Outalissi; a Tale of Dutch Guiana

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Chapter XV. The Execution.

‘Patriots have toil'd, and in their country's cause
Bled nobly; and their deeds, as they deserve,
Receive proud recompense. We give in charge
Their names to the sweet lyre. The historic muse,
Proud of the treasure, marches with it down
To latest times, and sculpture in her turn,
Gives bond in stone and ever during brass
To guard them, and immortalize her trust,
But fairer wreaths are due, though never paid
To those, who, posted at the shrine of truth, -
     Cowper.

In addition to Mr. Schwartz and Outalissi, whom we left at the close of the last chapter anticipating their martyrdom on the ensuing morning, there were two other unhappy prisoners under sentence of death; the one was an Englishman for forgery, the other a Dutch Roman Catholic soldier for the murder of his sergeant, and as the authorities thought it would give an air of impartiality to their proceedings that the four should suffer toge-

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ther, these also were ordered to prepare for execution, which was appointed to take place on the plain before the government house.

The morning was a particularly fine one, the sun rose with unusual splendour. The garrison was early under arms, the instruments of torture were on the ground, and the four men were marched round the plain behind the military band, playing the dead march, and attended by a strong guard to the last spot which was to receive their earthly footsteps. Four graves were dug a little in the rear, with a coffin in front of each, and in front of the coffins were the rack and other machines for extorting confessions.

The soldier preceded the other prisoners in the procession, with the Catholic domine by his side, bare-headed, and with the crucifix in his hand, which he ever and anon held up before the eyes of his unhappy disciple, exclaiming with great fervour -

O! Crux alma dei sacro medefacta cruore
Offer opem citius brachia pande sibi!

And when the man seemed (by a look of agony, for he scarcely spoke a word) to ask if such mercy could be meant for him? ‘Yes! for you,’ said the domine emphatically, ‘and every truly

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humbled sinner, if you will only restrain your doubts.’

Turn to this symbol your admiring eyes,
Believe! rush forward, and possess the prize!

This man had been a desperate character and a murderer, but it was impossible not to sympathize with the manly propriety of his comportment on this awful occasion. There was no inebriety, no bravado, but the most soldierly gaze of defiance upon death, in the certainty of its immediate incurrence, without a perceptible tremor, as he knelt upon his appointed coffin.

‘Is it philosophy, or insensibility, or religion, that supports this man now?’ said Edward Bentinck to Sergeant Vanderdonder, both of whom were of course upon duty with the rest of the garrison, ‘and if religion, is it a false peace?’

‘I don't know,’ said the Sergeant, very nobly, for the culprit had attempted once to murder, and actually stabbed the Sergeant Vanderdonder out of jealousy, ‘whatever it is, the man is now about to expiate his crimes against the world with his life, and has not God a right to forgive those against himself, without asking leave of man's partial views of comparative justice?’

‘Well said, sergeant,’ said Edward, ‘God forgive him, poor fellow!’

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‘Amen!’ said the honest sergeant, ‘as I hope to be forgiven!’

The next person in the solemn procession was the English forger; he was a poor, miserable, lilylivered sort of fellow by nature, and on his first detection and apprehension for the crime, of which he knew the certain penalty, appeared (if I may use such an expression) almost disgustingly afraid of death; but between his arrest and execution, he had been attended with such exemplary diligence, judgment, and earnest and affectionate benevolence, by an English missionary of the name of Smith,^* as to have undergone a revolution of character so complete and astonishing, that it apparently comprised even his constitution of body, and enabled him to evince a composure and even chastened joy in his condition, which exceeded that of his military companion.

On leaving his cell, the following conversation was reported to have passed between him and Mr. Smith, who attended him to the last. Mr. Smith said to him, ‘I hope you are leaving a prison for a paradise to-day.’

He replied, ‘I have a paradise already.’ On looking forward to the place of execution, he

* See note P.

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said, ‘I thought that sight would have sunk my heart, but God enables me to sustain that too.’

‘You have now,’ said Mr. Smith, ‘entered on the last hour of your earthly existence.’

‘I have,’ replied he, ‘but who would think that and look at me? See, I any now all calmness and comfort. O, what happiness do I now feel! How good is God to me! I have always dreaded the distress of soul that I might feel at this, last hour, yet this is the best hour which I ever had in my life. How good is God. He has kept the best blessings till the last. He knew that I should want most comforts now. If he had given them sooner, perhaps I might have slighted them, or trifled with them, but now they are just what I want. O let me praise him! Almost every night,’ said he, ‘when I was in my cell, after my first introduction by you to an acquaintance with the real nature of the Christian dispensation, my whole life came in review, with a thousand things which I had not thought of for many years, and all appeared so black and dreadful, that I scarcely dared to hope; but I now see sin in all its odiousness, and would rather die than run the risk, which I should by living, of a relapse into it, for I do believe that my repentance is accepted, and that Jesus has paid my dreadful

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debt to the violated majesty of his Father, whom I may now therefore, without presumption, call also mine; do tell my friends what I feel, it will make them happy to hear it. I am astonished at the greatness of my own consolations. How can a dying man be thus calm?’ Then holding out his arm, he said, ‘Look, not a nerve of my body trembles, and I have not a fear in my soul!’

Mr. Smith reminded him, when he had taken his station to be shot, and whilst kneeling on his coffin next the soldier, that he had always encouraged him to hope that God would hear prayer, and support him at the last hour.

He replied, ‘God has heard every prayer since I entered the prison which we have just left; he has given me every thing for which I asked.’^*

Mr. Schwartz followed to the ground the last prisoner, and being brought before the governor, was asked, ‘Whether he was prepared freely to give up the names of the parties in Outalissi's conspiracy, or to have them wrung from him by the rack?’

Mr. Schwartz said, ‘that he could not give up the names of men to their vengeance, whom he believed, in his conscience, to have had no other design than that of procuring redress for the most

* See note Q.

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aggravated oppression and injustice, and who, if they had succeeded, would, he was persuaded, have acted with a forbearance towards their enemies, and jealousy of taking life, that would reflect shame upon most of the victories of soi-disant Christians.’^*

‘You hear his confession, governor,’ said Mr. Hogshead, who was present, ‘he admits that he knows the negroes who were involved in this diabolical conspiracy.’

‘If you will not give us their names,’ said the governor to Mr. Schwartz, ‘I must bind you to the rack.’

‘Pain is terrible to the flesh,’ said Mr. Schwartz calmly, ‘but I believe that God can support me even under the tortures which you threaten, but if not, I will not betray to your vengeance those who have suffered too much from you already, and whom I consider as innocent of all guilt.’

‘Bind him to the rack,’ said the governor to the fellow in attendance for that purpose. On the officers proceeding to the execution of this order, the resolution of the glorious martyr seemed almost to fail him, a cold sweat burst out from every pore, and a visible tremor pervaded his joints;

* See note R.

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however he had the fortitude to submit himself to be bound to the wheel, and on persisting in his silence, it was put in motion, and when his bones and joints were all broken or dislocated, Mr. Hogshead asked him, ‘of what service his friend Christ was to him then?’

‘I never,’ said Mr. Schwartz distinctly and firmly, ‘had so clear a view of his glory, or such experience of his goodness and truth as at this moment,’ and expired with the last word.^*

At length Outalissi was brought forward to the governor, and a fine study he presented for an artist as he stood before him, his left leg advanced a little like that of a soldier standing at ease; the length and grace of his limbs well bound, with the exact proportion of muscle to give the utmost possible degree of strength and vigour without clumsiness; the exquisite cleanliness and beauty of the bent knee joint; the compact and firm, yet agile loins, unloaded with the least excess of corpulence; the fine convexing chest and corresponding shoulders, the Herculean strength of the latter entirely relieved to the eye by a light graceful neck, surmounted by features of luminous intelligence, and an expression of conscious self-sufficiency, which might have overawed a lion,

* See note S.

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left nothing wanting but a pedestal to make his whole figure rival, if not surpass, the utmost powers of the chissel, each separate part of the noble structure deriving from its indissociable connection and harmony with the whole the vindication of its own propriety; so that every impulse of risibility, even to the eye of a European unaccustomed to the naked exposure of the human person, was overborne by the imposing dignity of the combined expression, and you felt that artificial clothing would have been as ridiculous, and as much misplaced upon Outalissi, as upon the statue of the Apollo Belvidere. The torture and death of Mr. Schwartz he had surveyed with stern complacency,

‘As monumental bronze unchang'd his look,
A soul that pity touch'd, but never shook,
Train'd, from his tree-rock'd cradle to his bier,
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook;
Impassive - fearing but the shame of fear -
A stoic of the woods - a man without a tear.’

Once only pronouncing, in a tone of bitter sarcasm, his climax of disgust and loathing in the word Christians!!! And when the governor pointing to the body of the martyred missionary, asked him, if he was prepared either to disclose his accomplices, or undergo a similar treatment?

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he did not even deign to answer, and persisted in his indignant silence, till Mr. Hogshead, whose rage had never yet been appeased for the rescue from his grasp by Outalissi of poor Charlotte Venture, or the constant repulse of his infamous advances by Charlotte herself, baffled in the discovery of more victims to his resentment, and unable any longer to restrain the expression of his disappointment, broke out into a torrent of the most unmeasured and coarsest abuse, saying, ‘that the death of Mr. Schwartz was much too good for a black rascal like that, that he should be roasted by a slow fire, flayed, or buried alive up to his neck, or have hot melted wax or lead poured upon his navel, or be hung up alive to a gibbet by one of his ribs to feed the vultures, as used to be the mode of execution in the time of Stedrnan; that to treat such a fellow with humanity, that had nothing human about him but his shape, was a perversion of the term.’ At this moment a letter from Miss Cotton was put into the hands of Edward Bentinck, who stood close to the governor, saying that her father was too ill to write himself, but had authorised her to intreat Mr. Bentinck to make the governor acquainted with his inextinguishable gratitude and obligations to Outalissi, in having, on two separate occasions, at the ex-

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treme risk of his own life, saved what was a thousand times dearer to him than all his wealth, viz. the lives of both his children, and to explain to his excellency the particulars of her brother's rescue from the tiger, and her own from the blazing ship by Outalissi, and if pardon could not be extended to him, at least to spare him all indignities and torture, that her agitation and hurry between the confusion of the fire and her attendance on a sick parent, and the extreme rapidity of the trial, conviction, and sentence of Mr. Schwartz and Outalissi, with all of which she only became acquainted that morning, made it impossible for her to apply to him before; that she had not perhaps the same right to interfere in Mr. Schwartz's case, but should be glad either privately or publicly to express her conviction in the Christian integrity and goodness of his intentions, and (if there was yet time, although she feared there was not) to sign a petition, in which also her father would join with his other friends for mercy. Almost at the same moment when this letter was delivered to Mr. Bentinck, little Charles Cotton, who had been stealing up to Outalissi, (having seen the crowd of persons, and from the curiosity incident to children, followed the servant to the plain,) now sprang upon his arm, but overcome

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with alarm by the appalling objects by which he was closely encircled, could not utter a word, but bursting into tears, endeavoured to pull Outalissi away; and when the governor, who knew the child, endeavoured to separate them, he only clung the harder, and said, that if they did any harm to Outalissi he would tell his papa, that Outalissi was not an ougry man, (the negro term for wicked,) that Mr. Hogshead was an ougry man, and Outalissi a good man. The governor, who was far from a bad hearted man in cases that came immediately under his own observation, was a good deal struck, and indeed affected by so strong and totally undesigning a testimony to the humanity and good qualities of Outalissi, which Mr. Hogshead had so atrociously denied only the moment preceding, and inquired into the occasion of such an extraordinary attachment to him by his owner's child, which gave Edward Bentinck an opportunity of executing the commission which he had just received, and his selection for which, by Miss Cotton, made him but too happy.

‘Take away those instruments of hell!’ said the governor, when Edward Bentinck had finished his narration. ‘Outalissi! it is impossible for me to spare your life consistently with my duty to the colony, the safety of which must at all times

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and in all cases be my first object, and of that safety you are the confessed and open enemy; but you have heard the application that has been made for you, and the instances of your personal courage and humanity that have been so opportunely testified by your late owner's family; your character as a man now stands redeemed from all imputation, and I shall treat you as an open but honourable enemy, and be satisfied with inflicting on you a soldier's death, therefore disengage yourself from the child, and kneel with the two first prisoners upon your coffin.

‘Governor!’ said Outalissi, for a single moment subdued to tears, ‘I could have borne any torture, but this unexpected kindness unmans me. Death is nothing to me with honour, life nothing to me without, and since the great Spirit which is over all has thus vindicated my character, and proved to you decisively that I am not the monster which that bad man would make me out to be, but susceptible of some at least of the noblest feelings of our common nature; I cheerfully embrace the death you offer me, in the fullest confidence that there is another world, in which, if you are only acting as honestly up to your convictions of duty, as I have strove (however often unsuccessfully) to fulfil mine, it is appointed by the

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goodness of that awful Spirit, the common Judge and Father of us all, that we should meet again. Shades of my fathers! pardon these tears,

     ‘The last, the first,
The only tears that ever burst
From Outalissi's soul.’

Having then persuaded little Charles Cotton to return home on the assurance that he was only going back to his own country; and that, if he was a good, boy, he should one day or other infallibly see him again, he took his station kneeling on his coffin in a line with his two companions, earnestly refusing to have his eyes bound, in which also he was indulged. The platoon instructed for the purpose were marched into a line opposite about thirty yards off, the intermediate space cleared of the amateurs, the signal given, and in less than five minutes afterwards the four men were inclosed in their coffins and graves, the military dismissed, the concourse vanished, and no vestige either of them or the morning's spectacle visible in this temporal world.

Amongst the reflections suggested to Edward Bentinck on his return to his apartments in the barracks, from the solemn duties in which he had just borne a part, were the following: - How much

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more efficient is the support derived in the near prospect of death from those views of Christianity which rest their claims to the confidence of the disciple, simply on the acquiescence of his own heart in the unearthly purity of its precepts, and the adaptation of its doctrines to the actual moral defects of his nature, than from those which exclusively address themselves to the satisfaction of the reason. In this respect the Papist and the English sectarian are much more successful auxiliaries in the preparation of the mind for its last exercise of faith, than the minister of the English Protestant establishment; the former accustom their pupils to try the truth of the creed they propose for their acceptance, simply by its correspondence with the dicta of their own self-disabused conscience, and there is something in that mystical moral department of our nature which we vulgarly call heart, which responds loudly, distinctly, and affirmatively to the appeal. All captious objections, all self-vindicatory fetches, all merely speculative doubts advanced in the spirit of disputation, they overbear with the authoritative tone of sensible conviction. ‘This IS life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.’ The consequence

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of doubting or disbelief must therefore be the converse of eternal life. A man therefore, who is accustomed to repose his confidence in the truth of christianity principally on such impressions, has the evidence always within himself; and like love, fear, anger, or any other natural affection, ready to spring forth at a moment's notice with an energy proportioned to the importance of the exciting occasion.

Edward Bentinck considered himself both by habit and attachment a member of the church of England, and thought even its articles (if an attempt must be made to define what was perhaps never intended for definition by human language) as little exceptionable, and varying as little from the essential truths of christianity as possible. He thought also, that the majority of its clergy were men of unimpeachable moral integrity, and some of ‘the salt of the earth;’ but there was something in their mode of discharging their duties, a shyness of the subject of religion in conversation, and a timid caution of the slightest deviation from prescribed formulæ, that always conveyed to his mind a doubt of their own confidence in the doctrines, of which they were the appointed communicators to the public - they seem entirely to overlook the secondary character of the support sup-

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plied them by the state, and to be afraid of referring their authority and commissions to Him, whose recognition of them could alone make them genuine, and of which temporal government consistently with the truth of christianity (id est) with its right to interfere at all, could only provide external facilities for the exercise, to confide, in fact, more in their human than divine armour, and to be afraid, if they should dismantle themselves of the first, of challenging infidelity to a combat with the other. Nobly jealous of the slightest hypocrisy, they disdain to affect a confidence or unction which they do not feel, and cannot therefore possibly excite in others. They do not urge men to the shelter of the cross as they would call them from a crust of snow over a gulph in a glacier; a blazing dwelling or a sinking ship, a moment's demur in the change of your position, may be fatal. There is destruction, here is salvation; they must themselves feel confident of both before they can place them in sufficiently startling antithesis to each other to produce any extensive effect. ‘But whence is it,’ thought Edward Bentinck, ‘that the clergy of the church of England are less confident in the truth of their professed principles than other Christian ministers?’ This question he could only explain to himself by

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supposing the opposition to implicit credulity, in which their separation from the church of Rome originated, to give to their education too great a bias towards a spirit of philosophical and demonstration-demanding inquiry, and to make the ground of their faith too exclusively the rational evidences of christianity; which, although affording a preponderance of evidence in favour of its truth, so strong, that it would be unreasonable in any one not to act upon a presumption of equal strength in any of the common concerns of life, cannot amount to certainty. The immense field of research and science which these evidences embrace, and the very confined periscope of the most powerful and highly cultivated mind, make it impossible that any one can be sure, in any question of this nature, that no object of essential estimate in an incontrovertible judgment has been overlooked; that there is nothing beyond the compass of his present mental horizon, which, if admitted into view, might alter the comparative value and relative appearance of things present to his examination; he can never, therefore, feel the repose of absolute certainly from such evidences, and by habitually rejecting any other species of evidence than that which addresses itself to the reason, he seems to exclude himself from that most valu-

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able of all, viz. the Spirit of God testifying with his Spirit that he has passed from death unto life; for surely this evidence must be one of impression upon the heart. How defective, indeed, would be a revelation designed for the poor, as well as the rich, without some evidence independent of mental capacity and scientific acquirement. It is well indeed, as far as we can, to pursue both species of evidence, and for every one, to the utmost of his ability, to employ his reason as well for the confirmation of his faith as for its correction, and restraint from extravagance; but for any one to accustom himself to regard the reasonable evidences of christianity as the only admissible ground of satisfactory confidence in its truth, is to accustom himself to look to reason for what it cannot give, and therefore to deny himself all joy and peace in believing, of which humility, prayer, and obedience, are a much safer and better source, even if demonstration upon such a subject were within the power and province of reason, which it is not. Obedience is, perhaps, always the safest and surest path to religious knowledge; but next to that, the deep self-abasement and humility which, if the knowledge be genuine, will be found infallibly either to precede or follow it.^*

* See note T.