182 A GHASTLY llAFFLE. [1695. 



Wheel/ and the two Women were hang'd. We have been so 

 confidently assur'd of a singular Action relating to one of 

 these unhappy Wretches, that I can't doubt the truth of it. 

 He had, it seems, ever had an extreme Passion for Dice, so 

 that when he came to the place of Execution, he requir'd 

 with great earnestness, that some-one of the standers-by 

 would oblige him so far, as to play a Game or two with him 

 at Eaffle, protesting that after that he should die with all 

 manner of Satisfaction. If he had any design in this, no 

 body was able to dive into it ; however there was no stander- 

 by that would oblige him in what he desir'd. 



To speak Truth, the Governor had taken too much liberty 

 upon this occasion, for by reason of the many unjust pro- 

 ceedings of his Predecessors, the Company had left them 

 only a Power of accusing as well Blacks as Whites, as our 

 Tyrant himself once confess'd, in relation to our accus'd 

 Brethren ; for one of them having petition'd him to be 

 brought upon his Tryal, and not suffer'd to lie any longer in 

 his Irons, he answerd,'"^ he had no power to try him, and that 



1 John Splinter Stavorinus, who was a rear-admiral in the naval 

 service of the States-General, states that the punishments were very- 

 severe in the Dutch Colonies, especially with regard to Oriental slaves. 

 In the year 1768 he saw, at the Cape, one, who had set a house on 

 fire, broken alive upon the wheel, after the flesh had been torn from 

 his body, in eight different places, with red-hot pincers, without his 

 giving any sign of pain during the execution of this barbarous sentence, 

 which lasted full a quarter of an hour. Impalement was also practised 

 at the Cape, as well as at Batavia. Stavorinus gives some hideous 

 details of the impalement which he saw practised on a Macassar slave 

 at Batavia in 1769. (See Voyages to the East Indies, by Stavorinus, 

 translated by S. H. Wilcocke, vol. i, pp. 288, 671.) 



2 In orig. : " nai'vement," omitted by translator. Stavorinus says 

 that the administration of justice at the Cape was confided to a 

 sej^arate Council, of which the second in command of the colony- 

 was president. In civil matters an appeal lay from their sentence 

 to the Council of Justice at Batavia. In criminal affairs they 

 were empowered both to pass sentence of death and to put it into 

 innnediate execution. Officers were appointed in the out stations of 

 the colony (Mauritius was a dependency of the Cape) called drosts or 



