Part 8
“But there was now and then a person who would not swerve the breadth of a hair. Heroism did not excite the respect of our fathers. The person who would not confess or recant was not forgiven. They screwed the thumb-screws down to the last pang, and then threw their victim into some dungeon, where, in the throbbing silence and darkness, he might suffer the agonies of the fabled damned. This was done in the name of love—in the name of mercy—in the name of the compassionate Christ!
“I saw, too, what they called the Collar of Torture. Imagine a circle of iron, and on the inside a hundred points almost as sharp as needles. This argument was fastened about the throat of the sufferer. Then he could not walk, nor sit down, nor stir without the neck being punctured by these points. In a little while the throat would begin to swell, and suffocation would end the agonies.
“I saw another instrument, called the Scavenger’s Daughter. Think of a pair of shears with handles, not only where they now are, but at the points as well, and just above the pivot that unites the blades, a circle of iron. In the upper handles the hands would be placed; in the lower the feet; and through the iron ring, at the center, the head of the victim would be forced. In this condition, he would be thrown prone upon the earth, and the strain on the muscles produced such agony that insanity would in pity end his pain.”
“I saw the Rack. This was a box like the bed of a wagon, with a windlass at each end, with levers, and ratchets to prevent slipping; over each windlass went chains; some were fastened to the ankles of the sufferer; others to his wrists. And then priests, clergymen, divines, saints, began turning these windlasses, and kept turning until the ankles, the knees, the hips, the shoulders, the elbows, the wrists of the victim were all dislocated, and the sufferer was wet with the sweat of agony. And they had standing by a physician to feel his pulse. What for? To save his life? Yes. In mercy? No; simply that they might rack him once again.
“This was done, remember, in the name of civilization; in the name of law and order; in the name of mercy; in the name of religion; in the name of the most merciful Christ.”
Christian people in England had invented a machine called the “Witches’ Bridle.” It was so constructed that by means of a loop which passed over the victim’s head, a piece of iron having four points or prongs was forcibly thrust into the mouth. Two of these prongs pressed against the tongue and palate, the other outward to the cheeks. This infernal instrument was secured by a padlock. At the back of the collar was fixed a ring, by which to attach the witch to a staple in the wall of her cell. Thus “bridled,” and day and night watched over by some person appointed by her inquisitors, the unhappy creature, after a few days of such torture, maddened by misery and pain, would be brought to the point of confessing anything in order to be rid of her wretched life.
But thumb-screws, the collar, the scavenger’s daughter, the rack and the bridle were not the only means of inflicting pain devised by the ingenuity of cruelty. There was also the “Spider,” a diabolic implement with curved claws, for tearing out a woman’s breast. There were the iron Spanish Boots, the inner sides of which were set with points. After these machines had been placed around the lower legs of the victim they were screwed so tightly that often the shin-bones were crushed. To increase the horrible pain the torturer from time to time knocked with a hammer on the screws, so that sharp shocks like strokes of lightning shot through the victim’s body.
Another implement was an iron band which was fastened around the head and screwed tight and tighter until the eyes of the maltreated person protruded and she went almost crazy.
If the rack had not brought confession, the inquisitors ordered the “Elevation.”
After the writhing sufferer’s hands had been tied to the back, a rope, running over a pulley on the ceiling, was fastened to the hands. Then, by pulling the rope, the body of the victim was slowly lifted until the contorted and dislocated arms stood over the head, while the feet were high above the floor. To render such torment more severe, heavy stones were fastened to the feet, and now and then the body was allowed to drop suddenly, only to be lifted again after a while. In this dangling position the heretic or witch was often left for hours, while the tormentors sat in some nearby saloon over their ale and wine.
There were many other methods of torment, each more cruel than the others, among them the gradual pouring of water drop by drop on a particular part of the head or body, or the pouring of water onto a piece of gauze in the back of the throat, thus gradually forcing the gauze into the stomach. Boiling hot oil, burning sulphur and pitch, or molten lead were poured on the naked body, or the poor creatures were incessantly pricked and prodded in their dungeons so that they could not rest a second for weeks at a time, until they were finally driven to despair and madness.
No periods in human history are more terrible, revolting and depressing to contemplate than these times of the Inquisition and of persecution for witchcraft. The student, who has courage enough, to go through the blood-stained documents of these dreadful times, must feel as Ingersoll felt when he said:
“Sometimes, when I read and think about these frightful things, it seems to me that I have suffered all these horrors myself. It seems sometimes, as though I had stood upon the shore of exile and gazed with tearful eyes toward home and native land; as though my nails had been torn from my hands, and into the bleeding quick needles had been thrust; as though my feet had been crushed in iron boots; as though I had been chained in the cell of the Inquisition and listened with dying ears for the coming footsteps of release; as though I had stood upon the scaffold and had seen the glittering axe fall upon me; as though I had been upon the rack and had seen, bending above me, the white faces of hypocrite priests; as though I had been taken from my fireside, from my wife and children, taken to the public square, chained, as though fagots had been piled about me; as though the flames had climbed around my limbs and scorched my eyes to blindness, and as though my ashes had been scattered to the four winds, by all the countless hands of hate.”
From the records of trials for witchcraft still preserved in the archives of many European cities, it appears that the majority of victims were aged women; very frequently they had reared families and spent their youth and beauty in this self-denying work. But there are also many cases of the torturing of mere children; in several such cases little girls of seven and nine years gave affirmative answers to questions, as to whether they had held sexual intercourse with the devil. They even admitted to have given birth to children in consequence of such intercourse. A record covering the years 1627, 1628 and January, 1629, states that during this period in Wurzburg, Bavaria, one hundred and sixty-three persons were tortured, and burnt at the stake. Among them were seventy-two women, and twenty-six children under fourteen years. Among the latter were little girls of nine years or less, and one was a little blind girl.
On March 7, 1679, in Heimfels, Tyrol, a poor woman, Emerencia Pichler, was brought before the inquisitors. In spite of her solemn pledges by God and the Virgin that she knew nothing about witchcraft she was submitted to torture. On the third day of her sufferings the inquisitors wrung from the unfortunate creature a confession, that Satan had visited her one day, wearing a blue jacket, a white vest and red socks. In his company she made a flight to a high mountain, both riding on the same oven-shovel. Here they took part in the witches-sabbath, during which several infants were killed and eaten. The remains were used in concocting all kinds of ointments and powders, to be used in the producing of thunderstorms and plagues. The most horrible part of these confessions was that the woman, when questioned about accomplices, in her agonies named twenty-four persons, among them her own four children. Of course the poor woman withdrew her confessions, when the tortures were interrupted. Nevertheless she was found guilty. On her way to the place of execution she was twitched with red-hot pincers and afterwards burnt at the stake.
Her two oldest children, a boy of fourteen and a girl of twelve, were beheaded and their bodies burnt to ashes on July 29, 1679. Their little brother Sebastian, nine years old, and his sister Maria, six years old, were terribly flogged and forced to attend the execution of their mother and playmates.
Of all the other “accomplices,” named by the woman, not one escaped the clutches of the inquisitors and death at the stake.
There are on record thousands and thousands of similar cases, many of them horrible beyond belief and defying description. No country in Europe escaped the visitation of such inquisitors, many of whom journeyed from place to place in search of victims. In numerous cities the arrival of these fiends was regarded with greater fear than famine or pestilence, especially by women, against whom their malice was chiefly directed. That there was cause for such fear, is proven by the fact that in Treves seven thousand women lost their lives. In Geneva five thousand were executed in a single month. And in Toulouse, France, four hundred witches were burnt in one day, dying the horrible death by fire for a crime which never existed save in the imagination of their benighted persecutors.—
Among the countless women burnt as witches was also Jeanette d’Arc, who to-day is glorified by the French nation as =Jeanne d’Arc=, the Maid of Orleans, and who has been lately canonized. Born about 1411 at Dom-Remy, a small village in the Champagne, she witnessed the conquest of Northern France by the English. While brooding over this mishap, it became fixed in her mind that she was destined to deliver France from these invaders. This impression was strengthened by a number of visions, in which she believed to see St. Michael, the archangel of judgments and of battles, who commanded her to take up arms and hurry to the assistance of the king. In February, 1429, she set out on her perilous journey to the court of the Dauphin at Chinon. Here she succeeded in convincing the king of the divinity of her mission, so that she was permitted to start with an army of 5000 men for the relief of Orleans. Clothed like a man in a coat of mail, and carrying a white standard of her own design, embroidered with lilies and the image of God, she inspired her followers with a religious enthusiasm. Favored by good luck she entered the besieged city on the 29th of April, 1429, and by incessant attacks so discouraged the enemy that they withdrew on the 8th of May. However, in several other enterprises her luck failed, and on the 24th of May, after an unsuccessful sortie, she was taken prisoner through treachery, because, being pursued by the enemy, some Frenchmen shut the gates of the fortress into which she should have escaped.
With her capture the halo of supernatural power that had surrounded her, vanished. Accused of being a heretic and a witch, she was turned over to the Inquisition for trial. Her examination lasted six days. Among other insidious and indelicate questions on the subject of her visions she was asked whether, when St. Michael appeared to her, he was naked, and if she had entertained sexual intercourse with the devil. But no point seemed graver to the judges than the sin of having assumed male attire. The judges told her that according to the canons, those who thus change the habit of their sex, are abominable in the sight of God.
The decision to which the inquisitors finally came, was that the girl was wholly the devil’s; was impious in regard to her parents; had thirsted for Christian blood, adhered to a king who was a heretic and schismatic, and was herself a heretic, apostate and idolator. For all these crimes she was sentenced to death, and burnt alive on the market place of Rouen, May 30th, 1431.—
As has been stated already persecutions for witchcraft were not confined to European countries, but were also carried on by Christian priests and judges in all colonies established by Europeans on other continents. In the British colonies of North America the most sensational trial for witchcraft was that in Salem, Massachusetts, about which J. M. Buckley in an article written for the Century Magazine (Vol. XLIII, pp. 408–422) speaks as follows:
“The first settlers of New England brought across the Atlantic the sentiments which had been formed in their minds in Great Britain and on the Continent, as well as the tendencies which were the common heritage of such an ancestry. They were a very religious, and also a credulous people; having few books, no papers, little news, and virtually no science; removed by thousands of miles and months of time from Old-World civilization; living in the midst of an untamed wilderness, surrounded by Indians whom they believed to be under the control of the devil, and whose medicine-men they accounted wizards. Such a mental and moral soil was adapted to the growth of witchcraft, and to create an invincible determination to inflict the punishments pronounced against it in the Old Testament; but the co-operation of various exciting causes was necessary to a general agitation and a real epidemic.
“Salem witchcraft thus arose: The Reverend Mr. Parris, minister of the church in Salem village, had formerly lived in the West Indies, and brought some negro slaves back with him. These slaves talked with the children of the neighborhood, some of whom could not read, while the others had but little to read. In the winter of 1691–92 they formed a kind of circle which met at Mr. Parris’ house, probably unknown to him, to practice palmistry and fortune-telling, and learn what they could of magic and necromancy.
“Before the winter was over some of them fully believed that they were under the influence of spirits. Epidemic hysteria arose; physicians could not explain their state; the cry was raised that they were bewitched; and some began to make charges against those whom they disliked of having bewitched them. In the end those of a stronger mind among them became managers and plotters directing the rest at their will. By the time public attention was attracted Mr. Parris had come to the conclusion that they were bewitched and, having a theory to maintain, encouraged and flattered them, and by his questions made even those who had not believed themselves bewitched think that they were.
“From March, 1692, to May, 1693, about two hundred persons were imprisoned. Of these some escaped by the help of friends, some by bribing their jailors; a number died in prison, and one hundred and fifty were set free at the close of the excitement by the proclamation of the Governor. Nineteen were executed, among them George Burroughs, a minister of the Gospel.
“When it is remembered that a number of these persons were among the most pious and amiable of the people of Salem; that they were related by blood, marriage, friendship, and Christian fellowship to many who cried out against them, both as accusers and supporters of the prosecutions, the transaction must be classed among the darkest in human history.”
Several historians have made attempts to ascertain the number of men, women and children, who lost their lives through this abominable superstition. O. Waechter, who published a book about this subject, calculates that the number of victims must have been at least three millions! Imagine, what a terrible amount of sighs, tears, and physical and mental agonies this number represents!
Women in Modern Times.
WOMAN IN SLAVERY.
When our historians date the beginning of Modern Times from the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, they are fully justified, as no other event has caused so many radical changes in the thoughts of men as well as in all commercial and social conditions. The earlier views about our terrestrial globe and its relation to the universe gave place to new and far greater conceptions. Almost every day brought new and astonishing disclosures in natural history, physics and other spheres of science.
The end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th Century was also the time of the Renaissance as well as of the Reformation, of a revival of the wisdom of the classic past and of the rise and establishment of new sublime ideas about God and the destiny of man.
It could not fail that in this period of spiritual fermentation and inspiration the views about women, matrimony and woman’s rights likewise underwent considerable changes. But before these new conceptions found general acceptance many mediæval traditions, prejudices and customs had to be overcome and cleared away.
While the discovery of America brought incredible riches to various European nations, it caused nothing but misery and disaster to the aborigines of the New World. And to many million Africans as well.
It must not be forgotten that the conquest of Mexico, Peru and other rich parts of America inflamed the greed of inumerable adventurers, and that these men, in order to wring gold and other treasures from the natives, resorted to the most heartless cruelties. We also must call to mind, that in company with these conquerors went hosts of monks and priests of all orders, eager to convert the “heathen” to the “only true creed.” Ruthlessly invading the temples of the “infidels,” they turned the banner of the Cross, this beacon light of promise, into an awful oriflame of war, spreading destruction and disaster. The well known accounts, given by the Spanish bishop Las Casas, disclose among other horrible events the fact—heretofore unheard of in human history—that whole bands and tribes of American Indians, to evade the tyranny of their European oppressors, slaughtered their own children, and then committed suicide.
These Indians had been compelled not only to work in the gold mines and in the pearl fisheries, but to perform all other labor that white men were unable or unwilling to do. As under the cruel treatment of their oppressors the natives rapidly dwindled away and whole islands became depopulated the Portuguese as well as the Spaniards resorted to the importation of negro slaves, whom they captured in Africa and brought to America.
It was not long before the profits, derived from this trade, attracted the eyes of English adventurers. The first to become engaged in that new branch of business, was William Hawkins. It was he who undertook the first regular slave hunts to the coast of Guinea and opened that shameful traffic in which England was engaged for nearly three centuries. His son, John Hawkins, sailing under a charter of Queen Elizabeth, continued the lucrative business and grew rich.
That this men-hunter imagined himself under the special protection of the heavenly father appears from several entries in his log-book. When, invading a negro village near Sierra Leone, he almost fell into captivity himself and would have been exposed to the same fate that he inflicted, without compunction, upon thousands of other unfortunate men and women, he wrote: “God, who worketh all things for the best, would not have it so, and by Him all escaped without danger; His name be praised for it.” At another time, when his vessels were becalmed for a long time in midocean and great suffering ensued: “But Almighty God, who never suffereth His elect to perish, sent us the ordinarie Breeze, which is the northwest wind.”
To what extent the name of Christianity was abused, we see from the fact that Hawkins, when entering upon his greatest expedition with five ships in 1567 sacrilegiously named his flagship “Jesus Christ.”
Because of the riches Hawkins brought to England, Queen Elizabeth knighted him and granted him a coat of arms, showing, on a black shield, a golden lion rampant over blue waves. Three golden doubloons above the lions represented the riches Hawkins had secured for England. To give due credit to the piety of this “nobleman,” there was in the upper quartering of the shield a pilgrim’s scallop-shell, flanked by two pilgrim’s staffs, indicating that Hawkins’ slave-hunts were genuine crusades, undertaken in the name of Christianity. For a crest this coat-of-arms shows the half-length figure of a negro, with golden armlets on his arms, but bound and captive.
In an article entitled “The American Slave,” published in “Pearson’s Magazine” for 1900, James S. Metcalf states that the slave trade quickly developed to tremendous extent and that from 1680 to 1786 there were carried from Africa to the British colonies in America 2,130,000 slaves, men as well as women. This does not include the number, vastly larger, taken to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies before, during and after the same period.
The same author states, that the traffic in human flesh was a recognized commerce at the London Exchange, and that, in 1771, the English alone sent to Africa 192 ships equipped for the trade and with a carrying capacity of 47,146 slaves per trip.
It was the tribal warfare among the aborigines of Africa that furnished the slave dealers with the greater part of their human merchandise. Small and unprotected villages were constantly in danger of being attacked by powerful roving bands. When in 1872 the famous explorer Nachtigal traveled through Central Africa, he witnessed a tragedy that happened at the shores of Chad Lake. Strong forces of Bagirmis made an assault on a negro village, to capture the inhabitants and carry them off for slaves. Alarmed by their guards, the negroes, terror-stricken, fled to some tree-huts, prepared for such emergency in a nearby forest. Here they considered themselves safe. But unfortunately the enemies were in possession of a few guns, with which they picked a number of the fugitives from the trees like birds. Falling from the dizzy heights, the wounded were hacked to pieces. After a while the cruel enemies succeeded in constructing some rough ladders, by which the trees were scaled. Unable to escape, many of the assaulted, preferring death to slavery, threw themselves upon the ground below, where they perished.
The most desperate fight ensued for the tree-house of the chief. It took several hours, before the enemies succeeded in reaching the lower platform, where within a rude enclosure food, water, and even a few goats had been hidden. Unable to hold this place, the chief with his two wives and four children withdrew to the highest branches. From there he defended his family with such ability, that the foes, after having exhausted their supply in powder, were compelled to abandon the siege.—
The stronger portion of the captives made during such raids, were shackled hand and foot to prevent escape. The remainder often were killed and the flesh distributed among the victors, who, as a rule, after such a raid formed a small encampment, lighted their fires and gorged upon the human flesh. They then marched over to one of the numerous slave-markets on the rivers or the coasts, where they exchanged the captives with the slave-traders for beads, cloth, brass wire and other trinkets.