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.