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.