HISTORY— AN 18TH CENTURY ACCOUNT 179 



who thus by his clumsiness revealed the priceless secret, was 

 immediately killed, not by his countrymen, as might perhaps be 

 expected, but by the strangers ! There is no mention of torture ; 

 but the well was neither discovered then nor since.* 



The next historian is an Englishman, for Captain Alexander 

 Hamilton, in his Account of the East Indies, ■\ written about 

 1700, devotes some space to these islands. " The Andamans 

 are surrounded by many dangerous rocks and banks, and they 

 are all inhabited with cannibals, who are so fearless that they 

 will swim off to a boat if she approach near the shore, and 

 attack her with their wooden weapons, notwithstanding the 

 superiority of numbers in the boat and the advantages of 

 missive and defensive arms of iron, steel, and fire." 



As an example of this, Hamilton tells of one. Captain Ferguson, 

 whose ship, bound from Malacca to Bengal, in company with 

 another, was driven by a strong current on some rocks, and 

 lost. The second vessel was carried through a channel, and 

 was completely powerless to aid those shipwrecked, " which," says 

 our author, " gave ground to conjecture that they were all 

 devoured by those savage cannibals." 



This same chronicler met a native of the Andamans at 

 Acheen in 1694, ^"^^ says of the incident: "The Andamaners 

 had a yearly custom to come to the Nicobar Islands with a 

 great number of small praus, and kill and take prisoners as 

 many Nicobarians as they could overcome." During one of 

 these raids, however, the long-suffering Nicobarese armed them- 

 selves — it does not seem to have been their custom to resist — 

 and, gathering together, gave battle to the invaders, and utterly 

 defeated them ; and on this occasion the man under discussion, 

 then a boy of ten or twelve years, who had accompanied his 

 father, was taken prisoner, and, spared on account of his youth, 

 was made a slave. 



Some years went by, and he was sold to the Achinese, who, 



* A Voyage Round the World by Dr John Francis Gemclli Carcri. 

 ChurchilPs Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. \\. 

 t Pinkertotis Collection of Voyages. 



