James De Mille - Cord and Creese - James De Mille

"To further the ends of justice and to satisfy the desires of my friends, I will write an account of the whole case.

"In the name of God, I declare that John Potts is guilty of my death. He was my servant. I first found him in India under very remarkable circumstances.

"It was in the year 1826. The Government was engaged in an effort to put down bands of assassins by whom the most terrific atrocities had been committed, and I was appointed to conduct the work in the district of Agra.

"The Thuggee society is still a mystery, though its nature may yet be revealed if they can only capture the chief [Footnote: The chief was captured in 1830, and by his confession all the atrocious system of Thuggee was revealed.] and make him confess. As yet it is not fully known, and though I have heard much which I have reported to the Government, yet I am slow to believe that any human beings can actually practice what I have heard.

"The assassins whom I was pursuing eluded our pursuit with marvelous agility and cunning, but one by one we captured them, and punished them summarily. At last we surrounded a band of Thugs, and to our amazement found among them a European and a small boy. At our attack the Hindus made a desperate resistance, and killed themselves rather than fall into our hands; but the European, leading forward the little boy, fell on his knees and implored us to save him.

"I had heard that an Englishman had joined these wretches, and at first thought that this was the man; so, desirous of capturing him, I ordered my men whenever they found him to spare his life if possible. This man was at once seized and brought before me.

"He had a piteous story to tell. He said that his name was John Potts, that be belonged to Southampton, and had been in India a year. He had come to Agra to look out for employ as a servant, and had been caught by the Thugs. They offered to spare his life if he would join them. According to him they always make this offer. If it had only been himself that was concerned he said that he would have died a hundred times rather than have accepted; but his little boy was with him, and to save his life he consented, hoping that somehow or other he might escape. They then received him with some horrible ceremonies, and marked on his arm and on the arm of his son, on the inner part of the right elbow, the name of Bowhani in Hindu characters. Potts showed me his arm and that of his son in proof of this.

"He had been with them, according to his own account, about three months, and his life had been one continuous horror. He had picked up enough of their language to conjecture to some extent the nature of their belief, which, he asserted, would be most important information for the Government. The Thugs had treated him very kindly, for they looked upon him as one of themselves, and they are all very humane and affectionate to one another. His worst fear had been that they would compel him to do murder; and he would have died, he declared, rather than consent; but, fortunately, he was spared. The reason of this, he said, was because they always do their murder by strangling, since the shedding of blood is not acceptable to their divinity. He could not do this, for it requires great dexterity. Almost all their strangling is done by a thin, strong cord, curiously twisted, about six feet in length, with a weight at one end, generally carved so as to represent the face of Bowhani. This they throw with a peculiar jerk around the neck of their victim. The weight swings the cord round and round, while the strangler pulls the other end, and death is inevitable. His hands, he said, were coarse and clumsy, unlike the delicate Hindu hands; and so, although they forced him to practice incessantly, he could not learn. He said nothing about the boy, but, from what I saw of that boy afterward, I believe that nature created him especially to be a Thug, and have no doubt that he learned then to wield the cord with as much dexterity as the best strangler of them all.

"His association with them had shown him much of their ordinary habits and some of their beliefs. I gathered from what he said that the basis of the Thuggee society is the worship of Bowhani, a frightful demon, whose highest joy is the sight of death or dead bodies. Those who are her disciples must offer up human victims killed without the shedding of blood, and the more he can kill the more of a saint he becomes. The motive for this is never gain, for they rarely plunder, but purely religious zeal. The reward is an immortality of bliss hereafter, which Bowhani will secure them; a life like that of the Mohammedan Paradise, where there are material joys to be possessed forever without satiety. Destruction, which begins as a kind of duty, becomes also at last, and naturally perhaps, an absorbing passion. As the hunter in pursuing his prey is carried away by excitement and the enthusiasm of the chase, or, in hunting the tiger, feels the delight of braving danger and displaying courage, so here that same passion is felt to an extraordinary degree, for it is men that must be pursued and destroyed. Here, in addition to courage, the hunter of man must call into exercise cunning, foresight, eloquence, intrigue. All this I afterward brought to the attention of the Government with very good results.

"Potts declared that night and day he had been on the watch for a chance to escape, but so infernal was the cunning of these wretches, and so quick their senses, sharpened as they had been by long practice, that success became hopeless. He had fallen into deep dejection, and concluded that his only hope lay in the efforts of the Government to put down these assassins. Our appearance had at last saved him.

"Neither I, nor any of my men, nor any Englishman who heard this story, doubted for an instant the truth of every word. All the newspapers mentioned with delight the fact that an Englishman and his son had been rescued. Pity was felt for that father who, for his son's sake, had consented to dwell amidst scenes of terror, and sympathy for the anguish that he most have endured during that terrific captivity. A thrill of horror passed through all our Anglo-Indian society at the revelation which he made about Thuggee; and so great was the feeling in his favor that a handsome subscription was made up for him by the officers at Agra.

"For my part I believed in him most implicitly, and, as I saw him to be unusually clever, I engaged him at once to be my servant. He staid with me, and every month won more and more of my confidence. He had a good head for business. Matters of considerable delicacy which I intrusted to him were well performed, and at last I thought it the most fortunate circumstance in my Indian life that I had found such a man.

"After about three years he expressed a wish to go to England for the sake of his son. He thought India a bad place for a boy, and wished to try and start in some business in his native land for his son's sake.

"That boy had always been my detestation—a crafty, stealthy, wily, malicious little demon, who was a perfect Thug in his nature, without any religious basis to his Thuggeeism. I pitied Potts for being the father of such a son. I could not let the little devil live in my house; his cruelty to animals which he delighted to torture, his thieving propensities, and his infernal deceit, were all so intolerable. He was not more than twelve, but he was older in iniquity than many a gray- headed villain. To oblige Potts, whom I still trusted implicitly, I wrote to my old friend Ralph Brandon, of Brandon Hall, Devonshire, requesting him to do what he could for so deserving a man.

"Just about this time an event occurred which has brought me to this.

"My sweet wife had been ill for two years. I had obtained a faithful nurse in the person of a Mrs. Compton, a poor creature, but gentle and affectionate, for whom my dear love's sympathy had been excited. No one could have been more faithful than Mrs. Compton, and I sent my darling to the hill station at Assurabad in hopes that the cooler air might reinvigorate her.