His form you may trace, but not his face,
’Tis shadow’d by his cowl,
But his eyes may be seen from the folds between,
And they seem of a parted soul.”
Wednesday, April 15. The most intolerable feature of a legal process in Peru grows out of the “law’s delay.” A foreigner may be imprisoned for weeks, and perhaps months, without being able to secure a hearing before the proper tribunal. If he applies to the functionary, who represents his country at this court, his case then takes a diplomatic character, and wanders back and forth, in shadowy shape, while moons wax and wane. His case is loaded with all grievances, piques, and prejudices, which have agitated the parties, who have the management of it, through a series of years. Till at last he finds it quite as difficult to get out of the diplomatic net of his minister as the clutches of Peruvian law.
Now our commodores have a very brief mode of settling these difficulties. They man their batteries and demand the release of the prisoner in twenty-four hours. He is then held amenable to the laws, which it is alleged he has offended. If innocent, he is rescued from false imprisonment; if guilty, he pays the penalty. There are here no stately forms of court etiquette, no subscriptions of having the honor to be, with high consideration, your excellency’s most humble nincompoop. Instead of this a demand is made, founded in humanity and justice, and enforced by argument which the wise will not and the timid dare not resist. Such is one of the advantages of having a navy. Disband it and our citizens go to prisons and our commerce to pirates.
In the general tumult of Saturday night one of our junior officers came in conflict with an irregular detachment of the military police. Weapons were drawn; the leader of the file was disarmed by him, and several others received slight wounds, when he was overpowered by numbers, and led off to the guard-house. His liberation was promptly demanded by Capt. Du Pont, but his amenability to the laws of Peru, of course, recognised. The demand, after the responsibility of the case had been shuffled from the intendente to the prefect, and from him to the criminal judge, was complied with.
As soon as it reached the lawyers of Lima that a case of this kind had got into their courts, they gathered around the young officer like forty rival lovers for the hand of the same lady. Some proffered their services for half the usual fee; some for what he might please to give, and several said they should charge him nothing except for stationery. Some pressed their pretensions through the legitimate character of their diplomas; some through their relationship to the judge; and one quoted half the Justinian code, as evidence of his qualifications.
But they were all a little too disinterested; and it was determined to let the case go by default; and pay such damages as the court might decree. The result was that every rascal who had received a scratch, no matter from whom, on Saturday night, came in for damages. The sagacity of the judge set the claims of most of them aside; but enough succeeded to mulct our young officer in several hundred dollars, though his sword had as little to do with most of their wounds and bruises as the pen with which I write this. An offence here connected with a foreign officer, has as wide a responsibility as the magic of a Salem witch. Hardly a hen can miscarry, but the loss of her egg is traced in some way to this military Achan.
But yesterday the captain of an American merchantman was imprisoned at Callao. Commodore Stockton immediately inquired into the circumstances, which were these:—The captain had come down to the Landing to go on board his vessel, when he found his boat’s crew in conflict with a party on shore. The difficulty originated with a midshipman in the Peruvian navy, who had struck one of the Americans. The captain made a resolute effort to detach his crew from the engagement, when the whole were overpowered by the military and lodged in prison.