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relative to that fine city, was, that it was a glorious place to pillage!

The Deccan and the Rajpoot states were dreadfully infested by these barbarians; who obtained such an ascendancy over the governments of Scindia and Holkar, that they threatened to establish such a system of annual devastation throughout Hindoostan, as no empire was ever subject to before. Fortunately, however, they were totally incapable of encountering a regular force, to which they attached great power; and of which they consequently lived in great dread. Their fear of that species of force was, indeed, so great, that Major Lushington put a party of 3000 of them to flight with only 350 men!

a

In 1809 they generally invaded a country or province in parties, varying from one to four thousand each. Their arrival and depredations were frequently the only heralds of their approach. They carried nothing but their arms. They had no tents or baggage of any sort; their saddle-cloths were their beds; they never halted but to refresh themselves, or to indulge their lust and avarice; and their subsistence arose out of the plunder of the day. Their movements being exceedingly rapid and uncertain, it was a subject of no little difficulty to waylay them; they could only, therefore, be caught by surprise. They retired with the same rapidity as they approached; and what they consumed was frequently of more value, than what they took away; for nothing escaped them; and what they did not want they burned, broke, or destroyed. Ruin and desolation marked their footsteps; they indulged their propensities, in respect to women, to a most frightful extent; and when they had gratified their brutal passions, they not unfrequently murdered their innocent and helpless victims, as rewards for their shrieks and cries. To crown the whole, when they had plundered a village, and polluted its inhabitants, they set fire to the buildings: thus leaving the un

Official Papers, Dec. 27, 1816.

fortunate survivors alike destitute of house, of food, and of purity.

The chief season for their depredations was that, in which the crops were ripe; and thus the husbandmen were robbed of the fruits of their labour, at the time in which they expected to reap them. Every road was comparatively easy to them; as they marched without guns or baggage; and as they carried terror and destruction wherever they marched, so great was the horror they inspired, that one of the villages of the Deccan, hearing of their approach, unanimously resolved to sacrifice their families, rather than submit to the ravishment of their wives and children. The Pindarrees approached; a battle ensued; and the villagers being overpowered by numbers, they set fire to their dwellings, and perished with their neighbours and families in one general conflagration.

In one excursion of twelve days, 5,000 of these marauders plundered and polluted part of three British provinces. In this assault they robbed 6,203 houses; and burnt 269 to the ground: 182 persons also were murdered; 505 wounded; and 3,603 subjected to the torture. The property lost and destroyed was valued at 255,956 star pagodas. These bands became, at length, so numerous, that their force consisted of no less than 30,000 men; part of whom were in the secret, if not open, service of Scindia; and part in that of Holkar.

They were to be heard of in all quarters. The Marquis of Hastings, Governor-General of India, saw ample necessity, therefore, of suppressing, if not entirely destroying, these

a Ainavale. Vide Dalzell's Dispatch to the Secretary at Madras, March 18, 1816. Letter from Ongole, March 20, 1816.

b Answer to a Report drawn up by the Madras Government, April 22, 1818. Compare these accounts with the description which the Baron de Tott gives of the devastation caused by an army of Tartars.-Mem. i. 272.

C

Debates, H. of Commons, March 1, 1819. Major Fitzclarence (now Earl of Munster) compares their ravages to those of an army of locusts.-Journal, p. 3.

marauders, who were as dastardly as they were cruel. By a series of masterly movements, the Pindarree bands were surrounded, and so entirely intersected by a simultaneous movement, at all points, that they were prevented all possibility of escape. The chiefs were, therefore, taken prisoners; and in one campaign the Pindarree force was annihilated. In this campaign of only three months, the entire peninsula of Hindoostan was reduced to the authority of the British empire: -a dominion more extensive than Aurengzebe possessed, even in the zenith of his power for it comprises an extent of country, reaching from the Himalah mountains to the Indus; and from the river Sutlese to the Cape Comorin; an area containing seventy millions of subjects; all of whom are kept in subjection by thirty thousand British soldiers. If India, therefore, has gained little by the prowess of British arms, it has at least gained this; that a predatory force has been obliterated, of whom it was justly said in the British parliament, that there was no violence, they did not perpetrate; and no degree of human suffering, they did not inflict. Rapine, rape, murder, and every species of atrocity and torture, were the constant results of every enterprise; and the constant attendants of every success.

a

CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS.

THE Moors, in some parts of Africa, have such an abhorrence of a Christian, that they esteem it no more sin to kill one, than any of their animals. In the Tonga Islands ©, it is regarded as a slight offence to kill an inferior, to steal, or to commit a rape: provided it is not upon the person of a married woman, or a superior.

The Marquis of Hastings stated at a public meeting one hundred millions (Jan. 27, 1826).

b Debates, H. of Lords, March 2; H. of Commons, March 1, 1819.

Mariner's Account of the Tonga Islands, v. ii.

Garcilasso says, in his history of the Civil Wars of the Spaniards, that fathers in Peru were punished for the crimes of their children: while in the Afghaun nation, if a man commit a murder, his family is allowed to compensate it by giving six women with portions, and six without, as wives to the family aggrieved; and in Bantam a, the king is empowered, upon the death of a father of a family, not only to seize the habitation and inheritance, but the wife and the children.

d

Some nations are more criminal in their punishments, than criminals are in their offences. In England, to steal a sheep is to incur the penalty of death; to murder a man is no more. In Japan, almost all crimes were once punished with death. The Basheans of the North Philippine Islands even punished theft with burying alive. Dampier saw them bury a young man for this crime. They dug a hole; and many persons came to bid him farewell; among them was his mother, who wept as she took the rings from his ears. yielded without a struggle; he was put into the pit; and they covered him with earth; cramming it close, and stifling him.

He

In the Hindoo creed, it is stated, that the blood of a tiger pleases a goddess one hundred years; that of a panther, of a lion, and of a man, one thousand years; but the sacrifice of three men, one hundred thousand years. And let a Hindoo commit ever so enormous a crime, he would suppose himself perfectly safe, if he could be assured, that his friends would throw his body or his bones into the Ganges. "To kill one hundred cows," says the Dherma Shastra," is equal to killing a Bramin; to kill one hundred Bramins is equal to kill

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b After a long struggle between humanity and heartless policy, the penalty of death is now not so frequent, 1837.

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e Ward on the Religion and Manners of the Hindoos, vol. iv.

f Vide Collection of Voyages, contributing to the Establishment of the East

India Company, vol. v. p. 192.

ing a woman; to kill one hundred women is equal to killing a child; to kill one hundred children is equal to telling an untruth!"

Men, in some countries, killed their own fathers, under the sanction of custom, or the laws. In Rome, and even in Gaul, fathers were allowed, not only the lives of their children in infancy, but their liberties in adolescence. This practice arose out of the erroneous idea, that he who gives, has a right to take away. In the reign of Adrian, however, the power was modified; and a father was banished for taking away the life of his son, though that son had committed a great crime. The Jews had the privilege of selling their

.

children for seven years.

In Greece, the father pronounced whether the new-born child should live or die. If the latter, it was instantly put to death or exposed. Indeed, the custom of exposing children was so little repugnant to Grecian feeling, that Terence, (or rather Menander,) makes Chremes command his wife to expose his newly-born child. And who is this Chremes? The very same person, who uses the beautiful sentiment, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. From this custom rose many of the most affecting and romantic incidents in Grecian history; and Euripides has founded his fine tragedy of IoN upon it. Shakspeare, also, alludes to this custom, in the Midsummer Night's Dream :

EGEUS. I beg the ancient privilege of Athens;

As she is mine, I may dispose of her;
Which shall be either to this gentlewoman,
Or to her death; according to our law.

In Rome, young children were frequently exposed in the cavity of a column, called the Lactary, for the purpose of

b Cod. viii. 47. 10.

a Cæsar, de Bell. Gall., vol. vi. c. 19. c Minutius Felix. The Thebans, however, forbade the exposition of children, under pain of death. All children of parents, who could not maintain them, were brought up as slaves. Vid. Ælian, Var. Hist., ii. c. 7.

d Vid. Warburton. Div. Leg. Moses, 95.

e Festus.

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