamboo suspended from the roof by a rope at each end and worked by
blocks or pulleys to raise or depress it at pleasure.

“The prison had never been washed, nor even swept, since it was built.
So I was told, and I have no doubt it was true, for, besides the ocular
proof from its present condition, it is certain no attempt was made to
cleanse it during my subsequent tenancy of eleven months. This gave a
kind of fixedness or permanency to the fetid odours, until the very
floors and walls were saturated with them. Putrid remains of castaway
animal and vegetable stuff which needed no broom to make it ‘move
on’--the stale fumes from thousands of tobacco pipes--the scattered
ejections of the pulp and liquid from their everlasting betel, and
other nameless abominations still more disgusting, which strewed the
floor--and if to this be added the exudation from the bodies of a crowd
of never-washed convicts, encouraged by the thermometer at 100 degrees,
in a den almost without ventilation--is it possible to say what it
smelled like? As might have been expected from such a state of things,
the place was teeming with creeping vermin to an extent that very soon
reconciled me to the plunder of the greater portion of my dress.

“When night came on, the ‘father’ of the establishment, entering,
stalked towards our corner. The meaning of the bamboo now became
apparent. It was passed between the legs of each individual and when it
had threaded our number, seven in all, a man at each end hoisted it up
by the blocks to a height which allowed our shoulders to rest on the
ground while our feet depended from the iron rings of the fetters. The
adjustment of the height was left to the judgment of our kind-hearted
parent, who stood by to see that it was not high enough to endanger
life nor low enough to exempt from pain. Having settled this point to
his satisfaction, the venerable chief proceeded with a staff to count
the number of the captives, bestowing a smart rap on the head to those
he disliked, whom he made over to the savage with a significant hint of
what he might expect if the agreed tally were not forthcoming when the
wicket opened the next morning. He then took his leave, kindly wishing
us a good night’s rest, for the old wretch could be facetious; the
young savage trimmed his lamp, lighted his pipe, did the same act of
courtesy to all who wished to smoke, and the anxious community, one by
one, sought a short oblivion to their griefs in sleep.

“In vain, however, did our little party court that blessing; passing by
the torment of thought, the sufferings of the body alone were enough to
prevent it. I had youth on my side, and my slender frame enabled me to
bear the suspension better than my fellow sufferers. The tobacco smoke
was a mercy, for it robbed the infliction of half its torment. A year
afterward, when we had to undergo a punishment somewhat similar, though
in a purer atmosphere, we found the sting of the mosquitos, on the
soles of our undefended feet, ‘without the power to scare away’ these
venomous little insects, was intolerable; whereas in this well-smoked
apartment a mosquito could not live. We were not aware at the time
what a happy exemption this was. What a night was that on which we
now entered! Death, in its most appalling form, perhaps attended with
the agony of unknown tortures, was thought by all to be our certain
lot. Kewet-nee, who occupied the next place on the bamboo, excited a
horrible interest by the relation of a variety of exquisite tortures
which he had known to be perpetrated under that roof.

“The rays of the morning sun now began to struggle through the chinks
of the prison walls and told us that day dawned, bringing life and
happiness to the world outside, but only the consciousness of misery to
all within. The prisoners being counted and found to tally correctly
with the reckoning of overnight, symptoms of the routine of the day
began to attract attention. Our considerate parent made his appearance
and with his customary grin lowered down the bamboo to within a foot of
the floor, to the great relief of our benumbed limbs in which the blood
slowly began again to circulate. At eight o’clock the inmates were
driven out in gangs of ten or twelve at a time, to take the air for
five minutes, when they were huddled in again, to make way for others;
but no entreaty could secure a repetition of the same favour that day,
though a bribe, which few could promise, might effect it. Fresh air,
the cheapest of all the gifts of Providence, was a close monopoly in
the hands of the ‘sons of the prison,’ who sold it at the highest
price, and with a niggard hand.

“After breakfast the business of trying the prisoners began, and
each was brought in turn before the _myo-serai_, or assistant to the
governor. The first was a young man accused of being concerned in the
robbery of the house of a person of rank. Whether the accusation was
well founded or not I had no means of judging except by the result; but
certainly the man had not the appearance of a robber. As a matter of
course, he denied the crime; but denial was assumed to be obstinacy,
and the usual mode of overcoming obstinacy was by some manner of
torture. By order of the _myo-serai_, therefore, he was made to sit
upon a low stool, his legs were bound together by a cord above the
knees and two poles inserted between them by the executioners, one of
whom took the command of each pole, the ground forming the fulcrum.
With these the legs were forced upwards and downwards and asunder, and
underwent a peculiar kind of grinding, inflicting more or less pain as
the judge gave direction. Every moment I expected to hear the thighbone
snap. The poor fellow sustained this torture with loud cries but still
with firmness until the agony became so intense that he fainted. ‘The
tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.’ To restore animation they
resorted to cold water and shampooing. Thus revived, he was again
thrust back into his den with menaces of fresh torture on the morrow,
as no confession had yet been wrung from him. I may as well finish the
revolting story at once.

“True to his word, the _myo-serai_ returned the next day to renew his
diabolical practices. This time the culprit was tied by the wrists
behind his back, the rope which bound them being drawn by a pulley just
high enough to allow his toes to touch the ground, and in this manner
he was left until he should become more reasonable. At length, under
the pressure of agonising pain, just in time to save the dislocation
of the shoulder, the criminal made his confession and criminated two
respectable persons as accomplices. From what followed I presume this
was all that was wanted. The man of justice had now two men in his
toils who were able to pay. The unfortunate man, who, when relieved
from the pain of the torture, acknowledged he had accused innocent
people, was returned to gaol fearfully mangled and maimed; but instead
of meeting a felon’s fate, when time had been given to fleece the two
victims, he was released.

“Within the walls nothing worthy of notice occurred until the hour of
three in the afternoon. As this hour approached, we noticed that the
talking and jesting of the community gradually died away. All seemed
to be under the influence of some powerful restraint, until that fatal
hour was announced by the deep tones of a powerful gong suspended in
the palace yard, and a deathlike silence prevailed. If a word was
spoken it was in a whisper. It seemed as though even breathing were
suspended under the control of a panic terror, too deep for expression,
which pervaded every bosom. We did not long remain in ignorance of the
cause. If any of the prisoners were to suffer death that day, the
hour of three was that at which they were taken out for execution.
The manner of it was the acme of cold-blooded cruelty. The hour was
scarcely told by the gong when the wicket opened, and the hideous
figure of a spotted man appeared, who, without uttering a word, walked
straight to his victim now for the first time probably made acquainted
with his doom. As many of these unfortunate people knew no more than
ourselves the fate that awaited them, this mystery was terrible and
agonising; each one fearing, up to the last moment, that the stride
of the Spot might be directed his way. When the culprit disappeared
with his conductor and the prison door closed behind them, those who
remained began again to breathe more freely; for another day, at least,
their lives were safe.

“It is not my intention to make this narrative a chronicle of all
the diabolical cruelties in this den of abominations, but the first
specimen which greeted our eyes on the morrow may serve as a fair
sample of the practices which it was our fate to behold almost daily.
The routine was generally this:--The magistrate takes his seat in the
front of the shed in which we occupy the background, as though the
spot had been selected for our convenience, as spectators to behold an
amusing exhibition. A criminal is now summoned from the interior. He
hobbles out and squats down in terror before the judge; the crime of
which he is accused is stated to him. He denies it; he is urged by
various motives to confess his guilt; perhaps he knows that confession
is only another word for execution; therefore he still denies. The
magistrate assumes an air of indignation at his obstinacy and now
begins the work of his tormentor, the man with the ringed cheek who has
hitherto stood by waiting the word of command. He has many means at his
disposal, but the one selected for the present instance was a short
iron maul. It would simply excite disgust were I to enter into detail.
Suffice it to say that after writhing and rolling on the ground and
screaming with agony for nearly half an hour, the unfortunate wretch
was assisted to his den, a mass of wounds and bruises pitiable to
behold, leaving his judge not a whit the wiser.

“By degrees we settled down into the habits of the prison and were
becoming familiar with such scenes as I have recounted. We began also
to speculate on the length of time nature could hold out, if we were
left to test it. How long could we live in such a plight without the
use of water or other means of cleanliness? Would habit reconcile us to
it as it apparently had done many of our fellow prisoners? Some of them
had lived there for years. We gradually became acquainted with them
and with their crimes, real or imputed. There were many cases in the
calendar that were almost incredible and showed that accident, caprice,
superstition and even carelessness occasioned their confinement. One
grimy, half-starved old man had been kept there three years and neither
knew why he was there nor who sent him. The crime of another must have
been that of a madman, or more probably it was a false accusation,
preferred to gratify private revenge. He was said to have made an
image of the king and to have walked over it. The mere imputation of
practising necromancy against the sacred person of the king was a fatal
charge. The poor fellow was taken from among us at the hour of midnight
and despatched by breaking his spine. Why this singular method of
slaughter was resorted to, as well as the manner of carrying it into
execution, was as mysterious as the crime itself; they were not at
all particular as to the mode of depriving their victims of life, but
seemed to be guided altogether by caprice.

“The plan of the prison yard shows that there were a number of small
cells used by the ringed brotherhood, and the pleading of our amiable
protectress secured for us the liberty to occupy them. It is true they
were very small, the one I inhabited being about five feet wide with
just enough length to lie down in; it was so low that I could not stand
upright except in the middle where the roof was highest; but it was
Elysium when compared with the suffocating choke of the inner prison.
Nor could it be called altogether solitary confinement, for one of
our gaolers had a pretty daughter about sixteen years old, who took
a wonderful fancy to me and was a frequent visitor in my cell. She
supplied me, too, with an unspeakable luxury, water for ablution. Oh,
who can appreciate the gift but those who have been long deprived of
it? A scrap of rag, moistened with some of the water given us to drink,
only served to smear the grime like a plaster over our bodies. Now,
once again I could call myself comparatively clean. My cell had other
advantages. My eyes escaped many scenes of revolting cruelty; my ears,
many foul anathemas and gross abuse; my lungs and olfactories, all
sorts of abominations. The chief loss was the society of my friends.
The rats, too, were numerous and troublesome at first; but these,
though a disgusting nuisance, I managed to turn to account by the fancy
of the _pahquets_ for their flesh. The Burmese hold rats in about
the same estimation as we do hares, and sell them commonly in their
markets for about their own weight in lead. My cell, therefore, might
be regarded as a well-stocked preserve for game. The burrows ran in all
directions, and hardly a day passed without my bagging a few heads of
this novel kind of game and handing them over to my pretty visitor’s
father, who willingly lent me his spear for the purpose of destroying
them. The bait of a few grains of boiled rice at the entrance of the
burrows brought them out in shoals and gave me the opportunity of
spearing them. ‘What do you expect will be your fate?’ said this pious
Buddhist as he once took the struggling vermin from the spear, ‘when
the time comes for me to serve you as you are serving that creature?’
They all looked forward to the pleasure of decapitating us, and when in
a mild humour would promise me as a favour, to use their greatest skill
so that I should scarcely feel it. What a consoling thought!

“Shut up close in my little cell, I thought that at all events my
feelings would no longer be harrowed with the sight of deeds of blood.
To a certain extent it was so; but even here there was no abiding peace
and quietness. One night as I was vainly endeavouring to coax myself
asleep, the screams of an unfortunate wretch in the inner prison fell
upon my ear, and the door of my cell being at the time unfastened and
the prison wall not more than three feet off, curiosity prompted me
to peep through a crack to see what fresh mischief was on foot. Never
shall I forget the foul assassination I witnessed. The inmates were
breathlessly silent, evidently expecting some evil. The cries proceeded
from a young man who lay stretched on the floor with his feet in the
stocks. The lamp was burning dimly, giving just enough light to show
the form of a grim _pahquet_ striding toward his victim. Without a
word, he stamped several times on the mouth of the youth with his heavy
wooden shoes with a force which must have broken his teeth and jaws
into fragments. From my hiding place, where I stood trembling with
terror, I heard the bones crack and crash. Still the cries were not
altogether silenced, when the monster seized the club of the savage,
and with repeated blows on the body and head pounded the poor sufferer
to death. The corpse was then taken from the stocks and buried in the
prison yard.

“Now news came of the defeat of the Burmese troops in the field, and
the governor wreaked his vengeance on us. We were all hustled again
from our cells into the inner prison, to await any fresh orders that
might be issued from the palace. A merciful Providence again averted
the danger. For a few days, probably a week, we were kept in the old
den of corruption, when time, as before, softened down asperities,
the rage of the governor and of our keepers began to evaporate, and
a little renewed coaxing, backed by such insignificant bribes as our
people could yet afford to pay, regained for us the favour of the cells
in which we were once more installed, and my war of extermination
against the rats recommenced.

“While we were passing this week in the inner prison, a frightful
event took place, which threatened the immediate destruction of
the whole community; indeed, it is wonderful that the instinct of
self-preservation did not deter our parent of the prison from executing
his order. A woman was brought in covered with the pustules of the
small-pox. Our doctor looked aghast and so did we all, as well we
might. It was a case quite beyond his treatment, though it is strange
the versatile doctor did not undertake the cure. Even the Burmese
prisoners themselves expressed their astonishment, but remonstrance
was useless. The gaolers, however, showed a little common sense by
placing the unfortunate creature in a clear spot by herself to avoid
contact with the other inmates of the prison, with delicate threats
of punishment if she moved from it. We never heard what induced this
barbarity, but she was most likely suffering for the misconduct of some
relative in the war, and the authority who sent her there could not
have been aware of the disease, for she had not been among us more than
twenty-four hours when she was again taken away.

“But by what means was infection averted? Inoculation or vaccination
was unknown. Here were about fifty persons living in the same confined
room without ventilation, and yet not one of them took the disease. The
fact seems almost miraculous, and I should have doubted the nature of
the malady had it not been acknowledged and dreaded by everyone, the
natives as well as ourselves. I can only account for our immunity by
the free use of tobacco.

“After an engagement with the British troops, many were taken prisoners
and were brought to the prison. Unfortunately, it so happened that one
of the freaks, already noticed as common to the gaolers, had at this
time consigned all our party to the inner prison, and we beheld with
horror about a hundred of these men step one after another through
the wicket into our already well-filled prison, one of the ringed
fraternity remaining inside to see that they were packed as close as
possible. The floor was literally paved with human beings, one touching
and almost overlapping the other on every side. It soon became evident
what must follow. Difficulty in breathing, profuse perspiration and
other disagreeables, overcame the natural terror of their tormentors,
and the suffering multitude began to cry aloud for air and water.
The horrors of the notorious ‘black hole of Calcutta’ must have been
reënacted had the building been of brick, but the manner of its
construction, before explained, fortunately prevented it. At length the
clamour of the captives, working probably on the fears of the gaolers
themselves, induced them to open the wicket door for the night, some of
their number keeping ward outside as sentinels. By this means a general
disaster was avoided.

“This temporary influx of prisoners was the cause of greater anxiety
to me than to my companions from a peculiar circumstance. The stock
of fetters in the establishment ran short, and to provide for this
unexpected demand our three pairs of fetters were taken off for the
night, one ring only being left on the ankle, and by this we were
chained one to another, two by two, like hounds in couples, only by the
leg instead of the neck. Perhaps the reader may think this was, at all
events, a slight respite, for which we ought to have been thankful. So
it was, to all except myself, for the luxury of being able once more
to stretch the legs apart was, no doubt, a most grateful refreshment.
But--my flesh creeps when I think of it--I was chained to a leper.
My companion was an unfortunate Greek, whose ankles had by this time
broken out into unmistakable open leprous sores, with which a few
inches of chain alone prevented contact, while at the same time it kept
me in terrible proximity. The chain was kept at its full length all
night, as may be supposed, and sundry nervous jerkings from time to
time on my part to assure myself that it was so, indicated the nature
of my alarm to the poor man, who was not unconscious of his malady,
though he would not openly admit it. He grew irritated at my studied
avoidance of him, and raised the question himself only to deny it. This
voluntary allusion to it by himself, notwithstanding his denial, only
tended to confirm the fact. With what joy did I submit myself the next
day to the hands of my worthy parent, while he again invested me with
my wonted complement of irons. With what anxiety, too, did I watch for
weeks, searching diligently my ankles for the first symptoms of the
contagion, fearing I might unwittingly have rubbed against the infected
man and become inoculated with his loathsome disease. Happily I escaped
without accident.”

This horrible imprisonment was protracted into the sultry months of
March and April, and the wretched sufferers were left throughout
heavily laden with five pairs of fetters in a gloomy filthy dungeon,
without air or light, or even water to wash their fevered bodies,
constantly associated with the worst felons and sharing their dreadful
expectation to be taken out and executed. Finally, as the relieving
army approached, they were removed from Ava further into the country,
and the scene changed for the better as regards personal treatment.
The prisoners had at least fresh air, freedom from vermin, lighter
chains, water to wash in, exercise in the yard when their wounded feet
were sufficiently healed to allow them to walk, and as much comfort
as possible in a Burmese prison. But fresh terrors were caused by
the importation of a huge lioness into the prison enclosure. It was
confined in a strong cage, but was kept in a state of constant fury
and grew more and more ferocious, being kept continually without food.
The luckless prisoners began to believe that they were to be thrown as
a prey to the wild beast, but it grew visibly weaker and weaker and
presently died of starvation. The reason for shutting up the lioness
with the human victims of the terrified king was never explained.
Meanwhile the British troops pressed on and threatened shortly to
capture the capital by storm. The last and most terrible ordeal of all
was now impending. It was openly announced that the white prisoners
were to be sacrificed to save the king by being buried alive before
the broken and dispirited Burmese army. But another decisive battle
intervened, the prisoners were hastily released from gaol and carried
to Ava, whence they were borne by water to meet the British flotilla on
its way up stream, and the painful captivity was at an end.

The penal code of old Burmah in the pre-English days was primitive and
of ancient origin, being based largely upon the laws first promulgated
by Menu. Trial by ordeal was a very general rule, and many forms were
similar to those obtaining in other parts of the world. One was to
plunge a finger wrapped in a thin palm leaf into molten tin; again,
accused and accuser were immersed under water and the case was won by
the party who could remain the longest time below. Or two candles made
of equal portions of wax, carefully weighed, were lighted by the two
litigants, and the one which burned longest was adjudged to have won.

“In the Indies,” says one old authority, “when one man accuses another
of a crime punishable by death, it is customary to ask the accused if
he is willing to go through trial by fire, and if he answers in the
affirmative, they heat a piece of iron till it is red hot; then he is
told to put his hand on the hot iron, and his hand is afterward wrapped
up in a bay leaf, and if at the end of three days he has suffered no
hurt he is declared innocent and delivered from the punishment which
threatened him. Sometimes they boil water in a cauldron till it is
so hot no one may approach it; then an iron ring is thrown into it
and the person accused is ordered to thrust in his hand and bring up
the ring, and if he does so without injury he is declared innocent.
Sometimes an iron chain or ball is used instead of the ring. Sometimes
a vessel of oil is heated, and a cocoanut is thrown in to test the
temperature, and if it cracks, then the suspected person may prove
his innocence by taking copper coins out of the boiling oil.” Another
ordeal was to take the accused to the tomb of a Mohammedan saint and
walk past, having first loaded him with heavy fetters. If the fetters
fall off, he is declared to be clear. “I have heard it said,” is the
comment of one authority who had little confidence in the good faith
of the tribunal, “that by some artful contrivance the fetters are so
applied as to fall off at a particular juncture.”

The rich expiated any offence by the payment of a fine, while the
impecunious suffered imprisonment, stripes with a rattan, mutilation,
endless slavery, and in the extreme case, death. The sentence to
slavery extended to all a man’s belongings and to his descendants
forever. Capital punishment was performed by decapitation, and a
fiendish executioner often prolonged the agony of the condemned
convict. To throw a victim to be devoured by wild beasts or trodden to
death by elephants was a practice only surrendered in recent times. In
the northern provinces crucifixion was common, but the instrument was
not in the shape of an ordinary cross. It was more like a double ladder
consisting of three upright bamboos crossed by three horizontal bars,
and upon these two more were laid in the shape of a St. Andrew’s cross.
Three scaffolds were commonly erected on river banks or on sand banks
in the stream, and were constantly seen on the Irrawady. Sometimes the
culprit was killed before he was affixed to the cross; sometimes he was
tied up and rendered helpless by a few spear thrusts, or disembowelled
by a sword cut across the stomach. In any case, the body was left
suspended until the flesh was pecked off by vultures and the bones fell
off by decay. When the mouths of the Irrawady were Burmese territory,
the criminal was lashed to a tree stump at low water and left to be
drowned by the incoming tide. The fishes, more voracious than the
vultures, were often more expeditious than the sea and ate their prey
alive. The tree, one of the undeveloped growth in the mangrove swamps,
was familiarly known as the “stump of hell.”

Imprisonment, as we have seen from the previous pages, was often
worse than death. But there might be some relaxation of durance.
With money a prisoner might appease his gaolers. He could by payment
secure release daily to go home, eat his meals and pass his time in
comfortable idleness, provided he came punctually back at night and
allowed himself to be again incarcerated. Nevertheless, the friendless
and impecunious preferred to suffer a public flogging, inflicted on the
culprit at all the street corners. Bribery and corruption, buying ease
from dishonest gaolers, speedily disappeared under the British rule.
An equable uniform system has been adopted for all prisoners, and the
demeanour of even the worst is outwardly quiet. They are for the most
part irreclaimable gaol-birds, with all the traits and characteristics
of the congenital criminal.

The predatory instinct predominates in the character of the Burman. He
is consumed with a desire to lay violent hands upon his neighbours’
goods and possessions. He is a Dacoit, a thief and highwayman by
inheritance. One who knew Burmah intimately was convinced that the evil
propensity was inborn in every Burmese child, and was stimulated as he
grew up by Dacoit stories. The example of others who had taken to the
business and become famous for enterprising raids, was always before
the youth of every generation. It was no disgrace to a young fellow
to be concerned in a Dacoity attack upon a neighbouring village, but
very much the reverse, and the most successful robbers were generally
treated with much consideration and respect.

A Dacoit band for the most part numbered five or six; they were not all
armed with firearms, but they fired a few shots on making a descent
to give warning of their approach, and no resistance was offered as
they swooped down with loud shouts and much waving of swords. Ransom
was demanded or the village, if deserted, was looted, and the Dacoits
fled before the outrage became known to the police. Then pursuit was
organised, but was generally fruitless. The Dacoits were close at hand,
in the very village, and might be easily seized, but no one would give
information, as that would be deemed an unpardonable offence. To betray
an offender into the hands of justice is a sin against religion much
more than against morality. There is the utmost difficulty, therefore,
in tracing crime in Burmah. British police officers were driven to
death in ceaseless efforts to catch Dacoits, hunting them perpetually
for months and months and seldom, if ever, laying hands on a single
offender.

Summary vengeance was meted out to “informers.” On one occasion, a
well-to-do villager in Lower Burmah had assisted in the capture of a
notorious Dacoit. Some of the prisoner’s friends, without waiting for
the issue of the trial, visited the traitor’s house and upbraided him
with being the cause of the Dacoit’s apprehension. “We mean to punish
you for this,” they said. “You shall be burned alive; which do you
prefer, that the fire should be lighted here in your own house, or
outside the village?” His wife offered a thousand rupees to buy him
off, but it was sternly refused, and he was forthwith put to death. In
another instance, a man who received a reward for securing the arrest
of a band was obliged to surrender the money to other Dacoits, who
called him to account, and to prevent his repeating the offence, his
head was cut off and exhibited on a pole.

Dacoity, when the complete pacification of Burmah was so long delayed,
became the last form of resistance of the people. The one time thieves
were promoted into rebels and insurgents. The Burmese did not all
accept British rule very willingly, and the government resolved to
finally crush opposition by exterminating the dissidents under the name
of Dacoity. Many serious encounters, costly in human life, were fought;
many leaders of small bands long evaded pursuit and gave much trouble.
But vigorous measures persistently carried out gradually put down all
opposition, and the most active Dacoits ended on the gallows or found
their way to prison or to the penal settlements. A good picture has
been preserved of one prominent Dacoit who had long ravaged the country
and been guilty of many crimes; and upon whom a sentence of penal
servitude for life was at length passed. “A small, spare, thin-visaged
man, whose features have nothing in them that would bear out his
character of a cruel ruffian and leader of men ... yet such was the
power of his name that a sum large enough to be a fortune to any three
natives was offered to whoever should kill or capture him, before his
career was checked.” Every gaol in Burmah has its complement of such
life convicts, reckless desperadoes, a source of constant anxiety to
those in charge of them.

To follow this man on his reception and through his treatment will give
a good idea of prison life in Burmah. His clothing was first issued to
him; a loin cloth of coarse brown stuff and a strip of sacking to serve
as his bed. His hair was close cut and his head was as smooth as the
palm of his hand, save for one small tuft left on the crown; his name
was registered in the great book, and he was led to the blacksmith’s
shop, where his leg irons were riveted on him, anklets in the form of
a heavy ring to which a connecting ring with two straight iron bars
was attached. At the same time a neck ring of iron as thick as a lead
pencil was welded on, with a plate attached, nine inches by five, on
which a paper recording the personal description of the individual
was pasted. This was called the _thimbone_, and its adoption became
necessary through the frauds practised by the convicts.

At one time every new arrival was given a tin medal stamped with his
number, which was hung round his neck with a string. But it was found
that these records were frequently exchanged among the prisoners. A
prisoner sentenced to a long term often assumed the identity of a
short term convict, who accepted the more irksome penalty for a money
consideration. At the present time, with the irremovable _thimbone_,
these exchanges are rendered impossible. It is strange that such a
simple process of preserving identities is not enforced in Siberia,
where Russian convicts have long made a practice of fraudulent
exchanges.

“If there is a type of revolting human ugliness, it is the Burmese
gaol-bird,” says the same authority, “with his shaven head and the
unmistakable stamp of criminal on his vicious face. All convicts
seem to acquire that look of low, half-defiant cunning from their
associates, and a physiognomist would not hesitate to describe
nine-tenths of the men before us as bad characters if he saw them in
any society. Many of this gang are Dacoits, and their breasts, arms
and necks are picture galleries of tattooed devices, fondly cherished
by the owners as charms against death or capture. Some have rows of
unsightly warts, like large peas, upon the breast and arms which mark
the spots where the charms have been inserted,--scraps of metal and
other substances inscribed with spells known only to the wise men who
deal in such things. One or two natives of India are amongst the gang,
and these are conspicuous by the absence of the tattooing universally
found on the Burman’s thighs. A powerfully built convict at the end of
the rank, in addition to the usual irons, has his ankle rings connected
by a single straight bar, so that he can only stand with his feet
twelve inches apart. ‘Look at that fellow,’ says the superintendent;
‘he is in for five years, and his time would have been up in three
months. A week ago he was down at the creek with his gang working
timber, and must needs try to escape. He was up to his waist in water
and dived under a raft, coming to the surface a good fifty yards down
the stream. The guard never missed him until a shout from another man
drew their attention, when they saw him swimming as hard as he could
go, irons and all, towards a patch of jungle on the opposite side.’
Amongst a repulsive horde this man would take first place without
competition. ‘Reckless scoundrel,’ is written on every line of his
scowling face, and such he undoubtedly is. After the severe flogging
his attempted escape earned for him, he assaulted and bit his guards
and fellow prisoners, and the bar between his anklets was the immediate
result.

“Conspiracies to break out are not uncommon, although they are
seldom matured, owing to the system of never allowing one batch of
men to remain together for more than a night or two in succession. A
determined attempt to ‘break gaol’ took place in the great central
prison at Rangoon a few years ago, resulting in a stand-up fight
between warders and convicts. Some twenty ‘lifers’ confined in a large
stone cell, whose gate opened upon their workyard, were the culprits.
The hammers and road metal which provided their daily labour were kept
in this yard, and the first aim of the convicts was to obtain access
to the shed where these weapons lay. About midnight the attention of
the sentry was called to the illness of one of the occupants of the
cell by another man, who was apparently the only wakeful member of
the gang besides the sham invalid. A Madrassee apothecary was called
to the grated window of the den, and obtained sufficient information
to enable him to prepare some remedy. On his return with the potion,
seeing that all the convicts were sound asleep, he did not attempt to
give the medicine to the sick man through the window, but against the
rules caused the guard to open the gate intending to take it into the
cell himself. The instant the gate was opened, the slumbering convicts
sprang to their feet, rushed at the apothecary and knocked him down in
such a position that his recumbent form effectually prevented the guard
behind from closing it. They quickly made their way into the workshed,
and arming themselves with hammers and stones, prepared to resist the
warders who had been attracted by the noise and the shouts of a sentry
on the wall. A furious conflict now ensued between the warders, big,
muscular Punjabees armed with heavy cudgels, and the convicts with
their extemporised weapons. The warders were reinforced until both
parties were fairly matched, and the rough and tumble fight in the dark
progressed amid extraordinary confusion. The workyard was overlooked by
two huge wings of the gaol in which a large number of prisoners were
confined; these men, roused to a frantic pitch of excitement by the
uproar below, dashed about their wards like caged animals with screams
and yells of encouragement to their fellows; while the sentries in
the watch towers on the main wall kept up a desultory fire in the air
to prove to the convicts the impossibility of escaping, even if they
should succeed in scaling the high spiked iron railing of their yard.

“The combatants fought hand-to-hand for some time, neither side gaining
any advantage, whilst above the roar of human voices and the sickening
crash of heavy clubs on the convicts’ shaven skulls the alarm bell
clashed out warning that military assistance from the distant barracks
was required. Warders had been summoned from all parts of the gaol,
and a general outbreak seemed imminent when the appearance of the
superintendent with a revolver suddenly decided matters. Panic seized
the convicts; they dropped their weapons with one accord and crowded
back into the cell, leaving two of their number dead in the yard. It
would be impossible to conceive a more ghastly sight than that row
of naked, trembling convicts as the warders now ranged them in the
vault-like den to be counted. The dim light of oil-lanterns fell upon
upturned faces, before repulsive enough, but now positively startling
in their hideous disfigurement of dust and clotting blood. Every man
was streaming with blood from wounds about the head, more or less
severe, for the convicts had fought with the desperation of men to whom
success meant liberty. They were doomed to drag out their lives in
that earthly hell; a flogging was the worst that could happen to them
if their attempt failed, possible freedom the reward if it succeeded.
Who would not risk the first for the slenderest chance of the second?
They took the risk and fate had gone against them. The excitement was
over, and they huddled together against the wall of the cell in an
agony of fear for the consequences their night’s work would bring upon
them to-morrow, staring enviously at those whose wounds necessitated
their removal to hospital. For them, at least, a few days’ reprieve was
certain before they suffered lash and punishment drill.”




PRISONS OF CHINA




CHAPTER VIII

CRIME IN CHINA

    Great cruelty in the administration of the law in China--Experience
    of Lord Loch--Iron collar, chains and creeping vermin--Earth
    maggot--The “Ling che,” a slow ignominious death--Internal
    arrangement of prisons--Whole families detained as hostages
    for fugitive offenders--Mortality large; dead-house always
    full--Military guard--Public flogging of thieves--The “Cangue”
    or heavy wooden collar--Six classes of punishment--Method of
    infliction--Chinese punishment in the seventeenth century--Some
    cruel practices of to-day.


According to Chinese law, theoretically, no prisoner is punished until
he confesses his crime. He is therefore proved guilty and then by
torture made to acknowledge the accuracy of the verdict. The cruelty
shown to witnesses as well as culprits is a distinct blot on the
administration of justice in China. The penal code is ferocious, the
punishments inflicted are fiendishly cruel, and the prisons’ pig-stys
in which torture is hardly more deadly than the diseases engendered
by the most abominable neglect. The commonest notions of justice and
fair play are continually ignored. The story is told of a wretched
old man who had been detained years in the filthy prison of Peking,
dragging out a weary existence in the company of criminals of the
worst description. According to his own account, he had been living on
his land with his wife and family. One night he took out his gun to
scare crows and trespassers off his ripening crops, in the execution
of which innocent design he let off his weapon two or three times. On
the following day a man was found murdered on the far confines of his
land. Immediately he was apprehended, not as one might suppose, to
give evidence or relate what he knew, but to be made to confess that
he himself was the author of the crime. To extort this confession he
was cruelly and repeatedly tortured. “Of course,” he said, “I shall
never leave this prison alive, for they will keep me here until,
reduced to the last extremity by torture, I confess myself guilty of
a crime of which I am entirely innocent, and when I do confess they
will cut off my head on the strength of that confession.” This is
founded on unimpeachable fact, and the case is constantly recurring
under different forms. “In China it is not the prosecution who prove
a prisoner guilty, but the prisoner who has to prove that he is not
guilty.” In this same prison of Peking a visitor once was permitted to
enter a chamber in which was a barred cage eight feet by eight, and in
it twenty-six human beings were incarcerated, of whom six were dying
of gaol fever. He asked that they might be taken out of the cage “in
order that he might medically examine and if possible relieve them.
The gaoler opened the door of the cage and seizing the six by their
pig-tails, or by any other portion of their bodies that happened to
present itself, dragged them out one by one over the pavement into
the courtyard outside. No doubt several of these men were innocent
of the crimes imputed to them and were waiting to be tortured into a
confession of guilt.”

Few Europeans have experienced imprisonment in China. One Englishman,
Lord Loch, has given an account of the sufferings he endured when
treacherously captured during the war of 1860. “The discipline of
the prison was not in itself very strict and had it not been for the
starvation, the pain arising from the cramped position in which the
chains and ropes retained the arms and legs, with the heavy drag of
the iron collar on the bones of the spine, and the creeping vermin
that infested every place, together with the occasional beatings and
tortures which the prisoners were from time to time taken away for a
few hours to endure, returning with bleeding legs and bodies and so
weak as to be scarcely able to crawl, there was no very great hardship
to be endured.... There was a small maggot which appears to infest all
Chinese prisons: the earth at a depth of a few inches swarms with them;
they are the scourge most dreaded by every poor prisoner. Few enter
a Chinese prison who have not on their bodies or limbs some wounds,
either inflicted by blows to which they have been subjected, or caused
by the manner in which they have been bound; the instinct of the insect
to which I allude appears to lead them direct to these wounds. Bound
and helpless, the poor wretch cannot save himself from their approach,
although he knows full well that if they once succeed in reaching his
lacerated skin, there is the certainty of a fearful lingering and
agonising death before him.”

Punishment varies in cruelty and intensity with the crime; for the
murder of a father, mother, or several people of one family the
sentence is “ignominious and slow death.” This method is known as _ling
che_, and the victim is attached to a post and cut to pieces by slow
degrees, the pieces being thrown about among the crowd. This cruel
death was more than once publicly inflicted in Peking during the year
1903. Some of the most horrible passages in the _Peking Gazette_ are
those which announce the infliction of this awful punishment on madmen
and idiots who in sudden outbreaks of mania have committed parricide.
For this offence no infirmity is accepted, even as a palliation. A
culprit condemned to _ling che_ is tied to a cross, and while he is
yet alive gashes are made by the executioner on the fleshy parts of
his body, varying in number according to the disposition of the judge.
When this part of the sentence has been carried out, a merciful blow
severs the head from the body. It is said that the executioner can be
bribed to put sufficient opium into the victim’s last meal to make
him practically unconscious, or even to inflict the fatal stab in the
heart at first, which should ordinarily be the last. Common cases of
capital punishment are comparatively merciful, for the executioners
are so skilful that they generally sever the head from the trunk with
one swift blow. The Chinese prefer death by strangulation to any other
form, because it enables the body to appear unmutilated in the next
world. This feeling has such a hold on them that when four victims were
decapitated in Peking, their relatives instantly claimed the bodies and
sewed on the heads. The permission to do this was regarded by them as a
great privilege and a mitigation of the sentence.

The prisons of China are made up of a certain number of wards according
to their class. Thus, for example, the prisons of the respective
counties of Nam-hoi and Pun-yu in the province of Kwang-tung, which
are first-class county prisons, consist (besides chambers in which
prisoners on remand are confined) of six large wards in each of which
are four large cells, making in all twenty-four cells. The same
arrangements may be said to prevail in all county prisons. The walls
of the various wards abut one upon another and form a parallelogram.
Round the outer wall a paved pathway runs upon which the gates of
the various wards open. This pathway is flanked by a large wall
which constitutes the boundary wall of the prison. The cells are of
considerable size. The four cells in each ward are arranged two on a
side so as to form the two sides of a square, and they much resemble
cattle sheds, the front of each being enclosed in a strong palisading
of wood which extends from the ground to the roof. They are paved
with granite, and each is furnished with a raised wooden platform on
which the prisoners sit by day and sleep by night. They are polluted
with vermin and filth of almost every kind, and the prisoners seldom
or never have an opportunity afforded them of washing their bodies
or even dressing their hair, as water in Chinese prisons is a scarce
commodity and hair-combs are almost unknown. The approach to the prison
is a narrow passage at the entrance of which there is an ordinary
sized door. Above this entrance door is painted a tiger’s head with
large staring eyes and widely extended jaws. Upon entering, the
visitor finds an altar on which stands the figure of a tiger hewn in
granite. This image is regarded as the tutelary deity of the prison
gates. The turnkeys worship it morning and evening, with the view of
propitiating it and securing its watchfulness, gaolers in China being
held responsible for the safe custody of the miserable beings who are
entrusted to their care. At the base of the large wall which forms the
prison boundary there are several hovels--for by no other name can they
be designated--in some of which all the female felons are lodged and in
others whole families who are held as witnesses by the mandarins.

There is a law which admits of the seizure and detention as hostages
of entire families, any members of which have broken the laws of the
empire and fled from justice. Such hostages are not liberated until
the offending relatives have been secured, and consequently they are
not unfrequently imprisoned during a period of five, ten or twenty
years. Indeed, many of them pass the period of their natural lives in
captivity. Thus the mother or aunt of Hung Sow-tsuen, the leader of
the Taiping rebellion, died after an imprisonment of several years
in the prison of the Nam-hoi magistrate at Canton. The unoffending
old woman grievously felt this long detention for no crime or offence
of her own. Should the crime of the fugitive be a very aggravated
and serious one, such, for example, as an attempt upon the life of
the sovereign of the empire, it is not unusual to put the immediate,
although perfectly innocent, relations of the offender to death, while
those who are not so nearly related to him are sent into exile. In 1803
an attempt was made to assassinate the emperor Ka-hing. The assassin
was no sooner apprehended than he was sentenced to be put to death by
torture; and his sons who were young children were put to death by
strangling. The mortality in Chinese prisons is very great. The bodies
of all who die in prison are thrown into the dead-house and remain
there until the necessary preliminaries, which are of a very simple
kind, have been arranged for their interment. In the prisons of Canton
these receptacles may be seen full of corpses and presenting the most
revolting and disgusting appearance. Some of the unhappy victims have
died from the effects of severe and often repeated floggings. Others
have fallen victims to one or other of the various diseases which such
dens are only too well fitted to create and foster. In the prison
of Pun-yu there were on one occasion in the dead-house five bodies,
all with the appearance of death from starvation--a form of capital
punishment which in China is frequently inflicted upon kidnappers and
other grave offenders. Directly in front of the door of the dead-house
and at the base of the outer boundary wall of the prison there is
a small door of sufficient size to admit of a corpse being passed
through. The corpses of all who die in prison are carried through this
aperture into the adjoining street for burial. It would be paying
too much reverence to the deceased prisoner to allow the remains to
be carried through the gates of the _yamun_ to which the prison is
attached.

In point of appearance the unfortunate inmates of Chinese prisons are
perhaps of all men the most abject and miserable. Their death-like
countenances, emaciated forms and long coarse black hair, which,
according to prison rules, they are not allowed to shave, give them
the appearance rather of demons than of men, and strike the mind of
the beholder with impressions of gloom and sorrow that are not easily
forgotten. Prisoners in every ward with one exception only wear
fetters. The exception is the prisoner who is supposed to be more
respectable and who conducts himself better than any of his fellows
in crime. He is allowed the full freedom of his limbs and as a mark
of confidence and trust the privilege is conferred upon him of acting
as overseer and guardian of his comrades. The dress worn by Chinese
prisoners consists of a coat and trousers of a coarse red fabric. On
the back of the coat is printed in large indelible characters the name
of the prison in which its wearer is confined so that should he escape
from durance he would at once be recognised as a runaway or prison
breaker, and his recapture facilitated. Each prison is presided over
by a governor who has under him a considerable number of turnkeys.
Thus each large prison in Canton has a governor, twenty-four turnkeys,
thirty-seven watchmen and fifteen spearmen. In a barrack beyond
the doors or gates of each prison is a resident guard of soldiers.
The turnkeys, watchmen, spearmen, and so forth, become the most
casehardened and incorrigible of the criminals from the great amount
of misery which they daily witness. The policemen who are attached to
the _yamun_ are also men of vile character, and it is unfortunately
too common for them to share the booty with the thief and hoodwink or
deceive the magistrate.

The governor of a Chinese prison purchases his appointment from
the local government. He receives no salary from the state and is
compelled, therefore, to recoup himself by exacting money from such
relatives or friends of prisoners as are in good circumstances and
naturally anxious that their unhappy friends should escape as far as
possible the sad deprivations and cruelties for which Chinese prisons
are so notorious. To each prison a granary is attached in which rice
of the cheapest and coarsest kind is stored by the governor. This rice
is one of his perquisites, and he retails it to the prisoners at a
remunerative price. Vegetables and firewood for culinary purposes, both
of which are daily offered for sale to the prisoners, are also supplied
by him. As the government daily allowance to each prisoner does not
exceed twenty-five _cash_, the prisoners who are without friends are
not often able to buy even vegetables and firewood.

Besides the prison in which convicts are confined there is also within
the precincts of the _yamun_ a house of detention. This is neither so
large nor so strongly enclosed as the common gaol. Generally, in such a
house of detention there is a large chamber which is set apart for the
reception of prisoners on remand, who have friends able and willing to
satisfy the demands of the governor. By this arrangement such prisoners
avoid the misery of being shut up in the same ward with men of the
vilest character and often most loathsome condition, covered with filth
or suffering from various kinds of cutaneous diseases. The arrangement
is a great advantage to the governor of the gaol and to all prisoners
who can afford to pay for it, but a great disadvantage to other
inmates. The space required for the convenience of prisoners who have
friends to look after their wants leaves very little room indeed for
the reception of the great majority of the poorer criminals, who are
huddled together in a common ward sometimes too crowded to allow its
occupants to lie down. In the city of Canton, on the streets adjoining
the _yamuns_, there are other houses of detention, all densely crowded.

Imprisonment is not the only penalty inflicted; cases of petty larceny
are generally dealt with by flogging. The culprit is handcuffed and
with the identical article which he stole, or one similar, suspended
from his neck, is marched through the streets of the neighbourhood in
which the theft was committed. He is preceded by a man beating a gong,
and at each beat of the gong an officer who walks behind gives him a
severe blow with a double rattan across the shoulders, exclaiming,
“This is the punishment due to a thief.” As the culprit has to pass
through three or four streets his punishment, although regarded by the
Chinese as a minor one, is certainly not lacking in severity, and is
often accompanied by a considerable flow of blood.

A thief who had stolen a watch from one of his countrymen was flogged
through the Honam suburb of Canton, but the officer appointed to
flog him was very corpulent, and from his great earnestness in the
discharge of his duty became quite breathless before the various
streets along which the culprit was sentenced to pass had been fully
traversed. The person from whom the watch had been stolen, seeing that
the thief might escape the full severity of his penalty, snatched the
double rattan from the hand of the exhausted officer and applied it
himself most unmercifully to the thief’s back. Women who are convicted
of thieving are in some instances punished in this way. Occasionally
a long bamboo is used in cases of petty larceny. When this is the
case, however, the culprit receives his flogging in court in front of
the tribunal. He is at once denuded of his trousers and the number of
blows varies according to the nature of the larceny, from ten to three
hundred.

Mr. Henry Norman, who witnessed a most cruel flogging in court, which
left the prisoner in a pitiable state, asserts that when a policeman
was called to suffer the same punishment, it was seen that he had
bound strips of wood on himself to catch the full force of the bamboo.
The prescribed number of strokes were administered, but the fraud was
plainly apparent to the magistrate and all the spectators, and the
policeman, who was none the worse for the flogging, went about his
duties as usual when the ordeal was over. Spectacles of this kind, says
the same authority, seem to be highly enjoyed by a Chinese audience.


_Chinese Punishment_

    The _cangue_, or square and heavy wooden collar, is one of the
    modes by which petty offenders are punished in China. The weight
    varies with the offence, and they are worn from a fortnight to
    three months, during which time the _cangue_ is not removed by
    day or night. This device inflicts severe punishment, preventing
    the culprit from assuming any position of rest. The name of the
    prisoner and the nature of his offence are written on the _cangue_
    in large letters, so that “he who runs may read,” and he is often
    made to stand at one of the principal gates or in some other
    conspicuous place as an object of universal contempt.

[Illustration]

The _cangue_, or square, heavy wooden collar, is another mode by which
petty offenders in China are punished. _Cangues_ vary in weight, some
being considerably larger and heavier than others. The period for which
an offender is sentenced to wear this collar varies from a fortnight
to three months. During the whole of this time the _cangue_ is not
removed from the neck of the prisoner either by day or by night. Its
form prevents the wearer from stretching himself on the ground at
full length, and to judge from the attenuated appearance of prisoners
who have undergone it, the punishment must be terribly severe. The
name of the lawbreaker and the nature of his offence are written on
the _cangue_ in large letters, “so that all the world may read.” The
authorities often make the victim stand from sunrise to sunset at
one of the principal gates or in front of one of the chief temples
or public halls of the city, where he is regarded as an object of
universal scorn and contempt.

Another mode of punishing a criminal is that of confining him in a
cage. The cages are of different forms, the worst being too short to
allow the occupants to place themselves in a recumbent position and too
low to admit of their standing. To the top of one kind is attached a
wooden collar or _cangue_ by which the neck of the criminal, which it
is made to fit, is firmly held. Another cage resembles the former in
all respects but one. The difference consists in its being higher than
its occupant, so that while his neck is held fast by the wooden collar
attached to the top of the cage, the tips of his toes barely touch the
floor. Indeed, the floor, which is only a few inches from the ground,
is sometimes removed so that the prisoner may be suspended by the neck.
This punishment almost invariably proves fatal. The victims are as a
rule thieves and robbers. They are often punished by being bound to
stones by means of long chains passed round their necks. The stones are
not large, but sufficiently heavy to inconvenience them as they walk
to and from the prison to the entrance gates of the _yamun_, in front
of which they are daily exposed. These stones are their inseparable
companions by night and by day throughout the whole period of their
incarceration. In some instances they are bound to long bars of iron
and are daily exposed to the scorn of all passers by.

For capital and other offences of a serious nature there are six
classes of punishment. The first, called _ling che_, has already been
mentioned. It is inflicted upon traitors, parricides, matricides,
fratricides and murderers of husbands, uncles and tutors. The criminal
is cut into either one hundred and twenty, seventy-two, thirty-six or
twenty-four pieces. Should there be extenuating circumstances, his
body, as a mark of imperial clemency, is divided into eight portions
only. The punishment of twenty-four cuts is inflicted as follows: the
first and second cuts remove the eyebrows; the third and fourth the
shoulders; the fifth and sixth the breasts; the seventh and eighth
the parts between each hand and elbow; the ninth and tenth the parts
between each elbow and shoulder; the eleventh and twelfth the flesh of
each thigh; the thirteenth and fourteenth the calf of each leg; the
fifteenth pierces the heart; the sixteenth severs the head from the
body; the seventeenth and eighteenth cut off the hands; the nineteenth
and twentieth the arms; the twenty-first and twenty-second the feet;
the twenty-third and twenty-fourth the legs. That of eight cuts is
inflicted as follows; the first and second cuts remove the eyebrows;
the third and fourth the shoulders; the fifth and sixth the breasts;
the seventh pierces the heart; the eighth severs the head from the
body. A great many political offenders underwent executions of the
first class at Canton during the vice-royalty of His Excellency, Yeh.
On the fourteenth day of December, 1864, the famous Hakka rebel leader,
Tai Chee-kwei by name, was put to death at Canton in the same manner.

The second class of capital punishment, which is called _chan_ or
decapitation, is the penalty due to murderers, rebels, pirates,
burglars, etc. Prisoners who are sentenced to decapitation are kept in
ignorance of the hour fixed for their execution until the preceding
day. Occasionally they have only a few hours’ and in some instances
only a few minutes’ warning. When the time has arrived for making
the condemned man ready for execution, an officer in full costume,
carrying in his hand a board on which is pasted a list of the names of
the prisoners who are that day to atone for their crimes, enters the
prison, and in the hearing of all the prisoners assembled in the ward,
reads aloud the list of the condemned. Each prisoner whose name is
called at once answers to it, and he is then made to sit in a basket
to be carried once more into the presence of a judge. As he is taken
through the outer gate, he is interrogated through an interpreter by an
official who acts on the occasion as the viceroy’s representative.

Mr. Henry Norman described in 1895 an execution of fifteen offenders
of this class which he had witnessed. The condemned were carried into
the place of execution in flat baskets suspended from bamboo poles, and
literally dumped out, bound hand and foot. A slip of paper was stuck
in the queue of each condemned man, which described the nature of the
crime. These were taken out and stacked up by one of the executioners,
and then the work of severing the heads began, one of the executioners
holding the victim’s shoulders while the other used the knife. All
of those about to be beheaded witnessed the decapitation of their
comrades, and the spectators yelled with delight and frenzy. When the
last head had been severed, the place was ankle-deep in blood and the
executioner, who used the knife, was covered with it. The bodies were
thrown into a pond and the heads were put in earthenware jars and
stacked up with others surrounding this potter’s field.

A third punishment is called _nam-kow_, or death by strangulation. This
is inflicted on kidnappers and all thieves who with violence steal
articles the value of which amounts to five hundred dollars and upward.
The manner in which this form of capital punishment is inflicted is as
follows:--A cross is erected in the centre of the execution ground, at
the foot of which a stone is placed, and upon this the prisoner stands.
His body is made fast to the perpendicular beam of the cross by a band
passing round the waist, while his arms are bound to the transverse
beam. The executioner then places round the neck of the prisoner a thin
but strong piece of twine, which he tightens to the utmost and then
ties in a firm knot round the upper part of the perpendicular beam.
Death by this cruel process is very slow and is apparently attended
with extreme agony. The body remains on the cross during a period of
twenty-four hours, the sheriff before leaving the execution ground
taking care to attach his seal to the knot of the twine which passes
round the neck of the malefactor.

The fourth class of punishment is called _man-kwan_, or transportation
for life. The criminals who are thus punished are embezzlers,
forgers, etc. The places of banishment in the north of China and
Tartary are named respectively Hack-loong-kong, Elee Ning-koo-tap and
Oloo-muk-tsze. All convicts from the midland and southern provinces
are sent to one or the other of these places, where the unhappy men are
employed in a great measure according to their former circumstances of
life. Those who are of a robust nature and who have been accustomed to
agricultural pursuits are daily occupied in reclaiming and cultivating
waste lands. Others, more especially those who have been sent from the
southern provinces, where the heat in summer is almost tropical, are,
in consequence of the severity of the cold which prevails in northern
latitudes, made to work in government iron foundries. The aged and
those who have not been accustomed to manual labour are daily employed
in sweeping the state temples and other public buildings.

The fifth class of punishment is termed _man-low_, or transportation
for ten or fifteen years. The criminals of this class are petty
burglars and persons who harbour those who have broken the laws. Such
offenders are generally sent to the midland provinces of the empire,
where the arrangements for convict labour are similar to those of the
penal settlements of the north. Convicts of this class who are natives
of the midland provinces are sent either to the eastern, western or
southern provinces of the empire. The barbarous practice of tattooing
the cheeks is also resorted to with these prisoners. The sixth class is
called _man-tow_, or transportation for three years. A punishment of
this nature is the portion of gamblers, salt smugglers, etc. A convict
of this class is transported to one of the provinces immediately
bordering upon that of which he is a native or in which his crime was
committed.

Oppression by the ruling class was always rife in China, and instances
might be multiplied recording the cruel misusage of inferiors by
the mandarins. One case in which ample vengeance was exacted by the
aggrieved victim may be quoted here. The story is told by Lady Susan
Townley in her “Chinese Note Book.”

“A well-to-do farmer called Chiang-lo lived happily on his estate with
a pretty wife whom he loved, until one day, as ill luck would have it,
a rich Mandarin passed that way, who, seeing the fair dame, straightway
desired her. Anxious to get rid of the husband by fair means or foul,
he trumped up a charge against him, and the farmer was condemned ‘to
be a slave to a soldier,’ which meant that he would be marched in
heavy chains from Peking to the northern frontier of China, cruelly
beaten at every station (they occur about every eighteen miles), and
ill-treated at will by the soldier in charge of him. This sentence is
usually equivalent to death, for few can survive the hardships of such
a journey, the fatigue, heat, cold, hunger and torture. But our friend
with hatred in his heart resolved to live in order to be revenged upon
his enemy. So he bore all his sufferings with superhuman courage, and
finally arrived at his destination on the frontier, where he was put
to work in a mine.” After he had been there about three years His
Majesty Kwang Hsu assumed the reins of government, and accorded a
general pardon to all criminals. Thus in a night Chiang-lo recovered
his freedom, and without a moment’s hesitation set off to trudge back
to Peking. “This time there was hope in his heart for he meant to kill
his enemy and the wife who had betrayed him. When he saw her again,
however, all his old love for her returned and though she refused to go
with him, and though he knew that if he killed them both, Chinese law
would account him guiltless, whereas if he killed her lover and spared
her, he would be considered guilty of murder, and would have to bear
the penalty, he did not hesitate one moment, but left her and went to
find her seducer.

“For days he tracked him about the town, waiting for a favourable
opportunity. At last it came, as his rival passed him in the deep
embrasure of the Chien-men gate. Springing from his place of
concealment he challenged him to fight, but the coward refused. Then
Chiang-lo ... drew his knife and repeatedly stabbed him in the heart.
When he saw his enemy lying dead at his feet, the apathy of despair
fell upon him. Wiping his knife on his sleeve he bowed his head, and
turning his steps to the nearest police station calmly gave himself up.
A few weeks later he was beheaded.”

It is interesting to read that the prevailing method of punishment in
China in the seventeenth century differed little from that in force
at a very recent date. In the memoirs of the Jesuit Louis le Comte,
published in 1698, he says: “They have several ways of inflicting
death. Mean and ignoble persons have their heads cut off, for in
China the separation of the head from the body is disgraceful. On the
contrary, persons of quality are strangled, which among them is a death
of more credit.... Rebels and traitors are punished with the utmost
severity; that is, to speak as they do, they cut them into ten thousand
pieces. For after that the executioner hath tied them to a post, he
cuts off the skin all round their forehead which he tears by force till
it hangs over their eyes, that they may not see the torments they are
to endure. Afterwards he cuts their bodies in what places he thinks
fit, and when he is tired of this barbarous employment, he leaves them
to the tyranny of their enemies and the insults of the mob.”

Cruelty, which is one of the strongest characteristics of the Chinese
nature, manifests itself not only in the application of criminal law,
but with a peculiar callousness they delight to torture dumb animals
and enjoy witnessing the sufferings of children and adults of their
own race. A common practice of the professional kidnapper is to blind
a child after stealing it, and then carry it away to another town and
sell it for a professional beggar. Infant life is still being destroyed
by parents in some districts of China, and the abominable custom is
difficult to eradicate, as the children are simply abandoned and left
to starve, and if the crime is discovered it is difficult to prove
deliberate murder.

Cases have been known of Chinese boatmen refusing to rescue persons
who had thrown themselves overboard from a sinking craft and were
drowning, unless they agreed to pay an exorbitant sum asked as the
price of rescue. They have even been known to look on passively while
their fellow-countrymen were struggling for life in the water, without
raising a hand to help them.

It is but natural to expect that in a country where such occurrences
are common, the punishments inflicted on the really guilty should
exceed anything known in the practices of the enlightened nations of
to-day.




PRISONS OF JAPAN




CHAPTER IX

ENLIGHTENED METHODS OF JAPAN

    Enlightened Japan has striven to establish a perfect
    prison system--New prisons--Deportation to the island of
    Yezo--Agricultural labour and work in coal mines--Two fine prisons
    in Tokio--Description by Mr. Norman--The gallows--Training school
    for prison officials--Disciplinary punishments and rewards.


Japan as an enlightened and progressive country has made strenuous
efforts to establish “as perfect a prison system as possible; one
which is in harmony with the advancement of science and the results of
experience.” These reforms were commenced in 1871 and were continued
in various new prisons at Tokio, Kobold, Kiogo and upon the island of
Yezo, all admirably organised and maintained. This movement was hurried
on by the great overcrowding of the small provincial prisons on account
of the accumulation of long-term prisoners. No proper discipline could
be applied and there was absolutely no room for short-term offenders.
Most of those sentenced to hard labour and deportation are now sent to
the penal settlement on the island of Yezo, where they are employed
both within the prisons and at agriculture in the open air. Every
advantage is taken of the natural aptitudes of the Japanese, and the
inmates of gaols prove the most expert and artistic workmen. The very
worst criminals are sent to the prison of Sorachi in the remote island
of Yezo, beyond Poronaibuto--a bleak, desolate spot surrounded by
the usual bamboo fence--which holds about sixteen hundred convicts.
They are to be seen squatted on mats at work, each in front of his
own sleeping place, and on a shelf above are his wadded bed-quilt,
with a mosquito curtain on top of each. The place is so isolated
and surrounded by such an impenetrable jungle that escapes are out
of the question. A little further on is the prison of Poronai, in a
delightful spot, where the most extensive coal fields of Japan are
located. A small building houses some six hundred convicts who work
in the coal seams on the side of the hill. “Hard labour indeed,”
says Mr. Wingfield. “Heavily chained, by light of a safety lamp the
wretched convicts were crouching in holes where there was no room to
raise the head or stretch the limbs, and here they had to remain for
eighteen hours at a time.” Their sentences were for twelve years,
although remission might by good conduct be secured after seven. Yet
these luckless Japanese bore their irksome lot with a light heart. “As
we were leaving Poronai at 5 A. M.,” says the same observer, “we met
a batch of miners marching to face their ordeal and many after the
eighteen hours are completed have to be removed to hospital. They
were clanking their chains right merrily, talking and laughing loudly,
bandying quips and jokes.”

Japan is a land of rapid transition and nothing has changed more
completely in recent years than Japanese prisons. Still there was some
system, even in ancient days. The sexes were kept apart, the penalty
of the log worn round the neck and fastened to the ankle was not
imposed upon the aged or juvenile offender, nor upon dwarfs, invalids
or pregnant women. In the sixteenth century a prison reformer arose
who organised five new prisons in Yeddo for five different classes of
prisoners, comprising females and persons of different conditions of
life. Proper prison officers were appointed, and security was obtained
without despising sanitary needs. Still there must have been much
mutual contamination, owing to the indiscriminate herding together,
and the maintenance of internal order was left to the prisoners who
chose among themselves a _nanoushi_, or head, with eleven assistants
to control the whole body. Flogging was inflicted and handcuffs were
universally worn. In 1790 a house of correction was established on the
island of Yshikavoy in the Bay of Yeddo, to which were committed all
vagabonds or incorrigible prisoners whom it was thought unsafe to set
free lest they should relapse into crime. The work on this island was
chiefly the manufacture of oil. In cases of escape and recapture the
fugitives were branded with a certain tattoo mark on the left arm.

Even in the middle of the nineteenth century the same brutal methods
of torture prevailed as in China (from where their bloody codes were
mostly borrowed), and there are preserved collections of instruments
of torture as diabolical as any known to history. Crime, too, was not
lacking in those “isles of the blest,” and every species of moral
filth and corruption abounded, which was shown in its true colours
when the liberty of the press was granted, in 1872-1874. The number of
executions and deaths in the native prisons at that time was said to
average three thousand per annum.

The chief prison of the empire, in Tokio, as described by Mr. William
M. Griffis, who visited it in 1875, was very different in its sanitary
appointments and general condition from the prisons of Tokio to-day.
A curious feature was a small roofed in structure in the prison yard,
with open sides, where condemned men of rank were allowed to expiate
their crimes by plunging the dirk into their own bodies, after which
the executioner cut off their heads. The head, laid on a tray, was
then inspected by an officer of justice. There were very few of such
executions after 1871. The ordinary criminal was beheaded in the
blood-pit, so-called, which was a pit surrounded with a much stained
and slashed wooden curb, and kept covered by a sort of trap-door. In
the pit were mats, one above the other, which had been soaked with the
blood of many criminals. “The faint odour that ascended,” says Mr.
Griffis, “was more horrible in the awful cloud of associations which
it called up than the mere stench.” It was then April and twenty-five
heads had fallen there since the year began. The criminal was led to
the pit blindfolded and was beheaded with an ordinary sword, sharp as a
razor. Death followed frequently on the day of sentence and never later
than the day after.

Tokio has now two prisons; the first and chief is situated upon the
island of Oshikawa at the south of the city, and the second, the
convict and female prison of Ichigawa, is in the centre of the city.
The former is completely isolated, all communication with the mainland
being by police ferry, and can accommodate two thousand men and boys,
who are serving terms of ten years or less. The prison of Ichigawa
usually contains fifteen hundred men and about one hundred women,
among whom are many serving life sentences. Attached to the prison is
a convict farm, and it is here that capital punishment is carried out.
Otherwise the two prisons resemble each other closely and a description
of one will answer for both, says Mr. Norman, who described them in
1892, and gives the following account:

“The entrance is through a massive wooden gateway, into a guard-room
adjoining which are the offices of the director and officials. The
prison itself consists of a score or more of detached one-story
buildings, all of wood and some of them merely substantial sheds,
under which the rougher labour, like stone-breaking, is performed. The
dormitories are enormous wooden cages, the front and part of the back
formed of bars as thick as one’s arm, before which again is a narrow
covered passage, where the warder on guard walks at night. There is not
a particle of furniture or a single article of any kind upon the floor,
which is polished till it reflects your body like a mirror. No boot, of
course, ever touches it. The thick quilts, or _futon_, which constitute
everywhere the Japanese bed, are all rolled up and stacked on a broad
shelf running round the room overhead. Each dormitory holds ninety-six
prisoners, and there is a long row of them. The sanitary arrangements
are situated in a little addition at the back, and I was assured that
these had not been made pleasant for my inspection. If not, I can
only say that in this most important respect a Japanese prison could
not well be improved. In fact, the whole dormitory, with its perfect
ventilation, its construction of solid, highly-polished wood, in which
there is no chance for vermin to harbour, and its combined simplicity
and security, is an almost ideal prison structure. Of course the fact
that every Japanese, from the emperor to the coolie, sleeps upon quilts
spread out on the floor, greatly simplifies the task of the prison
architect in Japan.

“On leaving the dormitories we passed a small, isolated square
erection, peaked and gabled like a little temple. The door was
solemnly unlocked and flung back, and I was motioned to enter. It was
the punishment cell, another spotless wooden box, well ventilated, but
perfectly dark, and with walls so thick as to render it practically
silent. ‘How many prisoners have been in it during the last month?’ I
asked. The director summoned the chief warder, and repeated my question
to him. ‘None whatever,’ was the reply. ‘What other punishments have
you?’ ‘None whatever.’ ‘No flogging?’ When this question was translated
the director and the little group of officials all laughed together at
the bare idea. I could not help wondering whether there was another
prison in the world with no method of punishment for two thousand
criminals except one dark cell, and that not used for a month. And the
recollection of the filthy and suffocating sty used as a punishment
cell in the city prison of San Francisco came upon me like a nausea.”

In Japan a prison consists of two parts--dormitories and workshops.
There is nothing whatever of cells or regulation prison buildings
properly speaking. It is a place of detention, of reformation, and of
profitable work. The visitors found in the first workshop, to their
great surprise, a couple of hundred prisoners making machinery and
steam boilers. One warder, carrying only a sword, was in charge of
every fifteen men. The prisoners were working on contract orders for
private firms, under the supervision of one skilled master and one
representative of the firm giving the contract. They work nine hours a
day, and are dressed in cotton suits of a peculiar terra-cotta colour.
When the foreigners entered, the warder on guard came to attention
and cried, “Pay attention!” Every one ceased work and bowed with his
forehead to the floor, remaining in that attitude until a second order
bade them rise. They were making large brass and iron steam pumps, and
the workshop, with its buzz of machinery and its intelligent labour,
was much like a part of an arsenal here or in Europe.

Another shop contained the wood-carvers, where more than a hundred
men, with blocks of wood between their knees, were carving with keen
interest upon all sorts of things, from simple trays and bowls to
fragile and delicate long-legged storks. “I bought,” says our author,
“an admirably-carved tobacco box, representing the God of Laughter
being dragged along by his cloak by six naked boys, and afterward
I asked some Japanese friends who supposed I had picked it up at a
curio-dealer’s, how much it was worth. They guessed ten _yen_--thirty
shillings. I paid sixty-eight _sen_ for it--less than two shillings.
It is a piece of work that would be admired anywhere, and yet it was
the work of a common burglar who had made the acquaintance of a carving
tool and a prison at the same time.”

There were also paper-makers, weavers (who were making the fabric
for the prison clothing), fan-makers, lantern-makers and workers in
baskets, mats, and nets. A printing shop, too, there was, where the
proof-reader was a criminal of more than ordinary interest. He had
been secretary of legation in France and had absconded with a large
sum, leaving his shoes on the river bank to lead the authorities to
believe he had committed suicide, but he had been arrested eventually
in Germany with his mistress.

In one of the shops jinrikishas were being made, in another umbrellas
were being carved elaborately and in another every kind of pottery
was being turned out. To the amazement of the visitors, they found
sixty men, common thieves and burglars, making the exquisite cloisonné
ware--“cutting by eye-measurement only the tiny strips of copper to
make the outline of a bird’s beak or the shading of his wing or the
articulations of his toe, sticking these upon the rounded surface of
the copper vase, filling up the interstices with pigment, coat upon
coat, and firing and filing and polishing it.” The finished work was
true and beautiful and it was difficult to believe that these men knew
nothing at all about it before they were sentenced. It would be hard to
imagine teaching such a thing to the convicts at Dartmoor or at Sing
Sing. In the prison at Tokio the convict is taught to do whatever is
the limit of his natural ability. If he cannot make cloisonné, he is
assigned to the wood-carving department, or perhaps to make pottery.
If he cannot do these, he can possibly make fans or basket-work, or set
type or cast brass. And for those who cannot reach so high a limit as
these occupations there is left the rice mill or stone-breaking, but of
two thousand men only thirty were unable to do any other work but that
of breaking stones.

Prisoners receive one-tenth of the sum their handiwork earns. A curious
custom is that every adult prisoner is kept for an additional six
months after his sentence expires unless he is claimed by friends in
the meantime, and if he has not reached adult age he is detained until
that is attained. During the added six months these prisoners wear blue
instead of the universal reddish garb.

“The women’s quarter at Ichigawa,” continues Norman, “is separated from
the men’s by a high wooden fence and gateway guarded by a sentinel,
and consists of two or three dormitories and one large comfortable
workshop, where all are employed together at labour let out by
contract. When I was there they were all hemming silk handkerchiefs,
each seated upon the matted floor before a little table, and very neat
they all looked, and very pretty some of them, with their loose red
gowns and simply twisted hair. ‘Those are forgers,’ said the officer,
pointing to three of them; ‘I do not like them to be so pretty.’ One
of the women had a young baby playing beside her, and another of
them as she glanced up at us showed a face entirely different from
the rest, pale, sad and refined, and I saw that her hands were small
and very white. It was Hanai Ume, the once famous geisha of Tokio,
famous for her beauty, her _samisen_-playing, her dancing, her pride,
and most famous of all for her _affaire d’amour_. Two years ago a
man-servant managed to make trouble between herself and her lover, whom
she expected to buy her out of the life of a professional musician at
anybody’s call, and then offered to make peace again between them on
his own terms. So one night she called him out of the house and stabbed
him to death with a kitchen knife. Now music is mute for her and song
is silent and love is left behind.

“To the gallows is an easy transition, as it is a natural conclusion.
In a secluded part of the grounds at Ichigawa, there is a forbidding
object like a great black box, raised six feet from the earth at the
foot of a long incline cut in the grass. A sloping walk of black boards
leads into the box on the left-hand side. The condemned criminal is led
up this and finds himself inside upon the drop. The rope is adjusted
and the cap fitted, and then at a signal the bottom of the box falls
back. Thus the Japanese method is exactly the opposite of our own,
the official spectators, including a couple of privileged reporters,
being spared the ghastly details of the toilette on the scaffold, and
seeing nothing until an unrecognisable corpse is suddenly flung out and
dangles before them.”

The state of Japanese advancement in matters of penology is shown by
the fact that in Tokio a school is maintained for the training of
prison officials in theory and practice, with an annual attendance of
from eighty to one hundred students. They are instructed in the laws
relating to prisons and prisoners, in the general outline of the penal
code, the sanitary care of prisons, the treatment of criminal patients,
and kindred subjects.

The number of felons and misdemeanants is decreasing annually, while
there has been a slight increase, on the other hand, in the number of
contraveners. There are three disciplinary punishments in the prisons:
first, solitary confinement in a windowed cell; second, reduction of
food supply; third, solitary confinement in a dark room.

Medals are granted by the prison governors as rewards to any prisoners
who have worked diligently and conducted themselves properly in
prison, but no medal can be awarded more than three times to any
one individual. Medallists enjoy certain privileges and leniency of
treatment, and pardons are based on the medal system.




PRISONS OF EGYPT




CHAPTER X

THE LAW IN EGYPT

    Penal code in Egypt of Mohammedan origin and derived from the
    Koran--The law of talion--Price of blood--Blood feuds and blood
    revenge--The courbash freely used to raise taxes--Old police in
    Cairo--Extensive reforms--Oppressive governors--Tyrannical rule of
    Ismail Pasha--Protection and security guaranteed to the fellaheen
    by British occupation--Prison reform--Tourah near Cairo--Labour
    at the quarries--Profitable workshops--Assiut prison--Life at
    Tourah--Attempts to escape--Convicts employed on the communication
    line in the Sudan campaign--Excellent sanitation and good hospital
    arrangements.


The land of the Pharaohs has ever been governed by the practices and
influenced by the traditions of the East. From the time of the Arab
conquest, Mohammedan law has generally prevailed, and the old penal
code was derived directly from the Koran. Its provisions were most
severe, but followed the dictates of common sense and were never
outrageously cruel. The law of talion was generally enforced, a life
for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Murder entailed
the punishment of death, but a fine might be paid to the family of the
deceased if they would accept it; this was only permitted when the
homicide was attended by palliating circumstances. The price of blood
varied. It might be the value of a hundred camels; or if the culprit
was the possessor of gold, a sum equal to £500 was demanded, but if he
possessed silver only, the price asked was a sum equal to £300. The
accomplices and accessories were also liable to death. Compensation in
the form of a fine is not now permitted. A man who killed another in
self-defence or to defend his property from a depredator was exempt
from punishment. Unintentional homicide might be expiated by a fine.
The price of blood was incumbent upon the whole tribe or family to
which the murderer belonged. A woman convicted of a capital crime was
generally drowned in the Nile.

Blood-revenge was a common practice among the Egyptian people. The
victim’s relations claimed the right to kill the perpetrator, and
relationship was widely extended, for the blood guiltiness included
the homicide, his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and
great-great-grandfather, and all these were liable to retaliation
from any of the relatives of the deceased, who in times past, killed
with their own hands rather than appeal to the government, and often
did so with disgusting cruelty, even mangling and insulting the
corpse. Animosity frequently survived even after retaliation had
been accomplished, and blood-revenge sometimes subsisted between
neighbouring villages for several years and through many generations.
Revengeful mutilation was allowed by the law in varying degrees.
Cutting off the nose was equivalent to the whole price of blood, or of
any two members,--two arms, two hands, or two legs; the removal of one
was valued at half the price of blood. The fine of a man for maiming or
wounding a woman was just half of that inflicted for injuring a man, if
free; if a slave the fine was fixed according to the commercial value
of the slave. The whole price of blood was demanded if the victim had
been deprived of any of his five senses or when he had been grievously
wounded or disfigured for life.

The Koran prescribed that for a first offence of theft the thief’s
right hand should be cut off, and for a second, his left foot; for
a third, the left hand; and for a fourth, the right foot. Further
offences of this kind were punished by flogging, or beating with the
courbash--a whip of hippopotamus hide hammered into a cylindrical
form--or a stick upon the soles of the feet. The bastinado, in fact,
was the familiar punishment of the East. Religious offences, such as
apostacy and blasphemy, were very rigorously punished. In Cairo a
person accused of thefts, assaults and so forth used to be carried by
a soldier before the kadi, or chief magistrate of the metropolitan
police, and sent on trial before a court of judicature, or if he denied
his offence, or the evidence seemed insufficient for conviction,
although good grounds for suspicion existed, he was bastinadoed to
extort confession. He generally admitted his guilt with the common
formula in the case of theft, “the devil seduced me and I took it.” The
penalties inflicted less than death included hard labour on the public
works, digging canals and the removal of rubbish or compulsory military
service.

The modern traveller in Egypt will bear witness to the admirable
police system introduced under British rule, and to the security
afforded to life and property in town and country by a well organised,
well conducted force. In former days, under the Pashas, the whole
administration of justice was corrupt from the judge in his court
to the police armed with arbitrary powers of oppression. The chief
of police in Cairo was charged with the apprehension of thieves
and criminals and with his myrmidons made constant rounds nightly
through the city. He was accompanied by the public executioner and a
torch-bearer who carried a curious light that burned without flame
unless waved through the air, when it burst suddenly forth; the burning
end was sometimes hidden in a small pot or jar and when exposed served
the purpose of a dark lantern. The smell of the burning torch often
gave timely warning to thieves to make off. The chief of the police
arrogated to himself arbitrary powers, and often put a criminal to
death when caught, even for offences not deserving capital punishment.
A curious custom obtained in old Cairo; it was the rule for the
community of thieves to be controlled by and to obey one of their
number, who was constituted their sheik and who was required by the
authorities to hunt up offenders and surrender them to justice.

In old times the administration of the country districts was in the
hands of governors appointed by the Pasha and charged by him with the
collection of taxes and the regulation of the corvee, or system of
enforced or unremunerated labour, at one time the universal rule in
Egypt. The prompt and excessive use of the stick or courbash was the
stimulus by which the contributions demanded were extorted, and the
sheik, or headman of a village, might be severely bastinadoed when the
sum demanded ran short. Everything was taxed, particularly the land and
its products, wholly or in part, or they were sometimes seized outright
and sold at a fixed price, but impounded to make good the debts of the
cultivators to the government. Taxes were also levied in kind,--butter,
honey, wax, wood, baskets of palm leaves and grain. The government
granaries were kept full by the last named exaction and in this regard
an amazing story is told.

The governor of the district and town of Tanta, when visiting the
granary, saw two fellaheen resting who had just deposited their tale
of corn. One had brought in 130 ardebbs (equivalent to five English
bushels) from a village at a distance, the other only 60 ardebbs from
some land adjoining the town. The governor at once fell foul of the
defaulter, and utterly ignoring the townsman’s protest that his was a
daily and the countryman’s a weekly contribution, ordered the man of
Tanta to be forthwith hanged. The next day the governor paid a second
visit to the granary and saw a peasant delivering a large quantity of
corn. Being much pleased, he inquired who the man was and heard that
it was he who had been summarily executed the day before and who now
produced 160 ardebbs of grain. “What, has he risen from the dead?”
cried the governor, astounded. “No, Sir; I hanged him so that his toes
touched the ground; and when you were gone, I untied the rope; you did
not order me to kill him,” replied his subordinate. “Aha,” answered the
governor, “hanging and killing are different things. Next time I will
say kill.”

“To relate all the oppressions which the peasantry of Egypt endure,”
says Mr. E. W. Lane, the authority for the foregoing, “from the
dishonesty of the officials would require too much space in the present
work. It would be scarcely possible for them to suffer more and live.”
Yet a worse time was approaching, when the notorious Ismail Pasha
became practically supreme ruler and used his unchecked power for
the complete enslavement of Egypt. His methods of misgovernment, his
robbery, spoliation and cruel oppression are now matters of history.
This modern Sardanapalus, as he has been aptly styled, lavishly wasted
the wealth he wrung out of his helpless subjects by the intolerable
rapacity of his ferocious tax gatherers. The fellaheen were stripped to
the skin to fill his coffers and feed the boundless extravagance of
a vain and licentious prince. His private property was enormous; his
estates and factories were valued at sixty millions sterling; he owned
forty-three palaces and was building more when, in a few short years,
he had brought Egypt to the brink of ruin, and the people starved at
his door.

The people of Egypt not only paid taxes, but their possessions were
seized ruthlessly, their lands misappropriated, their cattle and goods
confiscated; they were mere slaves whose right to work on their own
account was forfeited; and the whole population was driven forth from
their villages with whips, hundreds of thousands of men, women and
children, under the iniquitous system of enforced labour, to make
roads through the Khedive’s estates, till the cotton fields and build
embankments to control the distribution of the life-giving Nile. No
escape from these hardships was possible, no relief from this most
grievous Egyptian bondage. The arbitrary despot backed his demands by
a savage system of punishments, and when the courbash was ineffectual,
he banished malcontents to the remote provinces of central Africa,
where, after a terrible journey, they expiated their offences at
Fazoglo or Fashoda. Sometimes the highest officials were arrested and
despatched in chains, without any form of trial, and were detained for
years in this tropical Siberia. To speak of the Nemesis that eventually
overtook Ismail and deprived him with ignominy of a power he so
shamefully misused is beyond the scope of this work. But reference must
be made in some detail to the many merciful changes introduced into
the administration of justice under the British protectorate that has
succeeded to Egyptian rule.

In Egypt, at the present time, every son of the soil is safe from
arbitrary and illegal arrest; the imposition of taxes is regulated
strictly according to law; there is no enforced labour,--the corvee
has been absolutely swept out of existence. Every peaceably disposed
citizen may live sheltered and protected from outrage and in the
undisturbed enjoyment of his possessions, waxing rich by his own
exertion, safe from the attack or interference of evil-doers. It was
not always so, and the great boons of personal security and humane,
equitable treatment now guaranteed to every soul in the land have been
only slowly acquired. Until 1844 the Egyptian police was ineffective,
the law was often a dead letter, and the prisons were a disgrace to
humanity and civilisation. Before that date the country was covered
with zaptiehs, or small district prisons, in which illegal punishment
and every form of cruelty were constantly practised. It was quite
easy for anyone in authority to consign a fellah to custody. One of
the first of the many salutary reforms introduced by the new prison
department established under British predominance was an exact
registration of every individual received at the prison gate, and
the enforcement of the strict rule that no one should be admitted
without an order of committal duly signed by some recognised judicial
authority. To-day, of course, any such outrage as illegal imprisonment
is out of the question. Another form of oppression in the old days
was the unconscionable delay in bringing the accused to trial.
Hundreds were thus detained awaiting gaol delivery for six or nine
months, sometimes for one or two years. At that time, too, there was
no separation of classes; the innocent were herded with the guilty,
children with grown men; only the females, as might be expected in a
Mohammedan country, were kept apart, but their number then and since
has always been exceedingly few.

The first step taken by the new régime was to concentrate prisoners
in a certain number of selected prisons, such as they were, but the
best that could be found. In these, twenty-one in number, strenuous
efforts were made to introduce order; cleanliness was insisted upon and
disinfectants were largely used, while medical men were appointed at
each place, who attended daily to give medicine and move the sick into
hospital. The health of the prisoners was so much improved that they
constituted one per cent. of the daily average of prisoners, and this
ratio has been maintained, so that in the cholera epidemic in 1896 only
a few convicts died.

A good prison system could only be introduced in improved prisons,
and the first created was the great convict establishment at Tourah,
a village about eight miles above Cairo on the banks of the Nile and
at the foot of the great limestone quarries that have supplied the
city with its building material from the earliest days. In 1885 the
old military hospital at Tourah was handed over to be converted into a
public works prison; a few of the wards were converted into cells, and
a draft of 250 convicts was brought from the arsenal at Alexandria to
occupy them. These proved skilful workmen, as the fellaheen, whether
captive or free, invariably are, and with the help of a few paid
stone-masons they restored the half-ruined upper story of the ancient
building and converted it into a satisfactory prison to hold one
hundred and fifty more inmates. The four hundred steadfastly continued
their labours and to such good purpose, demolishing, removing,
cleaning, and constructing new roads and approaches, that in May,
1886, an entirely new prison for five hundred convicts was completed
and occupied. Many forms of industry were carried on with excellent
financial results, as will be seen from the following details.

All the lime for buildings was burned in two lime kilns constructed
for the purpose; all the furniture and woodwork, the tables, beds and
doors were made by convict carpenters; all the ironwork, the bolts
and bars for safe custody, the very leg-irons, their own inalienable
livery under the old Egyptian prison code, were turned out by convict
blacksmiths; and hundreds of baskets for carrying earth and stone
have been manufactured. The industrial labour at Tourah is now of many
useful kinds. New prison clothing, new boots (although these usually
indispensable articles are only issued to a favoured few prisoners
in Egypt), the baking of bread and biscuit for home consumption, or
to be sent to out-stations, plate laying and engine fitting, stone
dressing for prison buildings, both at Tourah and elsewhere,--all
these are constantly in progress at the Tourah prison. The money made
in the prison provides funds for many things necessary for further
development, such as tram lines, locomotives, improved tools and
machinery of all kinds.

A visit to Tourah is both interesting and instructive. The chief
employment of the convicts is in the quarries, a couple of miles from
the prison, to which the gangs proceed every morning at daylight and
where they remain every day of the week but Friday, which is their
Sabbath, until four o’clock in the afternoon. There is no time wasted
in marching to and fro. The dinner, or midday meal, is carried out
to the quarries by the cooks, and after it is eaten the convicts are
allowed an hour’s rest in such shade as can be found in the nearly
blinding heat of the dazzling white quarries. As this midday siesta is
the common hour for trains to pass on to the neighbouring health resort
of Helouan, casual observers might think that rest and refreshment
formed a great part of the Egyptian convict’s daily life. But that
would be a grievous mistake. During the hours of labour, ceaseless
activity is the rule; all around the picks resound upon the unyielding
stone; some are busy with the levers raising huge blocks, stimulated
by the sing-song, monotonous chant, without which Arabs, like sailors,
cannot work with any effect. The burden of the song varies, but it is
generally an appeal for divine or heavenly assistance, “Allahiteek!”
“May God give it,” the phrase used by the initiated to silence the
otherwise too importunate beggar, or “Halimenu,” “Hali Elisa,” ending
in an abrupt “Hah!” or “Hop!” at the moment of supreme effort.

A visitor of kindly disposition is not debarred from encouraging
effort by the gift of a few cigarettes to the convicts. Tobacco is
not forbidden in the prisons of Egypt. It is issued to convicts in
the works prisons in small rations as a reward, according to the
governor’s judgment. The unconvicted and civil prisoners undergoing
merely detention are at liberty to purchase it. I was the witness, the
cause indeed, of a curious and unwonted scene in the small prison at
Assiut when I inspected it in 1898. The sale of tobacco was in progress
in the prison yard, where all of the prisoners, a hundred and more,
were at exercise. An official stood behind a small table on which lay
the little screws of tobacco for disposal, each for a few _milliems_,
the smallest of Egyptian coins, the fractional part of a farthing.
The eagerness with which the poor prisoners eyed the precious weed
excited my generosity, and I bought up the whole table load, then and
there, for a couple of shillings. The prisoners crowding around saw the
deal and understood it. Hardly had I put down the ten piastres when
the whole body “rushed” the table, overset it, threw the screws of
tobacco upon the ground, and all hands pounced down on the scattered
weed in one great struggling, scrambling, combatant medley. The tobacco
was quite wasted, of course, and I have no idea who got the money.
The mêlée was so unmanageable that it was necessary to call out the
guard to drive the prisoners back to their wards. I was aghast at my
indiscretion and ready to admit that I should have known better.

The daily unremitting toil of Tourah must be preferable to all but the
incurably idle. Yet the terror of “Tourah” is now universal up and
down Egypt. It is the great “bogey” of the daily life among the lower
classes, the threat held over the fractious child or the misconducted
donkey boy who claims an exorbitant “bakshish.” To accuse any decent
fellah of having been in Tourah is the worst sort of insult and at once
indignantly denied. When my own connection with the English prisons
became known, I was generally called the pasha of the English Tourah,
and my official position gained me very marked respect among classes
spoiled by many thousands of annual tourists,--the greedy guides and
donkey boys, the shameless vendors of sham curiosities, the importunate
beggars that infest hotel entrances, swarm in the villages and make
hideous the landing stages up the Nile. An old hand will best silence
a persistent cry for alms or the wail of _miski_ (poverty stricken),
of “Halas! finish father, finish mother” (the ornate expression for an
orphan), by talking of the _caracol_, “police station,” and a promise
of “Tourah” to follow.

Life in Tourah must be hard. The monotonous routine from daylight to
sundown, the long nights of thirteen or fourteen hours, from early
evening to morning, caged up with forty or fifty others tainted
with every vice and crime, must be a heavy burden upon all but the
absolutely debased. The evils of association, of herding criminals
together, left to their own wicked devices, without supervision, were
present in the highest degree in Egyptian prisons. At last, however, a
move was made to provide separate cells for a certain number, and a new
prison of 1,200 cells was built by convict labour at Tourah immediately
opposite the new hospitals and at some distance from the old prison.
Much mischievous conspiracy of the worst kind is prevented by keeping
individuals apart during the idle hours of the night, for it was then
that those concerted escapes of large numbers were planned, which have
occurred more than once at Tourah, but have been generally abortive,
ending only in bloodshed; for the black Sudanese, who form the convict
guards, are expert marksmen and surely account for a large part of the
fugitives.

There must be something very tempting to the untutored mind--and many
of these Tourah convicts are half-wild creatures, Bedouins of the
desert or the lowest scum of the cities--in the seeming freedom of
their condition during so many hours of the day. Liberty seems within
easy reach. Not a mile from the quarries are great overhanging cliffs,
honey-combed with caves, deep, cavernous recesses affording secure
hiding places, and it is for these that the rush is made. In August of
1896 there was a serious attempt of this kind, and success was achieved
by some of the runaways. The hour chosen was that of the break-off
from labour, when the gangs, surrounded by their guards, converge on a
central point, very much as may be seen on any working-day at Portland
or Dartmoor, and thence march home in one compact body to the distant
prison. It is a curiously picturesque scene. The convicts, mostly fine,
stalwart men, their ragged, dirty white robes flying in the wind and
their chains rattling, swing past, two by two, in an almost endless
procession. Below, the mighty river, flowing between its belt of palm
and narrow fringe of green, shines like burnished silver under the
declining sun; beyond stretches the wide desert to the foot of the
Pyramids, those of Sakhara at one end of the landscape, those of Cheops
at the other,--colossal monuments of enforced labour very similar to
that now surviving at Tourah.

Such was the moment chosen for a general stampede. About sixty or
seventy convicts agreed to cut and run simultaneously, all toward the
shelter of the hills. A few were told off to try conclusions with the
armed guards, to wrest away the rifles and thus secure both immunity
from fire and the power to use the weapon in self-defence. The attempt
appears to have been fairly successful at first. A few rifles were
seized, and the fugitives, turning on their pursuers, made some
pretty practice, during which a few of the more fortunate got away.
But authority finally asserted itself. Many were shot down; the rest
were overtaken and immediately surrendered. The absence of “grit,”
so characteristic of the race, showed itself at once, and these poor
wretches, who had been bold enough to make the first rush under a hail
of bullets, now squatted down and with uplifted hands implored for
mercy or declared it was all a mistake. “Malesh, it does not matter,”
was their cry then. But they no doubt found that it mattered a great
deal when a few days later Nemesis overtook them in the shape of
corporal punishment; for the lash, a cat of six tails, is used in the
Egyptian prisons as a last resort in the maintenance of discipline and
good order. It is only inflicted, however, under proper safeguards and
by direct sentence of a high official. There is no courbash now in the
prisons, and no warder or guard is permitted to raise his hand against
a prisoner. Tyranny and ill-usage are strictly forbidden.

Escapes have happened at other places. When military operations were
in progress on the frontier leading to the revindication of the
Sudan, an immense amount of good work was done by large detachments
of convicts at stations high up the river. There were rough and ready
“Tourahs” at Assuan, Wady Halfa, Korosko, Suakin, El Teb, points of
considerable importance in the service of the campaign, where supplies
were constantly being landed, stored or sent forward to the front. The
Egyptian prison authorities very wisely and intelligently utilised
the labour at their disposal to assist in unloading boats and in
reshipping stores and railway plant. Numbers of convicts were employed
to construct the railway ahead in the direction of Abu Hamed by which
the advance was presently made. The Nile above Merawi flows through the
most difficult country in its whole course, the very “worst water,”
and no navigation in that length was possible by steamers, little or
none by small boats except at high Nile and then only by haulage. It
was necessary, therefore, to complete the railway to Abu Hamed, so that
gunboats might be sent up in sections over the line, to be put together
above the cataracts and then utilised in the final advance, for the
river is more or less open to Berber and on to Khartum, and the success
of the campaign was greatly facilitated thereby.

Egyptian convicts did much good work of a superior kind. Now and again
a trained handicraftsman was found who was willing to put forward his
best skill and there was always a smart man ready to act as leader and
foreman of the rest, as is very much the case, indeed, with convicts
all over the world. One man in particular at Wady Halfa was well
known as a most industrious and intelligent worker. He so gained the
good-will of the British officers that, not knowing his antecedents,
many of them strongly recommended him for release as a reward for his
usefulness. But the prison authorities were unable to accede to this
seemingly very justifiable request. This best of prisoners (again
following experience elsewhere) was the worst of criminals. He had
committed no fewer than eight murders, possibly not with malicious
motives, or he would hardly have escaped the gallows. The death penalty
is not, however, inflicted very frequently in Egypt. In one case worth
mentioning as illustrating the almost comical side of Egyptian justice,
a man sentenced to death was held to serve a short term of imprisonment
for some minor offence before he was considered ripe for execution.
When the short sentence was completed, he was incontinently hanged.

At Assuan during war time hundreds of convicts were engaged all day
long under the windows of the hotel. Their rattling chains were heard
soon after dawn mixed with their unmelodious sing-song as described
above. They could be seen constantly and freely approached, as they
clustered around the great crane that raised the heaviest weights,
locomotives, tender, and boilers, from the boats moored below, or as
they passed along in single file backward and forward between the beach
and the railway station or storehouses near-by. All were in picturesque
rags, except the military prisoners, dressed in a startling uniform
of bright orange; all wore the inevitable leg-irons riveted on their
spare, shrunken brown ankles. It was the custom once, as in the old
French _bagnes_, to chain the Egyptian convicts in couples, a long-term
man newly arrived being chained with one whose sentence had nearly
expired.

This practice has now been discontinued, and each unfortunate bears
his burden alone. Much ingenuity is exercised to prevent the basils
or anklets from chafing the skin. The most effective method, employed
no doubt by the most affluent, was a leather pad inserted within the
iron ring; others without resources, owning not a single _milliem_ in
the world, used any filthy rags or scraps of sacking they could beg
or steal. Pads of this kind have been worn from time immemorial by
all prisoners and captives; no doubt the galley slaves chained to the
oar in classical days invented them, and they were known until quite
lately in the French _bagnes_ of Rochefort and Toulon by the name
of _patarasses_, which the old hands manufactured and sold to the
newcomers. Another old-fashioned device among the Egyptian convicts is
the short hook hanging from a waistband, which catches up one link of
the irons, a simple necessity where the chain is of such length that it
drags inconveniently along the ground.

The general use of fetters is not now approved by civilised nations.
But in Egypt they appear to be nearly indispensable for safe custody.
The removal of the leg-irons from convicts has often encouraged them
to effect escape. Once sixteen of them at Assuan were astute enough to
sham illness. It was during the cholera epidemic, and they knew enough
of the symptoms to counterfeit some of them cleverly. The medical
officer in charge was compassionate and thought it cruel that his
patients should die in their chains, so he had them struck off. Within
a few hours the unshackled convicts gave their guardians leg-bail, and
escaped from the hospital into the desert, and so down the river. These
very men afterward formed the nucleus of the band of _harami_, the
robbers and brigands who terrorised the lower province for some months
and were only disposed of at last by summary action. The story of the
subsequent burning of the brigands at Belianah became public property
and was made the occasion of one of those virulent attacks upon British
rule that often found voice under the unrestrained license of the
Egyptian press. These out-laws were pursued and overtaken at last by
the police in a house where they had barricaded themselves. It was
impossible to break in, and the assailants therefore set fire to the
thatched roof. The robbers used this as their private arsenal, and the
fire soon ignited their cartridges with a terrific explosion in which
most of the defenders lost their lives. This practice of concealing
explosives in the roof was not uncommon during the days of conflict
with the Mahdi. When the sheik of Derowi was arrested on a charge of
conveying contraband ammunition into the Sudan, he contrived to send
back a message to his wife to make away with all damaging evidence. She
thought the safest way to dispose of the gunpowder stored in the house
was by fire and at the same time she also disposed, very effectually,
of herself.

A striking feature at Tourah was the admirable prison hospital,
which would compare favourably with the best in the world. It is a
two-storied building with lofty, well-ventilated wards, beds and
bedding, all in the most approved style; a well-stocked dispensary and
a fully qualified medical man in daily attendance. The patients, unless
too ill to rise, sit up on their beds rather like poultry roosting, and
suffer from most of the ills to which humanity is heir. The complaints
most prevalent are eczema, tuberculosis (the great scourge of the black
prisoners from the south), ophthalmia, and dysentery. “Stone” is a
malady very prevalent and showing itself in the most aggravated form,
due no doubt to the constant drinking of lime-affected water. I saw
calculi of almost colossal size, the result of some recent operations,
extracted by the prison surgeons, whose skill is evidently remarkable.

Too much praise can hardly be accorded the Egyptian prison
administration for its prompt and effective treatment of the cholera
epidemic when it appeared in Egypt in 1896. Although the mortality
was serious in the general population, the percentage of deaths was
relatively small in the prisons. Out of a total of 7,954 prison inmates
(this number did not include the convicts at the seat of war or on the
Red Sea) there were only one hundred and sixteen cases and seventy
deaths. In six of the prisons the disease did not appear; in others,
although situated in the heart of infected towns, and prisoners were
being constantly received from infected districts, the cases were few.
In Tourah, with a total population of thirteen hundred and fifty, there
were but twenty-two; at Assiut, a new building with good sanitation,
only two; the average was largest at Keneh, Mansourah and Assuan. Not
a single female prisoner was attacked; an immunity attributed to the
fact that the females in custody receive regular prison diet, while
the males, except at Tourah and Ghizeh, are fed, often indifferently,
by their friends outside. These excellent results were undoubtedly
due to the strict isolation of the inmates of any prison in which the
cholera had appeared. Whenever a case showed, the introduction of food
or clothing from outside was strictly forbidden, and friends were not
admitted when cholera existed in the neighbourhood. Much credit was due
also to the unselfish devotion of the Egyptian medical staff, who were
unremitting in their care and of whom two died of the disease at their
posts.

It was officially stated in 1903 that such crimes as robbery with
violence, petty thefts and brigandage had increased materially since
1899. The reason given for this was the failure of the police machinery
to bring out the truth and the practice of bribes which was everywhere
prevalent. The corruption of magistrates and the terrorism held over
witnesses make it exceedingly difficult to bring a man to justice or
obtain satisfactory convictions. But we may well conclude that the
prison system as established in Egypt to-day is of the most modern and
satisfactory character.




PRISONS OF TURKEY




CHAPTER XI

TURKISH PRISONS

    Old castles used as prisons--The Castle of Europe--The
    Seven Towers and the “Well of Blood”--The Seraglio and the
    Bagnio--The Zaptie--Lack of prison discipline--Midhat Pasha
    and the Constitution--His disgrace and death--The Young Turk
    movement--Horrible massacres at Adana--The provincial prisons all
    bad--Fetters and other modes of torture--Little improvement under
    new sultan.


There are few notable buildings in Turkey constructed primarily as
prisons. In fact there are few buildings of any sort constructed for
that purpose. But every palace had, and one may almost say, still has
its prison chambers; and every fortress has its dungeons, the tragedies
of which are chiefly a matter of conjecture. Few were present at the
tortures, and in a country where babbling is not always safe, witnesses
were likely to be discreet.

In and around Constantinople, if walls had only tongues, strange and
gruesome stories might be told. On the Asiatic side of the Bosporus
still stand the ruins of a castle built by Bayezid I, known as “the
Thunderbolt” when the Ottoman princes were the dread of Europe.
Sigismund, King of Hungary, had been defeated, and Constantinople was
the next object of attack, though not to fall for a half century. This
castle was named “the Beautiful,” but so many prisoners died there of
torture and ill-treatment that the name “Black Tower” took its place in
common speech.

Directly opposite, on the European side of the Bosporus, is _Rumili
Hissar_, or the Castle of Europe, which Muhammad II, “the Conqueror,”
built in 1452 when he finally reached out to transform the headquarters
of Eastern Christendom into the centre of Islam. The castle was built
upon the site of the state prison of the Byzantine emperors, which was
destroyed to make room for it. The three towers of the castle, and the
walls thirty feet thick, still stand. In the Tower of Oblivion which
now has as an incongruous neighbour, the Protestant institution, Robert
College, is a fiendish reminder of days hardly yet gone. A smooth
walled stone chute reaches from the interior of the tower down into the
Bosporus. Into the mouth of this the hapless victim, bound and gagged
perhaps, with weights attached to his feet, was placed. Down he shot
and bubbles marked for a few seconds the grave beneath the waters.

The Conqueror built also the _Yedi Kuleh_, or the “Seven Towers,” at
the edge of the old city. This imperial castle, like the Bastile or
the Tower of London, was also a state prison, though its glory and
its shame have both departed. The Janissaries who guarded this castle
used to bring thither the sultans whom they had dethroned either to
allow them to linger impotently or to cause them to lose their heads.
A cavern where torture was inflicted and the rusty machines which tore
muscles and cracked joints, may still be seen. The dungeons in which
the prisoners lay are also shown. A small open court was the place of
execution and to this day it is called the “place of heads” while a
deep chasm into which the heads were thrown is the “well of blood.”

Several sultans, (the exact number is uncertain) and innumerable
officers of high degree have suffered the extreme penalty here. It was
here too that foreign ambassadors were always imprisoned in former
days, when Turkey declared war against the states they represented. The
last confined here was the French representative in 1798.

Another interesting survival of early days is the Seraglio, the old
palace of the sultans, and its subsidiary buildings, scattered over a
considerable area. In the court of the treasury is the _Kafess_, or
cage, in which the imperial children were confined from the time of
Muhammad III, lest they should aspire to the throne. Sometimes however
the brothers and sons of the reigning sultan were confined, each in a
separate pavilion on the grounds. A retinue of women, pages and eunuchs
was assigned to each but the soldiers who guarded them were warned to
be strict. The present sultan was confined by his brother Abdul Hamid
within the grounds of the Yildiz Kiosk, where he had many liberties
but was a prisoner nevertheless. Absolutism breeds distrust of all, no
matter how closely connected by ties of blood.

An interesting prison was the old Bagnio, once the principal prison
of Constantinople. The English economist, N. W. Senior, describes it
as it was sixty years ago, in his “Journal.” It was simply an open
court at one end of which was a two-story building. Each story was
composed of one long room divided into stalls by wooden partitions, the
whole, dark, unventilated and dirty beyond description. Some turbulent
prisoners were chained in their stalls which they were not permitted to
leave.

The chief interest lay in the court-yard, however, which was the common
meeting place. No rules as to cleanliness or regularity of hours
existed. No one was compelled to work and the great majority preferred
to lounge in the sun. In the court were coffee and tobacco shops, while
sellers of sweetmeats made their way through the crowds. Though capital
punishment was nominally inflicted, it was never imposed unless there
were eye witnesses of the crime, and seldom then. So of the eight
hundred inmates of the Bagnio, six hundred were murderers, some of them
professionals. Nearly all wore chains, some of which were heavy, and
as several prisoners were attached to one chain occasionally conflicts
arose as different members of the group exhibited divergent desires.

Another visitor about the same time saw the picturesque side.
He mentions the robbers, chiefs from Smyrna, stalking about the
enclosure, the voluble Greeks and Armenians, the secretive Jews, and an
Irishman or two, mingling with the stolid Turks. Inmates were sipping
coffee, smoking, playing cards, disputing, fighting, while a furtive
pickpocket made his rounds. In a corner a fever patient was stretched
out oblivious to his surroundings, though the clamour sometimes was
deafening. He goes on to say:

“Yet physically the wretches were not ill-treated; they need not ever
work unless they like. The court is small and so is the two-storied
stable where they sleep upon the earth; but then these are men who
perhaps never got between sheets nor lay on a bed in their lives.
They may talk what they like, and when they like. They have a Mosque,
a Greek chapel and a Roman Catholic chapel. They can have coffee and
tobacco, and if they work they are supposed to be paid for it. There is
no treadmill, no crank, there are no solitary cells.”

The same observer describes the Zaptie or House of Detention as it
then existed, and though the building as it exists to-day is improved,
conditions are not essentially different. Then there were two
communicating courts, where pickpockets, ordinary thieves, participants
in affrays, and even murderers were confined. At night they were locked
in rooms. One of these sleeping rooms, eleven by seventeen feet, was
occupied at night by twelve men. In such places prisoners were kept an
indefinite time awaiting trial, and perhaps then discharged without
trial and without explanation.

A large number of Turkish prisoners have been confined either for
conspiracy against the government, or for daring to exhibit a certain
amount of independence. An officer apparently high in favour to-day
might be degraded on the next without warning. An interesting case of
this kind is the case of Midhat Pasha, one of the best known men in
Turkey thirty or forty years ago.

He was one of the little group of Turks who adopted European ideas
after the Crimean war. He was a friend of England as opposed to Russia
and the influence of the latter state was thrown against him. He was
one of the ministers by whom the sultan, Abdul Aziz, was dethroned.
This prince soon afterward died, possibly by suicide, though ugly
rumours were heard. When Murad, the incompetent, was also deposed
Midhat had a hand in the affair. On the accession of Abdul Hamid he was
again made Grand Vizier, and secured the promulgation of the famous
Turkish constitution of 1876, against the will of the sultan.

When Abdul Hamid felt himself firm in his seat in 1877, he banished
Midhat, but recalled him the next year, and made him governor-general,
first of Syria and then of Smyrna. The constitution was practically
abrogated by this time. Then without warning he was arrested in May,
1881, charged with being concerned in the murder of Abdul Aziz. He
with others was quickly tried by a special court, was found guilty and
condemned to death.

The sentence was changed to imprisonment for life, and the place of
confinement was fixed at Taïf, in Arabia, a small place south of
Mecca. There he and his companions who had received similar sentence,
including a former Sheikh-ul-Islam, Hassan Haïroullah, were at first
allowed the freedom of the castle. Their servants bought and cooked
their food, and though the rude accommodations were somewhat trying to
the old men, conditions were endurable.

A change in treatment was foreshadowed by a change in gaolers. The
privilege of buying food was taken away, and they were expected to
eat the coarse fare of the common soldier. They were forbidden to
communicate with one another. For a time the faithful servant was
refused access to Midhat’s person, though this order was afterward
revoked. Poison was discovered in the milk, and in a pot of food.
The servant was offered large sums to poison him, but the faithful
attendant only redoubled his vigilance. Finally when hardship,
separation from family and friends, and dread of the future, seemed
unable to destroy his life more primitive measures were taken. After
enduring two years of such treatment he was strangled one morning while
still in bed, together with two of his friends. Such was the dread
inspired by the sultan, that no one dared to inquire or to make public
his fate. A letter from his friend, the Sheikh-ul-Islam, to the family
of Midhat was, however, published a few years ago and then the whole
truth became known.

The case of Midhat was not exceptional, except for his prominence in
European circles. The same fate has overtaken many others. Fishermen in
the Bosporus, every now and then, pulled up a sack in which a body was
sewn, and those who reasoned might remember that it had been announced
that a one time favourite at the Court had set out on a journey to
London or Paris, though somehow he had mysteriously failed to arrive.

But though Midhat Pasha and others who struggled to introduce Western
institutions into the borders of the East died their work lived. One
by one, those suspected of having advanced ideas were degraded. A man
might be Grand Vizier for a month or a week, or even for a day, and
then without warning, be dismissed in disgrace. The suspicious sultan
trusted no one. He set brother to watch brother, father to spy upon
son, and then believed none of them, though he always guarded himself
lest they might be telling the truth.

Paris received the larger number of those who fled from the clutches
of Abdul the Damned. In the life of the French capital, some gave
themselves up to the manifold dissipations which that city offers
for her visitors. Others loosely organised, worked and watched for
that better day, when the Turk should no longer be a byword among
civilised peoples. A newspaper edited by Ahmed Riza was published and
thousands of copies were smuggled into the dominions. Hundreds of
thousands of pamphlets somehow passed the Turkish frontiers and found
readers, though their possession if discovered meant imprisonment and
degradation, but the “Young Turks” were undismayed.

Into the harems the new ideas crept. One read to the others during the
long days, and the forbidden books passed from hand to hand, and from
house to house. Women high in rank, the daughters of court officials,
carried messages. Where a man seemed approachable on that side, some
member of his harem was converted, or else some woman was placed in his
way, even sold to him, perhaps. Dozens of women sold into the harems
of prominent men went as apostles of the new faith. Women deliberately
sacrificed their reputations, since free association with men, unless
supposedly lovers, would have aroused suspicion.

The army became infected, the officers first. During 1907, the third
army corps in Macedonia became thoroughly permeated. Of course
the cruel autocrat knew something of all this, for his spies were
everywhere, but he misjudged the extent. He had seen dissatisfaction
and unrest before, and he had crushed them by sudden blows. Perhaps he
was tired, and less acute than he had been twenty years before. At any
rate he waited too long before taking vigorous action.

Early in 1908 he ordered the higher officers of the army to quiet the
unrest. A beloved officer raised the standard of revolt in Macedonia,
and the soldiers refused to fire upon the rebels. The Committee of
Union and Progress, as the “Young Turk” movement was called, assumed
charge of the revolt and demanded the restoration of the constitution,
which the sultan refused. Agents were sent to enforce his commands, but
they were forced to flee for their lives, and officers not in sympathy
with the movement were threatened. Thoroughly alarmed by the defection
of the army, the cowardly sultan pretended to yield and on July 24,
1908, the constitution was restored.

Too much perhaps was expected of the Parliament. The fanatical Moslem
leaders spread rumours of every sort, and the sultan’s agents were
everywhere active, distilling doubt and suspicion into the soldiers
and populace. In April, 1909, the garrison at Constantinople rose,
dispersed the Parliament, and the wily sultan seemed again in control.
The army in Macedonia was still loyal to the new ideas, and was
promptly mobilised. Within ten days Constantinople was again in control
of the Young Turks.

Abdul Hamid was evidently not to be trusted. The die was cast. His
deposition was voted by the reassembled Parliament, and his brother
who had long been a prisoner was placed on the throne, though the Young
Turks, warned by their mishap, kept an effective veto on reaction in
the form of the army.

But the wily Abdul not only plotted to gain back his authority in
Europe, but his agents fanned the flames of religious and racial hatred
in Asia Minor. The Armenians were once a great nation, and though they
have long been ground beneath the heel of the oppressor, they still
cherish the idea that another great Christian nation will arise in
Asia. They saw hope in the new régime and began to speak more freely,
to exhibit pictures of their old kings, and to buy arms.

The fierce Turks, Kurds, Arabs and Circassians looked upon the
presumption of the “Christian dogs” with rage. Meanwhile agents of the
Mohammedan League were everywhere stirring passion to fever heat, and
on Tuesday, April 13, 1909, the conflict began in Adana, though not
until the next day was the fighting general. For three days the contest
raged, when soldiers appeared and a semblance of order was restored.
Similar scenes had taken place in Osmanieh, Hamedieh, while at Tarsus
the Armenians stood like sheep to be slain.

On Sunday, April 25th, the slaughter again broke out at Adana. This
time it was a massacre pure and simple, for the few Armenians who owned
weapons had either fled, or else were almost without ammunition. Men,
women, children were indiscriminately killed, houses were robbed and
burned, until hardly a Christian home was left standing. Over the whole
country fire and sword made a waste of what had been the home of a
prosperous population. How many were killed can only be estimated. Some
say thirty thousand. No estimate is less than half that number.

An investigation was set on foot by Parliament after the instigator of
the massacre had been sent with eight of his wives to live a prisoner
at Salonica. The commission reported that it had hanged fifteen
persons--fifteen persons for slaying fifteen thousand.

Though much reduced during later years, the Turkish empire still
stretches over three continents and the islands of the sea. Though
penal conditions around Constantinople are bad, where diverse races and
religions, far away from central control, must live together, trouble
constantly exists. The Turk has always been weak in administration, and
it is in these provincial prisons that the chief horrors are seen.

For administrative purposes Turkey is divided into _vilayets_, which
are subdivided into _sanjaks_ or _livas_, and these into _kazas_. Each
division has its prison. That of the last named corresponds roughly to
the county gaol of the United States. In it accused persons awaiting
trial and prisoners sentenced to short terms are confined. Graver
crimes are punished by confinement in the prison of the _sanjak_ or
the _vilayet_. For special crimes and for certain kinds of political
offences prisoners may be sent to Rhodes, Sinope, Tripoli and other
similar points where old castles are usually the prisons.

There is no common form of prison. Generally they are old ugly
buildings, though in a few larger towns new and elegant structures have
taken their place. In only one particular are they alike--they are all
dirty, and are generally damp and unhealthful, because of slovenly
attention and overcrowding. The prisons are usually in charge of the
_zaptiehs_, though special officers, chosen for the purpose control
others. Where these _gardiens_ have charge, matters are usually less
bad than in the general run.

Prisoners are expected to feed themselves. With the exception of
alcoholic beverages, friends or relatives may send any articles of
food, or the prisoner may buy them from his own means. Even alcohol is
smuggled in by the connivance of the guards who are always willing to
accept a bribe. Tobacco of course is considered a necessity. To the
very poor coarse bread is usually furnished, but the allowance for this
purpose is often embezzled by the officials, and then the poor must
live upon the charity of their fellow prisoners.

The indiscriminate congregate system is still in vogue as in the
days of the Bagnio. A dozen, a score, or more, are assigned to one
room where they live and sleep. Sanitary arrangements are usually
primitive, if not outrageously bad, and the atmosphere is trying to a
sensitive nose. There is no prison costume. A prisoner wears what he
likes, eats what he likes, and spends his time as he likes, within the
limits of the prison. There is no pretence of reform. The prisoners
live idle, useless lives. Though, according to law, a prisoner may work
if he desires, in fact, work is not encouraged because of the disputes
likely to arise over the sale of his product, and hardly one per cent.
is occupied.

Yet strange as it may appear at first glance, a great number are
perfectly content. Leisure, food, tobacco are theirs and they wish
little more. When two-thirds of the sentence has been served, it is the
custom to release the tractable prisoners. Many Turks however prefer
life in prison to life outside, and refuse to leave. It is a home where
they are free from care, exempt from taxes, and from military service.
They avoid thus all duties of citizenship and live like parasites upon
their relatives or upon any property to which they have a claim.

Theoretically all forms of physical punishment are forbidden, though in
every ancient prison the old fetters are preserved, rusted and stiff
to be sure, but still painful. Where differences of race and religion
between prisoner and keeper appear they are undoubtedly often used to
make harder the lot of the “infidel” or of the suspected conspirator.
While all charges of ill usage and torture made by Armenian, Jew, or
Greek can not be sustained, there is a foundation of truth.

Some of the handcuffs are of iron, while others are simply heavy blocks
of wood with two grooves for the wrists. When the heavy blocks are
nailed together, the arms are held in a most uncomfortable position,
and the obstructed circulation may cause intense pain. The Reverend G.
Thoumaian, an Armenian clergyman, tells of wearing these handcuffs for
fifteen hours on the journey from Marsovan to Chorum, and for five days
thereafter.

He and his companion also wore iron collars, connected by chains, for
twenty-five days while in prison at Chorum. Fetters are also worn,
connected by chains, and where the guards are especially brutal or the
prisoners are hated for any reason the latter may be chained to the
wall by neck and feet, sometimes so closely that the irons cut into the
flesh.

As is the case in Spain the convict warder flourishes in Turkey. To him
is sometimes confided the other forms of torture. A prisoner from whom
a confession is desired may be taken to a lonely cell where the lash is
plied until blood collects in a huge blister under the skin. This is
punctured and intense pain results as the raw surface comes in contact
with the air. Worse tales than this are told--of prisoners hanged by
the feet from a beam during the beating, of naked prisoners thrust into
cold cells and drenched with icy water, and even of the application of
hot irons.

Finally Mr. Thoumaian declares that to his own personal knowledge a
severe torture was applied to an acquaintance of his, a young graduate
of Anatolia College. The young man’s head was shaved, and on the bare
skin in a sensitive spot was placed a nutshell filled with vermin. As
they began to struggle and tore deeper and deeper into the sensitive
nerves, the torture was exquisite. Sometimes prisoners to whom
this test is applied lose all control of themselves and confess to
participation in any plot no matter how incredible, caring only for the
removal of the horrible pain.

These accounts all deal with the last years of Abdul Hamid’s reign,
when the demand for “free Armenia” was strong, when Macedonia was
restless, and when the loyalty of large part of the army was suspected.
Prisoners charged with ordinary crimes lived much the same lives as the
inmates of the Bagnio sixty years before, except perhaps that they were
better fed in the later years. Since the accession of the new sultan,
vigilance has been relaxed so far as politics are concerned. Whether
the leopard has really changed his spots, and the Turk has become
humane is a question that only the future can settle.


[Transcriber’s Note:

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.]





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The History and Romance of
Crime--Oriental Prisons, by Arthur Griffiths

*** 