Colonization, kidnap and confinement in the Andamans penal colony, 1771-1864

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 68-81

  Anderson, Clare ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Andaman Islands; Captivity; Colonialism; Gender; Indigeneity; Penal colony

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; COLONIZATION; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; GENDER ISSUE; HUMAN SETTLEMENT; INDIGENOUS POPULATION; NINETEENTH CENTURY; VIOLENCE;

ANDAMANS; ANDAMANS AND NICOBARS; INDIA;

EID: 78650925466     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: 10958614     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2010.07.001     Document Type: Article

References (121)

1. I employ colonial place names in keeping with the archives from which this paper is drawn.
2. Dening, Beach Crossings (note 4); Pandya, In the Forest (note 2); Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook's Adventures in the South Seas, New Haven, 2003.
3. DUL Forbes Mss, letter to Mr Whitney, 16 June 1864.Institutionalised captivity in the Andaman homeThe Andaman home was an institution of detention that aimed to 'improve' islanders, forcing them into productive labour through creating dependency on addictive consumables such as tobacco and rum. In effect, it extended and institutionalised earlier practices of kidnap and capture. However, it also replicated significant elements of the management of convicts in the Andamans penal colony. Islanders were placed in confinement, fettered, handcuffed, photographed, flogged, beaten, and guarded, mirroring substantively the treatment of Indian convicts. They even faced the prospect of banishment overseas. 'Jumbo' (Tura) for instance spent six months in irons in Moulmein in punishment for brigadesman Pratt's death. The same sanction was held out to islanders involved in violent incidents later on.101
4. IOR P/434/1 (India Public Proceedings April 1866) Andaman home report, February 1866; IOR P/434/2 (India Public Proceedings August, November 1866) Andaman home reports, June 1866, July 1866.
5. Boyce, Van Diemen's Land (note 6), 295-313.
6. Treacherous murder: further notes by Tytler, n.d.; Wyllie to Tytler, 14 March 1863.In 1863, Corbyn took one group of eight islanders to Calcutta in order that they might 'describe to their people, on their return, the superior advantages of a civilized life.'104
7. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 3 November 1863) Corbyn to Tytler, 3 October 1863; Friend of India (note 98), 5 December 1863.
8. Pandya, In The Forest (note 2), 82.
9. IOR P/434/1 (India Public Proceedings January, April 1866) Andaman home reports, October 1865, February 1866.
10. IOR P/434/1 (India Public Proceedings January, April 1866) Andaman home reports, October 1865, February 1866.Just as the islanders violently opposed colonial settlement, it would be a mistake to ignore their challenge to internment in the Home. In 1863 Corbyn wrote of the indiscipline of the 'insane frolic' that 'almost' baffled his efforts 'to civilize and instruct' the Andamanese men, women and children under his charge:The boy would rush off to one end of the room and dance and shout defiance. Madam Cooper would fling herself into an easy-chair ... Another would run to the door and call for Judder (cocoanuts) and Panoo (water) ... or a light for a cigar ... or else seize something on the table and set the rest into screams of laughter ... Joe, who is a very dodging and deceptive man, but extremely playful, almost always laughing and in high spirits, would try every artifice to escape the mat-work ... Jacko shewed a more pugnacious spirit, and was inclined to resist with force till he found such resistance unavailing. The same opposition was encountered in teaching Topsy and Bess sewing.108
11. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 31 July 1863) Corbyn to Tytler, 2 July 1863.Corbyn wrote of using physical force against islanders, striking them with his hands or cane, though the Andamanese were no passive subjects. When he slapped them, they slapped him back, with 'jocular or abusive remarks, which provoked roars of laughter from the rest at my expense'. His attempts to hold the head of one boy over his book to force repetition of the alphabet was met with a bodkin pointed at his eyes, 'with a sign that he would pierce them with it unless I gave up that obnoxious mode of teaching him.' And yet, Corbyn claimed that the Andamanese were deeply affectionate: 'I am almost crushed by the weight of their embraces'.109
12. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 31 July 1863) Corbyn to Tytler, 2 July 1863.
13. Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (note 4).
14. Anonymous, Muscular Christianity (note 98).
15. IOR P/188/66 (India Public Proceedings 15 April 1864) Andaman home report, April 1864; Corbyn's report, 1 March 1864.The Andamanese also mounted attacks on convicts associated with the Andaman home. 'I always thought that it was a good thing to have Church and a minister of the Gospil [sic] at hand', naval brigadesman Forbes wrote in 1864, 'but this place was bad enough without [Corbyn] now it is ten times worse.'112
16. DUL Forbes Mss, letter to Mr Whitney, 16 June 1864.
17. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 31 July 1863) Corbyn to Tytler, 2 July 1863.
18. Corbyn's narrative no. 2 (quotes 406).
19. Treacherous murder, further notes by Tytler, n.d.As the British had hoped, islanders came to depend upon the Andaman home for food, tobacco and other supplies, to the point that officials even began to use strategies of exile from Ross to punish misdemeanours.116
20. IOR P/434/1 (India Public Proceedings April 1866) Andaman home report, February 1866.
21. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 429.
22. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 18 May 1863) Jumbo and Snowball - language to be investigated: Mouat to A. Eden, Secretary to Government of Bengal, 10 April 1863.
23. Lester, Imperial Networks (note 4), 189.
24. R.C. Temple [John Ritchie], An unpublished 18th century document about the Andamans, The Indian Antiquary 30 (1901) 235.The British colonized the Andamans for the first time in September 1789, establishing a settlement on Chatham Island in Port Cornwallis (now Port Blair). Lieutenant R.H. Colebrooke, sent to survey the Islands with Lieutenant Archibald Blair during 1789-1790, claimed the islanders as 'a race of men the least civilized, perhaps, in the world; being nearer to a state of nature than any people we read of.' Unlike Ritchie, he faced showers of arrows and despite his best efforts was unable to seize a single man or woman. This perhaps explains his description of the Andamanese as 'cunning, crafty and revengeful', at times threatening and at others 'docile, with the most insidious intent'. He wrote:They will affect to enter into a friendly conference, when, after receiving with a show of humility whatever articles may be presented to them, they set up a shout, and discharge their arrows at the donors. On the appearance of a vessel or boat, they frequently lie in ambush among the trees, and send one of their gang, who is generally the oldest among them, to the water's edge, to endeavour by friendly signs to allure the strangers on shore. Should the crew venture to land without arms, they instantly rush out from their lurking places, and attack them.'Like brutes,' he went on, 'their whole time is spent in search of food.' And: 'In the morning they rub their skins with mud, and wallow in it like buffaloes ... Their dwellings are the most wretched hovels imaginable.' Such descriptions might be incorporated within colonial discourses about uncivilized indigenes more generally. Colebrooke surmised: 'The ferocious natives of New Zealand, or the shivering half-animated savages of Terra del Fuego, are in a relative state of refinement, compared to these islanders.'13
25. R.H. Colebrooke, On the Andaman Islands, Asiatick Researches 4 (1795) 385-394, reproduced in M.V. Portman, A History of our Relations with the Andamanese, Compiled from Histories and Travels, and From the Records of the Government of India, Vol. I, Calcutta, 1899, 69.
26. M. Symes, An Account of an Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava, in the Year 1795, Edinburgh, 1827, 155-156. Lists of transportation convicts from the Bengal presidency can be found in the India Office collections at the British Library (hereafter IOR), Bengal Judicial Proceedings series, 1793-1795, at P/128/7, P/128/12, P/128/13, P/128/15.
27. Portman, History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 82-84.
28. Portman, History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 86, 93-97 (quotes 93, 95).Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Symes, who visited the Islands in 1795, described the first capture of three Andamanese women. The women so feared sexual assault [Symes assumed] that they took it in turns to sleep. After they managed to escape, he lamented without a trace of irony: 'the object was to retain them by kindness, not by compulsion, an attempt that has failed on every trial.'17
29. Symes, An Account of an Embassy (note 14), 157-158 (quote 158).
30. Symes, An Account of an Embassy (note 14), 160-161 (quote 160). See also: IOR, V/3199 Selections from the Records of the Government Of India (Home Department) No. XXV: the Andaman Islands, with Notes on Barren Island, Calcutta, 1859; Appendix no. 2, Government of India Home Department, Public Consultation 6 August 1858: Precis of Information Regarding the Andaman, Nicobar, and Cocos Islands.
31. Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (note 4), 94-109.
32. Indian Hindus believed that they were descendents of the monkey hero of the epic Ramayana, Hanuman. See V. Pandya, In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds Of Andamanese History (1858-2006), Lanham, Maryland, 2009, 82.
33. Boyce, Van Diemen's Land (note 6), 86-89.In May 1796, in the face of high rates of sickness and mortality in the Andamans - described as a great embarrassment - the East India Company decided to abandon the Islands. It transferred the convicts to one of its other Indian penal settlements, on the island of Penang.21
34. National Archives of India, New Delhi (hereafter NAI), Home (Public): Minute of the Board, 8 February 1796.
35. Symes, An Account of an Embassy (note 14), 162.
36. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 116.
37. J.B.D. Rodyk, 'An old pensioner' of Penang, cited in Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 116-117.In their forced voyages across the Bay of Bengal and in their employment in domestic servitude, the captivity of islanders bore more than a passing resemblance to the slave trade. These kidnaps might be seen as part of the continuum of slavery and bondage characteristic of South and Southeast Asia at the time.25
38. I. Chatterjee and R.M. Eaton (Eds), Slavery and South Asian History, Bloomington, 2006.
39. C. Anderson, Convicts and coolies: rethinking indentured labour in the nineteenth century, Slavery and Abolition 30 (1) (2009) 93-109.
40. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 117.
41. [I. H. Burkhill], William Jack's Letters to Nathaniel Wallich, 1819-1821, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 73 (1916) 177. I thank David Arnold for this reference.Convicts, kidnaps and confinement: 1858-1864Most famous of all the Andaman captures in the run-up to Britain's permanent colonization in 1858 was the kidnap of an islander by the survey party sent to choose the best site for a penal colony for mutineers and rebels convicted in the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Revolt. The British had been interested in re-colonizing the Andamans for some years previously, after a series of indigenous attacks on distressed vessels.29
42. J.W. Dalrymple, Officiating Secretary to Government of India, to W. Grey, Secretary to Government of Bengal, 28 November 1855; Grey to Dalrymple, 29 February 1856, cited in Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 188-190.
43. Pandya, In The Forest (note 2), 74. In this paper I will use the term 'islander' to refer to all the indigenous populations of the Andamans, though when the British spoke of 'islanders' they probably referred to the Great Andamanese, who they encountered in North, Middle and South Andaman Islands.There are significant parallels between the history of indigenous-settler contact in the Andaman Islands and in other colonial frontiers - what Mary Louise Pratt and Greg Dening have called contact zones and beach crossings, respectively - across Asia, North America, New Zealand, the Pacific and southern Africa.4
44. H. Hopkinson, Commissioner of Arakan, to Grey, 8 February 1856, cited in Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 190-197 (quote 191).But it was 1857 that provided the catalyst to colonization, after the widespread destruction of British-built jails and the closure of India's Southeast Asian penal settlements to new transportation convicts left the government without a place for the safe incarceration of mutineers and rebels. Within the context of the immediate penal crisis, however, Britain's desire to 'pacify' the Islands' indigenous peoples was important. Later on in the nineteenth century, the British officer in charge of islanders, M.V. Portman, reminded his readers: 'Long before the Mutiny the conduct of the Andamanese had made it imperative that the Islands should be occupied, and friendly relations established with the Aborigines'.31
45. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 185.
46. F.J. Mouat, Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders, London, 1863; E. Belcher, Notes on the Andaman Islands, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 5 (1867), 40-49; F.J. Mouat, Brief narrative of an expedition to the Andaman Islands, in 1857, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London 6 (2) (1861-1862), 41-43; review of Adventures, in: Colburn's United Services Magazine, and Naval and Military Journal, Vol. III, London, 1863, 433-440.
47. Royal Archives, Windsor (hereafter RA), VIC/Z 502/30 letter from Lady Canning, 9 January 1858.
48. Pandya, In The Forest (note 2), 17. I have written about 'Jack's visual production in C. Anderson, Oscar Mallitte's Andaman photographs, 1857-8, History Workshop Journal 67 (1) (2009) 152-172.The survey party 'captured' the Andamanese in other ways too, raiding their settlements and taking bows, arrows, nets and other implements. Images of these cultural artefacts were reproduced alongside pictures of islanders in contemporary periodicals (Fig. 3). Stolen goods were also displayed at colonial exhibitions in such a way as to render material culture a crucial signifier of Andamanese 'primitiveness'.35
49. Pandya, In the Forest (note 2), 17; C. Wintle, Model subjects: representations of the Andaman Islands at the colonial and Indian exhibition, 1886, History Workshop Journal 67 (1) (2009) 194-207.
50. Professor Owen, On the osteology and dentition of the aborigines of the Andaman Islands, and the relations thereby indicated to other races of mankind, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 2 (1863) 34-43.
51. Owen, On the osteology and dentition of the aborigines (note 36). A small selection of later nineteenth-century literature includes: G.E. Dobson, On the Andamans and Andamanese, Journal of the Anthropological Institute 4 (1875) 457-467; W.H. Flower, On the osteology and affinities of the Andaman Islands, Journal of the Anthropological Institute 9 (1880) 108-133; E.H. Man, On the aboriginal inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, Journal of the Anthropological Institute 12 (1883) 69-175, 327-434. For critical readings of the relationship between photography and anthropometry, see: E. Edwards, Science visualized: E.H. Man in the Andaman Islands, in: E. Edwards (Ed), Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920, London, 1992, 108-121; J. Falconer, Ethnographical photography in India 1850-1900, Photographic Collector 5 (1) (1984) 16-46.
52. C. Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia, Oxford, 2004, 189-197
53. A. Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World: the Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore, Cape Town, 2006
54. E. Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, Oxford, 2001, 131-156.
55. D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley, 1993.The British shipped the first batch of 200 mutineers and rebels to the Andamans in March 1858 under the charge of medical officer J.P. Walker. By the end of the following year, over 3500 more convicts had been transported to the Islands.40
56. I. Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact, Cambridge, 2005; M. Daunton and R. Halpern (Eds), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, Philadelphia, 1999; G. Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self, Philadelphia, 2004; G. Dening, Mr Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Cambridge, 2002; A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain, London, 2001; A. Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making Of British Columbia, 1849-1871, Toronto, 2002; M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, 1992.
57. IOR P/234/46 (Northwest provinces judicial proceedings October 1858) list of prisoners dispatched from Mirzapur jail to Alipur jail, 3 September 1858; IOR P/206/62 (India judicial proceedings 6 January 1860) J.C. Haughton, superintendent Port Blair, to Grey, 13 November 1859.
58. IOR V/10/28 Andamans report, 1866-7.
59. IOR P/206/61 (India judicial proceedings 29 July 1859) extract proceedings foreign department, 10 January 1859.
60. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 273.
61. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 277-278.
62. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 277; Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (note 4), 93.
63. IOR P/206/61 (India judicial proceedings 29 July 1859) report by Dr G. G. Browne on the sanitary state of the Andamans, March 1859. There is an extensive literature on the health impact of the British penal colonies in Australia. The classic account is H. Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, Ringwood, Victoria, 1981.In this context, the British remained interested in Andamanese origins too. Evidently sympathetic to polygenesis, the commissioner of Tenasserim Albert Fytche drew attention to the Andamanese as the remnants of 'a race formerly very extensively diffused over South eastern Asia and its Archipelago, which, for the most part, has been extirpated by races more advanced towards civilization, being now driven to remote islands, or mountain fastnesses, such as the Andamans'. He associated the issue of blankets to Tasmanian aborigines and New Zealanders with their death in large numbers from pulmonary diseases, and predicted the same fate for the Andamanese.47
64. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 308.
65. Owen, On the osteology and dentition (note 36).
66. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 103.In an attempt to prevent further violence between islanders and the settlement, when J.C. Haughton replaced Walker as superintendent in 1859 he banned visits to places the Andamanese were known to frequent and suspended further exploration into the interior.50
67. P.D. Morgan, Encounters between British and 'indigenous' peoples, c. 1500-c. 1800, in: Daunton, Halpern (Eds), Empire and Others (note 4), 51-52.
68. IOR P/206/62 (India judicial proceedings 17 March 1860) Haughton to Grey, 29 December 1859.
69. IOR P/206/62 (India judicial proceedings 7 April 1860) A. Gamack, civil assistant surgeon Port Blair, to Haughton, 27-29 February 1860.
70. IOR P/206/62 (India judicial proceedings 7 December 1860) report of Khooshee Lall, June 1860.Despite what was presented as successful (i.e. non-violent) contact, coupled with British occupation and clearance of Andamanese territory was a fundamental incompatibility between the desire of both Andamanese and settlers to appropriate and to protect property. The Andamanese wanted food, working implements, cloth, and iron, and the British desired bows, arrows, and jewellery. As Portman put it later on, the Andamanese objected to 'strangers coming to their villages and taking away their property ... such conduct on our part could only provoke ill-feeling and hostility on theirs.'53
71. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 299.
72. Papers relating to the aborigines of the Andaman Islands (hereafter Papers relating to the aborigines) (Haughton to Grey, 10 January 1861), Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1861) 253-255.This kidnap reinvigorated practices of capturing and confining the Andamanese. Naval brigadesmen became trackers, guards and even collectors and producers of colonial knowledge. At the turn of 1860/61, brigadesmen were placed in charge of three of the captives, with the brief of learning something of their cultural practices. Explicitly drawing on Daniel Defoe's vision of a cannibal island, they named them 'Punch', 'Friday', and 'Crusoe Blair' (after the lieutenant), for there was an extraordinary belief at the time that they had 'no proper names for each other'.55
73. Memoranda relative to three Andamanese in the charge of Major Tickell, when deputy commissioner of Amherst, Tenasserim, in 1861 by Col. S.R. Tickell, 28 July 1863, enc. vocabulary of Andamanese words, as ascertained from CRUSOE and FRIDAY, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1864) 167 (emphasis in original) (hereafter Tickell's memoranda).
74. Papers relating to the aborigines (Hellard's notes), 258-259.
75. Papers relating to the aborigines (Haughton to Grey, 10 January 1861), 254-255; Papers relating to the aborigines (Hellard's notes), 262.
76. Papers relating to the aborigines (Hellard's notes), 262-263.Three more Andamanese were kidnapped a few days later, though Hellard noted that the two sets of captives were from different communities, for 'they did not show any sign of pleasure at seeing them.'59
77. Papers relating to the aborigines (Hellard's notes), 261.
78. J. Boyce, Van Diemen's Land, Melbourne, 2008; Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (note 4).
79. Papers relating to the aborigines (Haughton to Grey, 27 March 1861), 256-257.
80. Account of further intercourse with the natives of the Andaman Islands, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1864) (hereafter Account of further intercourse), 32-35.
81. Papers relating to the aborigines (Hellard's notes), 261.
82. IOR P/188/67 (India public proceedings 24 June 1863) R C. Tytler, enc. statement of John Watson, 27 April 1863; IOR P/188/67 (India public proceedings 31 July 1863) H. Corbyn to Tytler, 2 July 1863.The fate of the three other captives - named similarly 'Port Blair', 'Crusoe', and 'Jumbo'64
83. Portman wrote later that the Andamanese who remembered the incident in the 1890s told him that four men had been kidnapped: Íra Jóbo (Tuesday Blair), Bía Kurcho (Crusoe), Jumbo, the man who died in Moulmein, (Bira Buj), and Turai Dé (Friday). Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 306.
84. Papers relating to the aborigines (A note on certain aborigines of the Andaman Islands, by Lieut.-Colonel Albert Fytche, commissioner of the Tenasserim and Martaban provinces, 10 June 1861), 263.
85. Papers relating to the aborigines (Fytche's note, 10 June 1861), 265-267.
86. Tickell's memoranda (note 55), 163-169.Three decades later, Portman disagreed. He wrote that it was a turning point: from what the men had told their fellow islanders at the time, they had realised the nature and extent of British dominance in the region and the limits of their continued resistance.68
87. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 331-332, 359. Note the intriguing (but missing) associated reference in the 'B' proceedings of India public records (IOR P/188/66 nos 127-9): Captain J. C. Anderson, adjutant general's office, forwards a small list of Andamanese words and a lithographed likeness of an Andamanese lad who was in his father's service 21 October 1862.
88. IOR P/434/1 (India Public Proceedings April 1866) Andaman home report, February 1866.At the beginning of 1863, the British began actively to encourage naval brigade visits to Andamanese settlements. Petty officer of the naval brigade Harry Smith led a series of exchanges of biscuits, bread, plantains and other small items for islanders' bows and arrows, bringing them to the settlement headquarters at Ross Island.70
89. Morgan, Encounters (note 5), 51-52.
90. Duke University Library (hereafter DUL), Edwin F. Forbes, Journal and Letter Book 1861-1865 (hereafter Forbes mss), journal January 1863. See also IOR P/188/67 (India public proceedings 11 February 1863) statement of the visits of the aborigines, 14 January 1863.
91. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 11 February 1863) statement of the visits of the aborigines, 14 January 1863.
92. Account of further intercourse (note 61), 33.Permeating all contact missions was the underlying threat of capture and confinement. In his account of the 'friendly intercourse' of early 1863, for instance, superintendent Tytler wrote of how a 'boy and a man went over to Ross Island'. In contrast, a naval brigadesman stationed on the Islands at the time, Edwin Forbes, described in a letter home the same journey as a 'seizure' or 'kidnap', transforming it discursively into a quite different sort of event.73
93. DUL Forbes mss, letter to Mr Barnard, 17 January 1863.
94. Anderson, Oscar Mallitte's Andaman photographs (note 34).
95. Tickell's memoranda (note 55), 162.
96. Anderson, Oscar Mallitte's Andaman photographs (note 34).For their part, the convicts appear to have been simultaneously afraid and disdainful of the Andamanese. In the face of a series of violent raids on convict working parties, Tytler wrote of the convicts' constant dread of attack: 'even the utterance of the word Coffree or Junglee admees nearly paralyzes them'. He feared for the viability of new colonial outposts at the sites of Aberdeen and Haddo in the face of the prospect of mass desertion by the intimidated convicts.77
97. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 14 March 1864) continuation of statement regarding the aborigines of the Andamans, 24, 26-27 January 1864; IOR P/188/67 (India public proceedings 14 March 1863) treacherous murder of an English seaman (hereafter Treacherous murder): statement of Harry Smith, 28 January 1863; further notes by Tytler, n.d.; Tytler to E.C. Bayley, Secretary to Government of India, 5 February 1863. (Coffree=kafir [unbeliever]; junglee admess=Andamanese jungle-dweller).
98. IOR P/188/66 (India Public Proceedings 9 December 1864) A.P. Phayre, Chief Commissioner of Burma, to Bayley, 31 October 1864.
99. IOR P/206/61 (India Judicial Proceedings 29 July 1859) T. Farquhar, Superintendent Allahabad jail, to W. Muir, Secretary to Government of India, 14 January 1859.
100. See Lester, Imperial Networks (note 4), 4, 189.
101. Narrative no. 2, by Mr Corbyn, reproduced in Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 432.The Andamanese view of the convicts perhaps expresses something of the ambivalence of colonization through penal transportation, for convicts were simultaneously both a crucial part of the occupying force and under sentences of forced labour - or to put in another way both colonizers and colonized. One archival fragment that speaks to this point is the writing of convict Munir Shikohabadi, who penned a lengthy poem at about this time. His verse includes the couplet: 'Blackness belongs to the jungle people, whiteness to the Europeans/the prisoners on this island are caught day and night in two-colouredness'. In the original Persian, 'two-colouredness' invokes a sense of 'double-dealing', which captures neatly the nature of this peculiar colonial dilemma.81
102. For further discussion of Shikohabadi, see Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion, London, 2007. I thank Christopher Shackle for his poetic translations.
103. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 320, 334.
104. Treacherous murder, statement of James David, 28 January 1863.Towards a gendered reading of colonization and captivityThere is also the question of intimate relations in an almost exclusively male penal colony. We know almost nothing about personal relationships between convicts during the early colonial period - beyond the worries of British officials about the prevalence of 'unnatural crime' within an exclusively male penal colony. Both Mouat and the first government inspector of the Andamans, surgeon G.G. Brown, expressed fears that the Andamans would descend into the moral chaos of the notorious Australian penal colony at Norfolk Island. Mouat wrote that, without women, the Islands would become a 'pandemonium of the worst description'.84
105. IOR P/206/61 (India Judicial Proceedings 29 July 1859) report by Dr G.G. Browne on the sanitary state of the Andamans, March 1859; IOR P/146/15 (Bengal judicial proceedings 10 March 1858) Mouat to C.J. Buckland, Secretary to Government of India, 22 February 1859.
106. IOR P/188/49 (India Judicial Proceedings 15 January 1858) C. Beadon, Secretary to Government of India, to acting Superintendent H. Man, 15 January 1858.
107. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 14 March 1863) continuation of statement regarding the aborigines of the Andamans, 18 January 1863 (my emphasis). At the time, 'intercourse' implied trade and social communication (perhaps in this case through gesture), as well as sexual connexion.
108. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 285.
109. For instance: IOR P/434/2 (India Public Proceedings August 1866) Andaman home report, June 1866; IOR P/434/12 (India Public Proceedings) Andaman home report for the official year 1867-1868. High rates of stillbirth and infant mortality were observed similarly in colonial Australia. See Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (note 46), 125-126.
110. IOR P/434/2 (India Public Proceedings August 1866) Andaman home report, June 1866, Superintendent B. Ford to C.P. Hilderbrand, Officiating Secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Burma, 5 October 1866.A turning point in the history of the settlement revolved around an attempted rape that led to the death of a naval brigadesman called James Pratt at the hands of two islanders. On 28 January 1863, P.W. Fendall, commander of the Andamans detachment, reported that it has been an entirely unprovoked attack.90
111. Morgan, Encounters (note 5), 62.
112. Treacherous murder, continuation of statement regarding the aborigines of the Andamans, n.d.; A. Gamack, civil surgeon in medical charge, to P.W. Fendall, commanding naval brigade, 28 January 1863.
113. Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (note 4), 94-95.
114. Treacherous murder, J.W.S. Wyllie, Under Secretary to Government of India, to Tytler, 14 March 1863.
115. Treacherous murder, further notes by Tytler, n.d.But we might look beyond discourses of race and make sense of islanders' apparently unpredictable behaviour if we consider it as a quite coherent response to the violence and sexual exploitation that was rarely acknowledged by officials. The brigade captured two islanders allegedly involved in the incident - they called them 'Jumbo' (later identified by Portman as Tura) and 'Snowball' (Lokala)94
116. Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, 361.
117. DUL Forbes Mss, Journal entries, 29 January 1863, 17 February 1863.
118. Treacherous murder, further notes by Tytler, n.d.
119. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 24 June 1863) Tytler to Wyllie, enc. statements of John Hamilton, Henry Brown, John Watson, and John Duncan, 27 April 1863; IOR P/188/67 (India public proceedings 4 August 1863), Tytler to Bayley, 15 July 1863.By the time knowledge of the attempted rape came to light, Pratt's death had provoked a fundamental shift in local policy. Tytler had already ordered 'Jumbo' (Tura) and 'Snowball' (Lokala) into custody on Ross Island, and induced (by what means we do not know) the woman known as 'Madam Cooper' (by now known as 'Topsy') and a boy known as 'Sambo', 'Snowball' (Lokala)'s brother, to join them. Tytler built them a house, and employed convicts under his personal supervision 'to wait upon them and attend to their wants like servants.' He placed in charge the recently ordained Calcutta-born and British-educated Reverend Henry Corbyn. This arrangement formed the basis of a long-term institution for the Andamanese, which islanders called the Boudla[h],98
120. Anonymous, Muscular Christianity among the pigmies, Friend of India, 6 August 1863; Narrative no. 3, by Mr Corbyn, reproduced in Portman, A History of our Relations (note 13), Vol. I, ch. 12.
121. IOR P/188/67 (India Public Proceedings 31 July 1863) Tytler to Bayley, 25 June 1863.