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 slope 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.