406 Incidents of Foreign Field Sport. 



violence, such as dacoity with manslaughter, murder, 

 and the like ; but one or two, I may say more, of the men, 

 according to their ideas, had been unjustly punished. 

 To send a man across the Kala Panie, one who is not 

 one of our subjects, to the Andamans for life because 

 he has killed a man in a tribal feud, or to confine 

 another because he has killed the paramour of his 

 young wife, which is no offence according to their 

 ideas and laws, they consider unjust. Look at the 

 case of the man who stabbed the Earl of Mayo. He 

 was an Afghan ; he had been a domestic servant of the 

 Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar, had played with 

 his children and bore the best of characters ; but 

 because he had slain openly a foe, he was condemned 

 for life to penal servitude, which was to him a 

 thousand times worse than death. To escape that 

 existence he deprived the most popular Viceroy we 

 have had in India of his life, not for revenge or 

 because he owed him any grudge, but simply that he 

 himself might be killed. Another, a strongly-built 

 Burman a young man whom I trusted and who 

 was the first to rush to warn me when the convicts 

 afterwards mutinied was a lifer ; he had avenged 

 his honour by killing a man who had seduced his 

 wife. Does any one imagine that either he, or any 

 one of his race, considered that a crime ? I for one 

 think the man was perfectly justified. 



We had two or three Shan chiefs who had been 

 concerned in dacoities ; awful villains no doubt, but 

 none of these races can refrain from robbery by 

 violence if they see their way to doing it ; it is done 

 as much for a lark as for filthy lucre, and they 

 consider the punishment of transportation not only 



