Prisoners their own warders

by John Frederick Adolphus McNair; W. D. Bayliss

In cases of particular good conduct a prospect may be held out of emancipating deserving convicts from further obligation of services on condition of their supporting themselves and not quitting the settlement.

Upon the abstract question of the advantage of this arrangement I believe there will be little difference of opinion. The advantage of holding out an adequate motive of exertion is sufficiently obvious, and here it would have the double tendency of diminishing the bad characters and of increasing that of useful and industrious settlers, thereby facilitating the general police of the country and diminishing the expenses of the Company."

These intentions were acted upon afterwards, and the good effects of the regulations were soon apparent; a large body of people who had been living in the lowest state of degradation soon became useful labourers and happy members of society. So grateful were they for the change, that when they were sent round to Penang on the transfer of Bencoolen to the Dutch in 1825, as we have stated, they entreated to be placed on the same footing as they had been placed at Fort Marlborough, and not reduced to the state of the convicts in Prince of Wales Island, who were kept as a Government gang to be employed wherever their services might be thought most desirable.

Upon December 20th, 1823, Sir Stamford Raffles wrote a further letter to Government in regard to these convicts, of which we can only give an extract, which runs thus—

"As the management of convicts ought to be a subject of consideration, I send you a copy of the regulations established for those of this place. The convicts now at Bencoolen amount to 800 or 900, and the number is gradually increasing. They are natives of Bengal and Madras; that is to say, of those presidencies. The arrangement has been brought about gradually, but the system now appears complete, and, as far as we have yet gone, has been attended with the best effects. I have entrusted Mr. John Hull with the superintending of the department, and he feels great pleasure and[8] satisfaction in the general improvement of this class of people."

It is greatly to be regretted that we have been unable to obtain a copy of the regulations to which Sir Stamford Raffles refers, but we have no doubt they formed the basis of what were hereafter called the "Penang rules."

It was, as we have said, in the year 1825 that the whole of the Bencoolen convicts were transferred to Penang, and thence, as opportunities offered later on, to Malacca and Singapore. One point we trace in regard to those convicts is that, greatly to their disappointment, they missed the freedom they had possessed at Bencoolen, for they were sent to work in gangs upon the roads, and in levelling ground near the town of Penang. At first they were tried at jungle cutting and burning, but had no aptitude for it. This work was therefore entrusted to Malays, who we all know have a natural bent for cutting down trees and underwood, and are possessed of implements wonderfully suited for the purpose.

We may remark here that transportation in those early times had its terrors both to the European from our shores to Australia, and to the native of India to these settlements, and more especially to the latter.

Though, by a system of "assignment" or "compulsory" servitude to masters, or by a ticket of leave which made it open to the European criminal to work for whom and where he pleased, expatriation became in time to be less severely felt; still, for a long period it continued to act as a deterrent to others, though to the convict himself it was "greater in idea perhaps than in reality." To the native of India it meant even a severer punishment than to the European, for to be sent across the "kala pani," or "black water," in a convict ship or "jeta junaza," or "living tomb" as they called it, meant, especially to a man of high caste, whether of the right or left hand section, the total loss to him of all that was worth living for. He could never be received in intercourse again with his own people, and so strong are the caste ideas of ceremonial uncleanness that it would be defilement to his friends and relations even to offer to him sustenance of any kind, and he was in point of fact excommunicated and avoided. Happily this dread of caste defilement has now, by railway communication over the country and equalization of classes under our rule, greatly diminished, but it is still, as Balfour says, "a prominent feature in every-day Hindu life." Sir Stamford Raffles' views as to the treatment of those transported convicts have in the main been recognised by all authorities in the Straits Settlements since his time; and his suggestion as to the privileges to be granted to men of the first class, though not defined by him as a "ticket of leave," has been all along kept in view, and was in regular force in the jail of which we treat. He divided his convicts into three classes only, but as time went on they were separated into six classes, and later on in the narrative will be given the reasons for this enlargement of the number. Dr. Mouat, Inspector General of Jails, Bengal, in a paper read before the Statistical Society some few years ago, spoke of this jail and the ticket-of-leave system as follows:—

"I visited the Straits Settlements in 1861 when under the rule of my friend, Sir Orfeur Cavenagh, and found in existence a system of industrial training of convicts superior to anything we had at that time on the continent of India. It was said to have been inaugurated by the celebrated Sir Stamford Raffles in 1825, when Singapore was first selected for the transportation of convicts from India, and to have been subsequently organised and successfully worked by General H. Man, Colonel MacPherson, and Major McNair. The ticket-of-leave system was in full and effective operation, and very important public works have been constructed by means of convict labour, chief amongst them St. Andrew's Cathedral, a palace for the Governor, and most of the roads. The ticket-of-leave convicts were said to be a well-conducted, industrious lot of men, who very rarely committed fresh crimes, who all earned an honest livelihood, and were regarded as respectable members of the[11] community amongst whom they dwelt. The public works were creditable examples of prison industry and skill St. Andrew's Cathedral, built under Major McNair from plans prepared by Colonel MacPherson entirely by convict labour, struck me as one of the finest specimens of ecclesiastical architecture which I had seen in the East, and I believe there exists in no other country a more remarkable example of the successful industrial training of convicts."