INTERIOR OF THE LET-MA-YOON PRISON.
The following description of the interior of this jail is given by an English fellow-prisoner of Mr. Judson:
“The only articles of furniture the place contained were these: First, and most prominent, was a gigantic row of stocks, similar in its construction to that formerly used in England, but now nearly extinct; though dilapidated specimens may still be seen in some of the marketplaces of our own country towns. It was capable of accommodating more than a dozen occupants, and like a huge alligator opened and shut its jaws with a loud snap upon its prey. Several smaller reptiles, interesting varieties of the same species, lay basking around this monster, each holding by the leg a pair of hapless victims consigned to its custody. These were heavy logs of timber, bored with holes to admit the feet, and fitted with wooden pins to hold them fast. In the centre of the apartment was placed a tripod, holding a large earthen cup filled with earth-oil, to be used as a lamp during the night-watches; and lastly, a simple but suspicious-looking piece of machinery whose painful uses it was my fate to test before many hours had elapsed. It was merely a long bamboo suspended from the roof by a rope at each end, and worked by blocks or pulleys, to raise or depress it at pleasure.
“Before me, stretched on the floor, lay forty or fifty hapless wretches, whose crimes or misfortunes had brought them into this place of torment. They were all nearly naked, and the half-famished features and skeleton frames of many of them too plainly told the story of their protracted sufferings. Very few were without chains, and some had one or both feet in the stocks besides. A sight of such squalid wretchedness can hardly be imagined. Silence seemed to be the order of the day; perhaps the poor creatures were so engrossed with their own misery that they hardly cared to make any remarks on the intrusion of so unusual an inmate as myself.
“If the ensemble be difficult to portray, the stench was absolutely indescribable, for it was not like anything which exists elsewhere in creation. I will therefore give the facts, and leave the reader’s nose to understand them by a synthetic course of reasoning—if it can.
“The prison had never been washed, nor even swept, since it was built. So I was told, and have no doubt it was true; for, besides the ocular proof from its present condition, it is certain no attempt was made to cleanse it during my subsequent tenancy of eleven months. This gave a kind of fixedness or permanency to the fetid odors, until the very floors and walls were saturated with them, and joined in emitting the pest. Putrid remains of castaway animal and vegetable stuff, which needed no broom to make it move on—the stale fumes from thousands of tobacco-pipes—the scattered ejections of the pulp and liquid from their everlasting betel, and other nameless abominations, still more disgusting, which strewed the floor—and if to this be added the exudations from the bodies of a crowd of never-washed convicts, encouraged by the thermometer at 100°, in a den almost without ventilation—is it possible to say what it smelt like?
“As might have been expected from such a state of things, the place was teeming with creeping vermin to such an extent that very soon reconciled me to the plunder of the greater portion of my dress.”
Surely it were enough for Mr. Judson to be shut up in the hot, stifling stench of a place like this without having his ankles and legs weighted with five pairs of irons, the scars from which he wore to his dying day. He could say with the Apostle Paul, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” In each pair of fetters the two iron rings were connected by a chain so short that the heel of one foot could hardly be advanced to the toe of the other; and this task could be accomplished only by “shuffling a few inches at a time.” The five pairs of irons weighed about fourteen pounds, and when they were removed after being long worn, there was a strained sensation, the equilibrium of the body seemingly destroyed, so that the head was too heavy for the feet. Then at nightfall, lest the prisoners should escape, they were strung (to use Dr. Price’s graphic if not elegant expression) on a bamboo pole.
“When night came on,” writes one of Mr. Judson’s fellow-prisoners, “the ‘Father’ of the establishment, entering, stalked toward our corner. The meaning of the bamboo now became apparent. It was passed between the legs of each individual, and when it had threaded our number, seven in all, a man at each end hoisted it up by the blocks to a height which allowed our shoulders to rest on the ground, while our feet depended from the iron rings of the fetters. The adjustment of the height was left to the judgment of our kind-hearted parent, who stood by to see that it was not high enough to endanger life, nor low enough to exempt from pain.... In the morning, our considerate parent made his appearance, and, with his customary grin, lowered down the bamboo to within a foot of the floor, to the great relief of our benumbed limbs, in which the blood slowly began again to circulate.”