The report of experts definitely decided against Saghalien as an agricultural colony. The soil forbade all hope of raising grain to support those who worked it. Food must be imported to maintain life; cattle breeding might succeed, but with difficulty, and fish must remain the staple diet. One source of natural wealth which might be developed was the coal fields, in which the island was supposed to be rich, but the quality of the coal was inferior to the Australian and very much below that of Newcastle and Cardiff. Mr. Hawes, a later traveller (1903), contests this, however, and describes the coal as a good lignite, superior to the Japanese as a steam coal, and says it commands a higher price. As an article of commerce, it suffers from the difficulties of lading for export. There is not a single harbour on the whole circumference of the island, and approach is often hindered by want of beacons and constantly prevailing fogs.

Coal mining in Saghalien began in 1858, and some 30,000 tons were extracted during the first ten years. The production was very costly; the mines were worked by candle light; the ore was bad and much mixed with stone. The largest deposits are upon the western coast, and it is mined chiefly at Dui and Vladiminsk. Mr. Hawes saw a seam of brown coal exposed on the banks of the river Tim. At Vladiminsk the coal was on the ground, level, and easily reached by tunnelling into the cliff, and when it failed at one spot, another was soon discovered. The coal sells to the merchants at twelve shillings per ton, of which the convicts now employed receive ten per cent.

The adoption of Saghalien as a penal colony commended itself to the authorities for several reasons. In the first place, the conditions of life were more irksome than on the mainland; the work would, it was thought, be much harder; and the place itself was wilder, more savage and solitary,—all of which would combine to increase the severity of the punishment. Moreover, the prospect of remaining forever as a settler upon a remote island, after the term of hard labour was accomplished, would still further act as a deterrent to crime. Accordingly, it was resolved to inflict this harsher penalty upon recidivists and recaptured fugitives, the brodyagi, or runaway convicts, of whom so many thousands were always at large and who, when recaptured, as well as all the “Ivan-don’t-remembers” who would not tell their names, were sentenced to penal servitude for a fresh term of four years in Saghalien. Again, Saghalien by sea was better than Siberia by étape process, with its long painful journey, the sufferings it entailed on the travellers, and the burden of corruption inflicted upon the local population by the way. Last of all, it would tend to free Siberia of the convict element, and assist the colonisation and development of the new territory, with manifest benefit to the convicts on release by the opportunities offered for rehabilitation and betterment of character and position.

These were the views expressed by Governor-General Anuchin in his famous reports to the Czar in 1880. But they had already taken effect, and deportation to Saghalien had begun practically some years previously. The first body of convicts, eight hundred in number, were sent there in 1869, but they went across the whole continent of Asia, having already travelled from Russia, and descending the long length of the Amur River, some two thousand miles, completed a total journey of 4,700 miles before reaching its mouth at Nikolaevsk, where they arrived decimated by disease and all more or less suffering from scurvy. After that, sea transportation was used, the party starting from Odessa and voyaging through the Suez Canal by the Red Sea, Indian and Northern Pacific Oceans, but under very neglected and imperfect conditions, so that those who embarked were subjected to terrible privations and cruelties on this voyage half round the world.

As time passed, and the last century drew to its close, deportation direct to Saghalien steadily increased. Twice a year the steamer Yaroslav, one of the Russian volunteer fleet, the appointed convict ship, performed its sad mission and brought out its living freight of eight hundred exiles from Odessa. Besides these, many hundreds regularly arrived from the mainland, who were convicts due to become exiled settlers. The latest law provided that the penal colony should be the receptacle of all males sentenced to more than two years, of all females not over forty years of age, sentenced to the same period, and of any political prisoner at the discretion of the imperial government. Criminals, on arrival, are classified according to their sentences and located in the various gaols in the three administrative districts of Alexandrovsk, Timovsk and Korsakovsk. The largest prison centre is at the first named; the second in importance is at Korsakovsk; and there are two prisons in the Timovsk district, one at Derbensk, the other at Rikovsk.

When Mr. Hawes visited the island in 1902, he found a principal gaol at Alexandrovsk known as the “testing,” or probation prison, for the worst criminals, those with a sentence of twelve years and upward, whose fetters are not removed and who are confined in a quarter styled the “chained” prison. There is a second prison known as the “reformatory,” for those with lesser sentences, into which convicts from the testing prison, after passing a minimum of four years, may be promoted. These last-named prisoners are permitted to work in gangs beyond the walls, under escort, without very strict discipline, so that many leave their parties to work on their own account in various forms of depredation. The “ticket-of-leave” men, or free commands, were entered on the lists of the reformatory prison and included the vagrants, brodyagi, who were deported after recapture on the mainland. Immediate release from jail is the boon conceded to any convict, even the very worst, whose freeborn wife has elected to come out from Russia and join him. He becomes then an exile settler of one of the “peasant” class, so-called, whom it is hoped will assist colonisation. The same boon is conceded to female convicts. “Free” husbands, however, are not often eager to share their lot. According to Mr. Hawes, there were only six of these loyal spouses on the whole island. But the women convicts have the chance of being chosen to join in a convict marriage or temporary coupling of parties, which is not only permitted but strongly encouraged. The consequences of such unions are deplorable. The effect on the woman is most demoralising, and too often the offspring, when children are born, have inherited the criminal taint. The civil contract cannot be entered into without divorce in the case where a husband still exists in Russia, although many widows have simplified the matter by murdering their husbands before leaving home, often, indeed, the cause of their deportation. Figures quoted for one year, 1897, show that there were 2,836 murderers in durance upon the island, and a much larger number if ex-convicts were included, and of this total, 634 were women who had murdered their husbands. Clergymen on Saghalien refused to give a religious sanction to these civil contracts unless there had been a formal dissolution of the Russian marriage. The civil bond sat lightly on both parties; the women in particular elected to go their own way, and if interfered with or if they found their marriage ill-assorted or irksome, they at once transferred themselves to some other master. The results of this outrage upon the most sacred of human institutions must assuredly lead to its abolition; they are identically the same as reported by Mr. George Griffith to be the case in New Caledonia. He says: “I saw about seventy-six separate and distinct reasons for the abolition of convict marriages at the convict school. On every face and form were stamped the unmistakable brand of criminality, imbecility, moral crookedness and general degeneration.”

The testing prison at Alexandrovsk generally held some six hundred inmates, many of them in chains and most of them in idleness; a few, barely ten or twelve per cent., were occasionally sent out to be employed in mining, road-making and log-hauling; and the authorities justified this limitation by the plea that the majority of them were such desperate characters that they could not safely be suffered to go beyond the walls. The unutterable weariness of long-continued, unbroken idleness bore so heavily upon this mass of caged and shackled humanity that desperate and determined attempts at escape were of constant occurrence. So great was their longing to be free that they would willingly risk their lives to breathe the fresh air. The only break in the dull round of prison life was surreptitious gambling. They would sacrifice everything to secure the means of play; they would stake the government clothing issued, and even their rations a month ahead. In the latter case, as an alternative to punishment, the convict put himself in pawn to the authorities. He was lodged in a separate cell and allowed himself to be starved for two days out of every three; the rations saved were accumulated and placed to his credit for the payment of his debt.

The conditions of life at Alexandrovsk not strangely incited the prisoners to turbulence, insubordination and the commission of crime whenever the chance came. When at large, even for a short time after successful escape, they were veritable brigands, robbing and slaughtering; when once more incarcerated, they were intractable and incorrigible, and no punishment could affright or keep them in order.

The older brutal methods survive in Saghalien. Physical tortures are superadded to the infliction of prolonged sentences. As to the latter, many convicts are well advanced in life with unexpired sentences of forty or fifty years. Hawes tells us he found thirteen in this class, and fifty-one others, one of them a woman, with sentences of from thirty to forty years, and 240 with from twenty to thirty years of unexpired sentences. He also found a couple of offenders chained to wheelbarrows, and the number had been much larger not long before.[before.]

Employment of corporal punishment has for the most part disappeared in Russian and Siberian prisons; its infliction at Kara on Madame Sigida in 1889, and the universal horror inspired throughout the civilised world by this terrible catastrophe, largely led to its abandonment; but the practice is still in force in Saghalien. Until 1902 females were flogged with the rozgi, birch rods dipped in salt. The infliction was within the power of the chief of the prison, and although it might be lightly, was ever arbitrarily imposed. It was not an excessively cruel, but a most brutal and disgraceful punishment. But the plet still flourishes, although the leaded ends are said to have been replaced by knots, and may be a very terrible weapon in the hands of a skilful flagellator. Until recently, it was worthy to replace the murderous knout of ancient times. The patient was very much at the mercy of the executioner, the so-called palach, a salaried convict-official, to whom his comrades paid tribute in the Saghalien prison in food and tobacco, to curry favour with him and persuade him to lay the leaded ends of the lash so as to catch the wooden flogging bench rather than their bare backs. The palach spared his victim at very considerable risk, and might be flogged for neglect of duty. In one case, an offending executioner, by name Komeleva, was punished and flogged by the hands of his particular enemy. So terrible was the infliction that although it incurred in 1882, a photograph taken of the wounds in 1899, seventeen years afterwards, showed them to be still suppurating. Three strokes of the plet were sufficient to kill, and another story is told of a convict at Saghalien who promised the palach a bottle of vodka if he would not hit him with the leaded ends. The victim was a hardened veteran, and when he had received ninety-five strokes, thinking he had escaped, he called out, “It’s no matter; you can’t hurt me now, you needn’t think you’ll get your vodka.” But he had not reckoned with his man, for after three more strokes he was dead. It was only necessary to draw back the plet as the stroke was spent for the ends to injure the liver and send a clot of blood to the heart.