THE AMERICAN SIBERIA.*
THERE is certainly no denying the aptness of the title Captain Powell has given his book ; put for the alternate scorching heat and intense cold of Siberia, the semi-tropical climate of Florida, and for the terrible fatigue of the mines, the ex- hausting labour of turpentine-culture or railroad-construc- tion, and we may well call life in a Florida convict-camp life in a semi-tropical Siberia. It is necessary, in order to realise the nature of life in a convict-camp, to grasp the difference between European and American convicts. A European con- vict has either poisoned a man, or stabbed him, or beaten his brains out with a poker, or shot him with a revolver purchased for the purpose. When convicted, he is shut up at Port- land, let us say, whence it is almost impossible for him to escape. The American convict has shot some one, the cul- mination probably of a long feud or a deadly quarrel, with his revolver or " pop," his long-barrelled rifle or " scatter- gun," weapons with which he is as familiar with as an English gentleman is with his paper-knife. The crime is even more dastardly and inhuman than its European contemporary; but the criminal is no coward, and he is probably a backwoods- man of great strength and agility, instant resource, undying determination, and powers of endurance that, did one not know what the human machine, when properly trained, was capable of, would seem fabulous. We have said that he is no coward, and, indeed, he possesses a courage and nerve that seem marvellous. Moreover, he is not confined in a prison, but drafted, at least in Florida, to a camp where he works on a plantation, cultivates turpentine, or pioneers a railroad. He is shackled night and day, but freedom is within reach, and for men who think as little of bullets and buck-shot as the Irish do of blackthorns, he is ready—astonishingly ready, it must be confessed—to run the gauntlet of Winchester rifles carried by the guards. The fact, if he happens to be a noted desperado, that a fifty-pound ball is attached to his foot, does not deter him, and there is the fact, more remarkable still, that the grasp of life often enables him to escape after receiving wounds that constitutions less tenacious of vitality would succumb to imme- diately. He acts as if the excitement of battle sustained him. We must explain that under the lease system, owners of pro- perty bid for the labour of gangs of convicts, chiefly, it appears, for turpentine-culture, work which consists in chipping pine- trees in a peculiar manner, and reaches the limit even of convict endurance. Guards armed with repeating-rifles watch the squads at work, and a prisoner attempting to escape, if he pays no attention to warnings, is fired upon. For this sum- mary method, Captain Powell, in the beginning of his descrip- tion of fourteen years in convict camps, pleads the excuse of • The American Nutria. By J. 0. Powell, Captain of the Florida Convict. Camp. (Mew H..1. Smith and Co. no alternative. The guard could not leave his squad : as often as not, indeed, he had to hold the squad at the muzzle of his rifle to prevent farther escapes. The system, says Captain Powell, must be blamed, and not the man. We do not see how any other system could be adopted with such desperate characters, unless, indeed, they could be tamed by a milder discipline, which seems not to be thought of. The camp being in the neighbourhood of forests and swamps, a backwoodsman with a fair start could defy capture, especially if he struck water on his route, as the dogs were of coarse rendered helpless, or if they did recover the trail, valuable time was lost. That men were hunted by dogs to within, say, a year ago, will seem incredible to many people ; yet Captain Powell would have found it impossible to recover an escaped convict without their aid. The idea that bloodhounds are used to " trail con- victs is a mistake; the fact is, that foxhounds are used for man-hunting in nearly all the Southern convict camps." Captain Powell thinks them a " trifle less keen of scent than a deerhound," but of course they are not so fast. He describes the hound used as being larger than a "full-blooded pointer," built heavier about the shoulders, but resembling it in general contour. The head is that of the " typical hound," as he is pleased to call it,—from which we gather that the animal is larger than the English foxhound, with pro- bably more evident strain of the bloodhound in it, and
slower. Their powers of following up a stale trail and holding it through cross-trails and back-trails and over travelled roads, are remarkable, says our author. They never touched the runaways, keeping a safe distance. Captain Powell has a dog that trails by air, holding its head high, runs at full speed, and rarely makes a mistake. To the fox-hunter, this must seem an inversion of the natural order of things; but the scent of a man does not necessarily lie as low as that from a small four-footed animal. We have seen a terrier—on a very hot scent, it is true—run without lowering its nose. " Some men," says Captain Powell, " could not be followed by any hound." Such cases must be rare, however. What an illimitable career of crime must be open to them The puppies were trained by running a " trusty "—a " trusted " convict, we presume—for a few miles, and then setting the dogs on his track. They sometimes singled the man out as he lay among a hundred others on the sleeping-platform in the cell-house.
Fifteen years ago, the system of convict-camps was in a state that might have belonged to the Middle Ages or Siberia, but not to the States a " decade and a half ago," says our author. He describes the treatment as one of unrelieved barbarity. The guards were armed with bayonets, which they used freely, and the punishments were what people of nice tastes would describe as tortures,—namely, stringing up by the thumbs, "sweating," and "watering." The first is a cruel enough torture, in all conscience. In the dark days before the close of Governor Stern's administration, in one of the camps a Negro convict was strung up for breaking a rule, and the Captain then in command, wishing to punish the man severely, left him till he ceased to struggle ; when released, he dropped to the ground dead. The Captain—but let Captain Powell finish —
"It was then that the Captain realised what a monstrous thing he had done, and he deserted his post, slunk away into the night, and was never heard of again. Here was a study for an artist. Night in the palmetto woods, the flaming camp-fire outlining the circle of frightened convicts and the miserable barracks where they slept, the distorted corpse upon the ground, and the panic-. stricken officer creeping away among the trees."
Shortly before these iniquities were repressed, we read of a partial amelioration. It was meant to be so, but was scarcely an improvement. Half the convicts were sent to build a railroad that ran through " tropical marshes " and " palmetto swamps." We quote again :— "The commissary department dwindled into nothing. I do not . mean that there was some food or a little food, but that there was no food at all. In this extremity, the convicts were driven to live as the wild beasts, except that they were only allowed the briefest intervals from labour to scour the woods for food. They dug up roots and cut the tops from `cabbage' palmetto trees. Noble Hawkins, a ten-year Nassau convict, lived for fourteen days on nothing but palmetto-tops and a little salt, and his case was but one of many."
It was at this time that the tragedy recorded above took place. It was the remnant who had survived the morasses of
Lake Eustace that disembarked one morning in the fall of 1876 from a railway " car," and formed the original nucleus of Captain Powell's camp. By an irony of circumstance, the station was at a place known as " Live Oak "! While the thirty men were having their clothes burnt and a wash, he noticed two white men whose hands "resembled the paws of certain apes, for their thumbs, which were enormously enlarged at the ends, were also quite as long as their index- fingers, and the tips of all were on a line." These victims of stringing-up, the gentle reader will be glad to hear, eventually served out their time, and were discharged. "Sweating "was shutting up the offender in a box-cell, without ventilation or light ; and "watering " was that torture, belonging naturally to the cruel Spanish race, which the Inquisition used so freely, and which received its firmest support from the members of the Society of Jesus. The Marchioness de Brinvilliers, it will be remembered, suffered this torture. The method in vogue at Chattahoochee was almost identical with that of the Inquisi- tion. One may well ask what the Southern temperament might not have developed into, if the absolute disposal of so many defenceless individuals had not been taken from the authorities in '66. Surely it is remarkable enough that, ten years after an ocean of blood had been spilt, such barbarities should have been ignored by the Government of a State. Captain Powell tells us that when he took charge of the prison, the proportion of white to black was one to twenty; at present it is one to two, and in a few years he expects to see an even greater dif- ference. The reason for this is not far to seek. The hatred of the Negro that prevails in Southern Florida—Taylor and Lafayette Counties, for instance—is a species of insanity, a true homicidal mania. We quote Captain Powell again :—
" An inveterate hatred prevails against the negro in these sections. I do not suppose there are half-a-dozen coloured families in Taylor County, and when a negro passes through he goes on a run. To illustrate ; the natives had formerly a favourite amuse- ment, which consisted of organising a bear-hunt and inviting one darky to accompany the party. He would invariably be missing when they returned, and they would report sorrowfully that he had gone into a swamp after a bear and that the beast had eaten him. Finally, the appetite of Taylor County bears for negroes became so notorious that no black man would consent to join in sport of that character."
The region of San Peter's Bay and the Bay itself is one vast morass, and swarms with outlaws; no marshal or sheriff has ever dared to do his duty in it. The moss-covered slime is full of skeletons of animals, and the spots of firm ground are full of animals. The morass or a bullet would be the fate of any one who attempted to serve a warrant.
The bulk of The American Siberia is taken up with the exciting escapes of prisoners and the chasing of the runaways. We should say that there was no sport like it. The extra- ordinary nerve and endurance possessed by the runaways seems always incredible. One man cut his chain in two, crept off his bench in the cell-house, and escaped behind the guard's back ; it was pitch-dark, and the hounds were on his trail immediately; but he beat his pursuers in a fair race, outrunning the swiftest hounds, and even stopping to refresh himself in water-melon patches. A most determined attempt to escape of one desperate man almost deserved success. Two platforms on each side of the sleeping-house, one above the other, furnish a kind of "bunk " arrangement for the convicts. The guard at the door, who commanded the interior, noticed one night a grating noise, as of a man filing his chain ; but sup, posing the runaway, whom he identified, would rush for the door, he waited. The runaway, however, after a time became quiet, and the guard continued to wait, but no rash occurred. The Captain was then fetched, and the shape of the recum- bent figure under the blankets attracted his attention; it was a board of the platform placed on its edge. Through the opening thus made the prisoner had slipped on to the sand, and crawled to the outer wall, in which he made a hole, and so escaped. All this had taken hours to do, however, and the dogs were not far behind him. Hearing the baying, the man "whirled about in his tracks," and ran back to meet the pursuers. When face to face almost, he leaped to one side, and, as the hunt swept past, ran into the road again and pursued his course back to the camp. The hounds of course ran back on the trail, and were soon overhauling him ; he ran back again and repeated his ruse, but the dogs kept on only as far as the
point where he had doubled, where they doubled, not going on. to the camp, thus distinguishing the new from the old trail.
The convict, though his game was evidently up, once more repeated his tactics ; this time, however, the dogs did not go as far as the doubling-point, but throwing up their heads for a moment, made for a tree, thus securing their man. The runaway's object was to gain time to cross the Suwanee River. Another runaway, besides temporarily changing into female dress, adopted very much the same tactics, leaping to and fro over a fence ; the dogs frustrated this by dividing the work, thus losing no time. He was caught just before reaching the river, having run thirty-five miles of trail in six hours, his pursuers doing the distance in four hours. As a punishment, he was started to run back, but was, of course, unable to do so, and was mounted. His subsequent history furnishes reflection for juries. The woman who sent him to prison for life made a death-bed repentance, but not before he had spent eight years as a convict. Three men made an escape once, overcoming the guard, who ran imminent risk of being shot for some grudge by one of them. The other two persuaded their com- panion not to put their necks in a noose for a grudge, bat the emotion and struggle turned the guard black in the face, and he only just saved himself by shouting, from being shot later as a runaway Negro. Some of Captain Powell's most dangerous experiences were in his capacity as prison-agent, conveying convicts from gaol to camp who were wanted for the purpose of lynching. We ought not to forget, though, that hunting runaways in a neighbourhood where they were largely related, was work in which he often carried his life in his hand. Captain Powell, who writes like a gentleman, is obviously a man possessed of great nerve, and suited to his position; his experiences are extremely well written, modest, and full of interesting and often fascinating incidents.
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