THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS
Revived as a penal settlement after the Indian Mutiny in
1857--Now holds some twelve thousand convicts--Port Blair system
established--Graduated treatment--Well-selected marriages--Lapses
from good order--Cases and causes--Assassination of Lord Mayo--The
aboriginal Andamanese--The Tarawas--Escapes constantly effected
by Burmese prisoners--General results achieved--Development by
cultivation--Clearance of forests--Tea plantation--Numerous
exports--Deportation from the Straits Settlements to
Bombay--Ratnagiri gaol.
The Indian government long practised transportation beyond the seas
as a punishment for the most determined criminals. The terrors of
crossing the “black water” were very potent to the native mind,
although the effect of the penalty as a deterrent was never marked
and the practice gradually fell into desuetude. But it was revived in
1857 as a solution of the difficulty in dealing with the great body
of rebels and mutineers in custody charged with participation in the
great Indian Mutiny, a special commission was despatched to visit the
Andaman Islands and report upon their fitness for the establishment of
a great penal settlement. To the student of penal science, the results
achieved in the Indian Ocean, or more exactly, the Sea of Bengal, must
be extremely interesting. The system of transportation has succeeded
better there than anywhere else, whether in the Australian colonies,
where it resulted in the creation of a great nation at the cost of much
human misery, or in the French experiment in New Caledonia. Russia has
also tried transportation on a gigantic scale with the most deplorable
results in Siberia and on the island of Saghalien.
The settlement on the Andamans, or more precisely upon the northern
and principal island, has by this time accomplished a very distinct
work in penal colonisation. Many causes, natural and artificial, have
contributed to this gratifying result: a fertile soil, a good, albeit
tropical climate; an intelligent administration, which has been backed
up by the willing efforts of convict labourers, alive generally to
their own benefit in making the best of the system in practice. The
force available for the cultivation and development of the main island
has always been large.
It is an industrious, self-supporting and for the most part peaceable
population, where good order and a quiet demeanour are enforced by
stringent discipline, although the inherent evil nature of so many
criminals cannot be invariably held in check, and ghastly occurrences
have from time to time been recorded in almost every nook and corner
of Port Blair, the headquarters of the penal settlement. The Andaman
convict has committed some heinous offences; he is a murderer in some
form or other, deliberate, vindictive, or moved by sudden ungovernable
passion; he has been a highway robber or persistent Dacoit; he has
forged notes or securities on a great scale. He has betrayed a
serious trust, has been a wrecker and desperado, and has more than
once deserved the extreme penalty of the law. Beneath the surface the
community is a seething mass of depravity, of wickedness, generally
latent, but breaking out often in the most violent and bloodthirsty
excesses.
To have held the dangerous elements continually in check, to have
largely modified and counteracted their evil tendencies, and to have
returned the worst characters to their homes cured and reformed is
a subject for congratulation by those who achieved it, and some
account of the system employed at the Andamans is worth giving here.
It is right, however, to admit that this system is not entirely
efficacious. All are not amenable to better influences and a certain
small percentage remains incorrigible. Some four per cent. of the total
population have shown themselves so desperately bad that it has been
deemed unsafe to suffer them to leave the precincts of the gaol.
Every convict on first arrival is relegated to the close confinement
of the cellular prison by way of breaking him in, and he is detained
there under the most irksome conditions for an unbroken period of six
months. He remains in his cell all day and all night, save for a brief
space spent at exercise with others, but in strict silence. His next
step is to an associated gaol where gang labour of a severe character
is enforced, and is imposed for a year and a half. Then come three
years of unremitting toil, the exact counterpart of penal servitude as
understood in Great Britain--hard labour under supervision, unpaid,
unrewarded, but he is well fed, well housed and cared for, and always
closely guarded. Five years have thus elapsed in a painfully monotonous
and irksome existence, after which his employment is pleasanter and his
personal capacity is studied; the more intelligent are selected for
positions of trust and authority.
Comparative freedom comes at the end of ten years, the convict gains
his ticket-of-leave and is called in local language a “self-supporter.”
He has done, more or less, with prison restraints; he lives in some
small village in a house of his own and earns his living his own
way; he farms; he keeps cattle; he moves about freely unguarded and
unwatched; he sends home to the mainland for his wife and children;
or, if single, he may marry a female convict in the same position as
himself. His condition is to a certain extent enviable. If industrious,
he may make and put by money, but still he is tied and bound by
regulation; he has no civil rights, and is in the hands of a paternal
authority which prescribes his place of residence and will suffer him
to move to and fro within his village, if well conducted, but he cannot
leave the settlement and he must not be idle under pain of the loss of
privileges and relegation to enforced labour. Existence nevertheless is
tolerable, and in this way he completes ten or fifteen years more until
at length the time for absolute release arrives. In the earlier period
of this last stage he has received assistance in the shape of free
gifts of food and tools and a roof to cover him, but his self-reliance
is stimulated by the obligation in later years to fend for himself
and accept all the public burdens of the community. He must pay rent
and taxes and all charges exacted from the free population. All the
disabilities are equally imposed upon female convicts with permission
to marry or enter domestic service after five years of conditional
liberation.
We see in this system a consistent effort to encourage self-help and
self-restraint. Moral improvement is its great aim; good conduct is
encouraged; retrogression, or lapse into wrong-doing, is punished by
the withdrawal of privileges and a return to irksome restraint. On
the other hand, substantial reward is offered to those who have made
the best use of their ticket-of-leave, and the old convict, purged
of his original offence, emerges, and, backed by the small capital
he has saved, has become an orderly and reputable member of society,
thoroughly reformed, broken to harness and reasonably certain to
continue in the straight road. He is neither pauper nor gaol-bird;
he is no unwelcome burden on his relatives, no menace to public
security, but a source of strength rather than weakness to the body
politic. Penal exile has never before achieved such excellent results.
Steady industry, as we have seen, is the general rule, and morality is
greatly encouraged. Convict marriages, such a fruitful source of evil
elsewhere, as in New Caledonia and Saghalien, where they have fallen
largely into disuse, are preceded by so many precautions that the bond
when entered into is seldom broken. The fitness of the contracting
parties is personally inquired into by the chief authority of the place
who must give his sanction or no marriage can take place. Permission
is refused in certain cases as when a husband in India declines to
divorce his convict wife, or when the applicants are of bad character
or the male is an hereditary Dacoit, or when there is a difference in
caste. Great care is also taken of the children when any are born.
The young are well cared for; primary education is compulsory and
technical instruction is free to all. Thrift is steadily inculcated in
the rising generation and stimulated by the example of the elders. No
institution is more flourishing at Port Blair than the savings bank,
and the self-supporting convicts are often considerable depositors from
the economies made in their allowance and the profits on their labour.
Sanitation receives the very best attention in the islands, and both
death and sick rate are, for the East, exceptionally low. The public
health is seldom, if ever, affected by malignant epidemic disease;
cholera is a rare visitant, and small-pox is constantly kept in check.
There is an abundant and most efficient medical staff, and the convicts
at large, as well as those actually in durance, can count upon the
official doctor’s unremitting care.
Although the general tone of the settlement is excellent, and good
order is preserved, there are occasionally lapses among the convicts
whose manners and dispositions are by no means mild and submissive, nor
can their evil impulses be easily repressed, or still less entirely
stamped out. The convict temper is irritable and breaks out often into
resistance to authority and bitter quarrels of one with another which
sometimes end in murderous affrays. There is a seamy side to Port
Blair which is often shown in resistance to authority exercised, as
it mostly is, by fellow convicts advanced to positions of trust; for
some six per cent. of well-conducted convicts are regularly employed
as warders, guards and overseers. This is in accordance with the
general practice in India, although entirely condemned by modern penal
science. Nevertheless, mutiny and insubordination are uncommon on any
large scale, although vindictive feelings are aroused and cherished at
real or fancied injustice and oppression, and in the annals of murders
committed one or two convict officials killed by comrades figure
annually.
The causes of murder in the Andamans hardly differ from those inciting
to it elsewhere. Murderous passion is swiftly aroused among men with
savage, irritable tempers, quick to quarrel, quicker still to strike;
consuming thirst for revenge will be slaked only in blood; and greed
and covetousness are easily awakened in people whose self-control
is weak. A small reason often suffices for the infliction of death.
A convict asked a village woman to be allowed to husk his rice in
her mortar and killed her brutally with an axe when she refused.
An old Dacoit, who had been refused permission to marry, killed a
more fortunate rival to whom the woman of his choice was given. Two
convicts, about to be granted tickets as self-supporters, were eager
to obtain sufficient funds to give them a good start; they discovered
that a convict, who was a notorious miser, had a secret hoard, and
his fate was sealed. His body was picked up in a running stream with
his head broken in. A somewhat similar case was that of a labouring
convict who was in possession of a sum of money lent by a friend; he
first was inveigled into a lonely spot and there knocked down by a
blow on the eye, after which he was strangled. A convict employed as
a petty officer in hospital incurred the deadly enmity of a patient
for reporting him to the doctor, and the patient gave vent to his
hatred by killing his enemy with a thrust of a pointed bamboo. The
same weapon was used by another convict who beat out the brains of a
petty officer for slapping him on parade in the presence of a hundred
men. One convict had caught another hanging about the barrack room bent
upon thieving, and having expressed his intention of denouncing him was
murdered while asleep on his bed. A convict warder supervising a party
of sail-makers had reason to find fault with one of his charges for
idling, and at the first opportunity, before anyone had time to suspect
or prevent him, the labourer picked up a knife and stabbed the overseer.
Any weapon would serve to give effect to the homicidal frenzy;
sometimes it was a rice pounder, sometimes a wooden crutch, sometimes
an axe for cutting firewood, sometimes a heavy mallet used in
wool-teasing. The convicts were known to commit the capital offence
in order to draw down the death penalty when they were tired of life
from long brooding over fancied unjust treatment. Sentence of death by
hanging was the invariable requital of murder when clearly proved, and
it was passed by a sessions’ judge, subject to subsequent confirmation
by a court of reference. Lesser punishments were sometimes imposed,
such as prolonged transportation or relegation to the chain gang, while
corporal punishment was ordered for lesser offences.
An atrocious murder which echoed through the whole world was that of
the viceroy of India, Lord Mayo, who was killed by an Andaman convict
in 1872. The viceroy had visited Mount Harriet, a finely wooded
slope rising above Port Blair and looking out over Viper Island with
a glorious view eastward, in order to judge of its suitability as a
sanatorium. He had just finished the descent. “The ship’s bells had
just rung seven; the launch with steam up was whizzing at the jetty
stairs; a group of her seamen were chatting on the pier-end. It was
now quite dark, and the black line of the jungle seemed to touch the
water’s edge. The viceroy’s party passed some large loose stones to
the left of the head of the pier, and advanced along the jetty; two
torchbearers in front.” The viceroy, preceding the rest, stepped
quickly forward to descend the stairs to the launch. The next moment
the people in the rear heard a noise, as of “the rush of some animal”
from behind the loose stones; one or two saw a hand raised and a
knife blade suddenly glisten in the torchlight. The viceroy’s private
secretary heard a thud, and instantly turning round, found a man
“fastened like a tiger” on the back of Lord Mayo.
“In a second twelve men were on the assassin; an English officer was
pulling them off, and with his sword-hilt keeping back the native
guards, who would have killed the assailant on the spot. The torches
had gone out; but the viceroy, who had staggered over the pier-side,
was dimly seen rising up in the knee-deep water, and clearing the hair
off his brow with his hand as if recovering himself. His private
secretary was instantly at his side in the surf, helping him up the
bank. ‘Burne,’ he said quietly, ‘they’ve hit me.’ Then, in a louder
voice, which was heard on the pier, ‘It’s all right, I don’t think I’m
much hurt,’ or words to that effect. In another minute he was sitting
under the smoky glare of the re-lit torches, on a rude native cart at
the side of the jetty, his legs hanging loosely down. Then they lifted
him bodily on to the cart, and saw a great dark patch on the back of
his light coat. The blood came streaming out, and men tried to staunch
it with their handkerchiefs. For a moment or two he sat up on the cart,
then he fell heavily backwards. ‘Lift up my head,’ he said faintly, and
said no more.”
The assassin, Sher Ali, was a very brave man belonging to one of
the Afridi tribes, who had done excellent service to more than one
commissioner at Peshawar and distinguished himself as a soldier. He
was completely trusted by Colonel Reynolds Taylor, one of the best of
our Indian officers, when at Peshawar, and was often in attendance on
his family; in fact, he was the confidential servant of the house.
This man, however, belonged to a society in which tribal feuds were
a hereditary custom. Some such feud existed in his family and he was
called upon to take his part in exacting a bloody vengeance for a
quarrel. Had he committed the murder on his own side of the frontier,
no notice could have been taken of it; and it would have been esteemed
a legitimate deed sanctioned by the religious feelings and customs
of the tribe; but his offence was committed within British territory
and must be tried by British laws. He was convicted and sentenced to
transportation to the Andamans instead of death, which he would greatly
have preferred. Continually brooding under a sense of wrong, he took
the first opportunity that offered for murderous retaliation and found
the death he desired, on the gallows.
Attempts to escape from the islands were at times frequent, encouraged
by the easy access to the sea and the facility with which boats
could be seized. But recaptures were also constantly made, and there
were other chances against the fugitives, especially that of being
run down by the aboriginal Andamanese. The natives of these islands
are savages of a Nigrito race allied to the Papuans, but who, from
having had no connection with the outer world for several centuries,
have kept their blood absolutely pure. They are of small stature,
the males a little under five feet in height, but finely made and
well proportioned. In colour they are a jet black, and are among
the darkest hued specimens of mankind. They are inveterate smokers,
men, women and children, and are bright and intelligent, somewhat
childish, petulant and quick tempered, but merry and light-hearted.
They constitute a good unofficial guard, and as they constantly prowl
round the convict settlements are a great deterrent to escape.
Being well used to jungle life, they are very successful trackers,
who frequently bring back fugitives dead or alive. If by chance the
evading convicts fall into the hands of the Jarawa tribe, their fate is
sealed. These Jarawas are and always have been utterly irreclaimable;
neither kindness nor force has had any appreciable effect in overcoming
their unconquerable dislike to strangers, even of their own blood
belonging to other tribes. Armed with bows and arrows, they show fight
whenever encountered, and when pressed and punishment is attempted,
they retire into the impenetrable jungle. With the exception of these
irreconcilables, the Andamanese have been trained, like other wild
animals, by patience and kindness to treat us with entire confidence
and trust.
The strong yearning to escape torments more especially the natives of
Burmah, a large number of whom are deported to the Andamans. They are
a semi-amphibious race, largely brought up to a life on the water,
expert boatmen and tireless swimmers. Precise rules are in force at the
Andamans that only a limited number of Burmese may be included in any
one boat’s crew. More than half the escapes by water were accomplished
by Burmese, who boldly ventured out into the open sea, risking all
its perils to win across to their dearly loved native land. It is a
curious fact that the Burmese Dacoit, who would face the death penalty
with fortitude, has always dreaded imprisonment or deportation with
overmastering terror. One explanation of this consuming dread is the
not uncommon fear of the unknown. Again, the treatment of prisoners in
Burmah under the native régime was merciless; the most excruciating
tortures were the rule, and protracted life was worse than a thousand
deaths. Exile to the Andaman Islands was anticipated with nameless
apprehension. The case of a famous Dacoit may be quoted in proof of
this. He had been long in custody; he awaited his trial with patience
and resignation, and he would have heard a sentence of death unmoved,
but he was quite overcome when a short term of transportation to the
Andamans was passed upon him, although it was accompanied by a promise
of early conditional liberation. When the time came for his departure,
he refused to move off with his escort, kicking and even biting
everyone within reach, and eventually he had to be tied with ropes and
carried along.
In this connection, Major E. C. Browne, in “The Coming of the Great
Queen,” tells the following:
“It was the same with other Dacoits who had been taken red-handed.
Two or three were shot, others flogged and released and several were
detained for deportation. These were the gloomiest of all and begged
to be killed or released. One fellow actually succeeded in evading his
sentence. He had got hold of a soldier’s boot-lace and with this he
strangled himself during the night. I should scarcely have been able
to credit this story if the witness of the dead man in the morning,
with the boot-lace drawn so tight that it had actually penetrated the
skin, had not been an officer of my own regiment whose veracity was
unimpeachable.”
The best general account of the results obtained in the Andamans is
found in the address to the Society of Arts by Colonel Temple, sometime
chief commissioner to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Andaman
penal system “is the result of the constant attention of the government
which created it, and is the outcome of the measures of practical men,
devised to meet the difficulties with which they have found themselves
face to face, and reduced to order and rule by some of the keenest
intellects that have worked in India for many years past.” Repeatedly
tinkered and patched and recast and remodelled though it has been, the
Andaman system is still inchoate, still on its trial, as it were. It
could not well be otherwise, for in dealing with the criminal we are
attempting to solve a mighty problem as old as criminality itself.
From the best estimates at hand we may take it that the permanent
convict strength of the settlement may be placed at about twelve
thousand, of whom about eight hundred are women, and the rule is that
only life convicts are sent from India and life and long-term convicts
from Burmah. The people received, therefore, are the murderers who
have for some reason escaped the death penalty, and the perpetrators
of the more heinous offences against person and property, the men of
brutal violence, the highwaymen, the robbers, the habitual thieves and
the receivers of stolen goods, the worst of the swindlers, forgers,
cheats, coiners and, in fact, the most unrestrained temperaments of
a continent. These considerations show the scale of the work and the
nature of the task. Any one observing the work of the English in
the East may possibly be struck with the idea that the reason for
the acknowledged capacity of the race for colonial enterprise and
the maintenance of empire is the ability and the willingness of the
average Englishman to put his hand to any kind of work that may come
his way, without any special training, from framing suitable laws and
regulations and creating suitable organisations to making roads and
ditches, building houses and clearing land and ploughing it. Here in
Port Blair, the officers entrusted with the creation and organisation
had no training for the work and were without any special guidance
and teaching, yet they managed, with the worst possible material to
work upon, to create in little more than forty years, upon primeval
forest and swamp, situated in an enervating and, until mastered, a
deadly climate, a community supporting itself in regard to many of its
complicated wants.
They began with the dense forests, the fetid swamps and the
pestilential coral banks of tropical islands, and have made out of
them many square miles of grass and arable lands, supporting over
fifty villages besides convict stations. Miles upon miles of swamp
have been reclaimed, the coral banks have been controlled and a place
with regard to which the words climate and pestilence were almost
synonymous has been turned into one favourably spoken of as to its
healthiness. The settlement now grows its own vegetables, tea, coffee,
cocoa, tapioca and arrowroot, some of its ordinary food grains and most
of its fodder. It supplies itself with the greater part of its animal
food and all its fuel and salt. In other lines of work, it makes its
own boats and provides from its own resources the bulk of the materials
for its buildings which are constructed and erected locally. Among
the materials produced are all the timber, stone, bricks, lime and
mortar, and most of the iron and metal work are made up there from raw
material. In the matter of convict clothing, all that is necessary to
be purchased elsewhere is the roughest of cotton hanks and wool in the
first raw condition, every other operation being performed on the spot.
It provides much of its own leather.
In achieving the results, the officers have had first to learn for
themselves as best they could how to turn out the work to hand and then
to teach what they had learned to the most unpromising pupils that can
be imagined for the work required of them in Port Blair. And they have
been hampered all along by the necessities of convict discipline, by
the constant release of their men and their punishment for misconduct.
It is under such conditions that the corps of artificers and other
convicts have had to be utilised. Nevertheless, the roads and drains,
the buildings and boats, the embankments and reservoirs, are as
good and durable as are the same class of structures elsewhere. The
manufacturers are sufficient for their purpose, and there are among the
taught those who are now skilled in the use of many kinds of machinery.
Cultivation is generally fair and some of it very good; the general
sanitation is literally second to none.
First of all the industries of the Andamans is that of timber, and
to accelerate and increase it a steam tramway has been instituted
and there are now some fourteen miles of line connecting the forests
with the shores of Port Blair. As a further adjunct steam saw-mills
were erected in 1896 and a forest department that employs from five
to six hundred men daily under its own officers, not only supplies
the settlement with all of its requirements in timber from the local
forests, but also exports timber and forest produce to various places
in India and Europe. Of these latter exports, rattans and gurjun oil
are the chief; other natural products of the islands are trepang,
tortoise-shell and edible birds’ nests, but they are collected only
in small quantities. The principal cultivations in which convicts
and ex-convicts are engaged are paddy, sugar cane, Indian corn and
turmeric; cocoanuts have during the past thirty-five years been
extensively planted, and besides the agricultural products previously
mentioned, vegetables and fruits of various kinds are grown. The larger
industries in which the penal community is engaged have already been
alluded to, but there are many minor employments, the products from
which also go toward making the settlement self-supporting. Among these
are to be found the manufacture of all kinds of furniture, cane chairs,
baskets, many varieties of bamboo work and ornamental woodcarving,
woven articles from serviettes to saddle-girths, and blankets, pottery,
rope and mats, silver, tin, brass and iron work, shoes, rickshaws and
carts, besides the production of such materials as lime, bricks and
tiles. Port Blair is in communication three and often four times a
month with Calcutta, Madras and Rangoon by the vessels of the Asiatic
Steam Navigation Company. The distances between the settlement and the
ports named are 796, 780 and 387 miles respectively.
The earliest penal settlement on the Andamans was in the southern
island, where it was founded on the present site of Port Blair in 1792.
It was known as the “old harbour.” After three years the establishment
was moved to the present Port Cornwallis on the northern island, but
this proved to be most unhealthy and it was closed, the convicts,
numbering some two hundred and seventy, being removed to Penang, at the
extremity of the Malay Peninsula. In the early “fifties” the Straits
Settlements sometimes sent their long-term convicts to Bombay, from
where they were usually drafted to such moist and congenial climates as
Tannah and Ratnagiri. By good behaviour they earned tickets-of-leave to
the hill stations, Mahabuleshwar and Matheran, where they became the
market-gardeners of the place, many preferring to remain after their
time had expired, respected and respectable citizens, often possessed
of considerable wealth. At one time the Ratnagiri gaol contained about
three hundred and sixty convicts; “at least two-thirds were Chinamen
and Malays from the Straits, great ruffians, each with a record of
piracy or murder, or both combined. Many of them were heavily fettered
and carefully guarded by armed police when at their ordinary work in
the ‘laterite’ quarries, for they were mostly powerful men;” the tools
they used were formidable weapons and as there were known to be deadly
feuds always present among them, serious disturbances and outbreaks
were constantly dreaded. Nevertheless, misconduct was exceedingly rare;
breaches of gaol discipline were much fewer among these desperadoes
than among the milder Hindus in the work-sheds within the gaol. The
fact having in due course created much surprise, inquiries were
instituted as to why pirates and murderers, usually so insubordinate in
other places, were so well-conducted and quiet at Ratnagiri.
The riddle was presently solved. “For some years one Sheik Kassam had
been gaoler. Belonging to the fisherman class and possessed of very
little education, he had, nevertheless, worked his way upward through
the police by dint of honesty, hard work and a certain shrewdness
which had more than once brought him to the front. At last, toward
the end of his service, the gaolership falling vacant, he was, with
everyone’s cordial approval, nominated to the post.” With comparative
rest and improved pay, the old gentleman waxed fatter and jollier
and was esteemed one of the most genial companions the country could
produce. The cares of state, and the responsibility of three hundred
murderous convicts, weighed lightly on Sheik Kassam. He developed a
remarkable talent or predilection for gardening, almost from the first.
“He laid out the quarry beds, brought water down to irrigate them,
produced all the gaol required in the way of green stuff, and made
tapioca and arrowroot by the ton. The better plot of land belonging
to the gaol lay between Sheik Kassam’s own official residence, a
tiny bungalow-fashioned dwelling, and a walled courtyard near to the
highroad. The sheik had no difficulty in obtaining permission to erect
a high wall of rubble from the quarries along the whole road frontage,
so that, as he urged, the convicts at work in the garden would not be
gazed at by passers-by, and that forbidden articles, such as tobacco,
sweetmeats, liquor, and the like, should not be passed or even thrown
over to them.”
Presently this favourite slice of garden was safely boxed in from the
public view by an enclosure some eight feet high, extending from the
gaol itself round to the gaoler’s house, the only entrance to it being
a little wicket-gate by the side of the sheik’s back-yard.
At last the head-superintendent of the Bombay prison heard that
Sheik Kassam’s disciplinary system consisted in his bringing the
most dangerous of the Chinamen and Malays quietly into his back-yard
from the adjoining garden, and there regaling them with plenty of
sweetmeats, sugar, drink in moderate quantity, and adding even the
joys of female society of a peculiar sort. If any one became unruly
or saucy, he was liable to get a dozen lashes, but if they behaved
decently they all had their little festivals with regularity. After
this discovery, poor old Sheik Kassam’s character as a model gaoler was
gone; he was dismissed, but with a full pension which he did not live
long to enjoy.