Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 142 of 635 - First - Home
They Commit Their
Depredations On Horseback In The Manner Of The Bedouins.
The
insalubrity of the prisons would be attended with fatal results but
that these receptacles are cleared from time to time by the flight of
the prisoners.
It also frequently happens that sentences of death,
tardily pronounced by the Audiencia of Caracas, cannot be executed for
want of a hangman. In these cases the barbarous custom is observed of
pardoning one criminal on condition of his hanging the others. Our
guides related to us that, a short time before our arrival on the
coast of Cumana, a Zambo, known for the great ferocity of his manners,
determined to screen himself from punishment by turning executioner.
The preparations for the execution however, shook his resolution; he
felt a horror of himself, and preferring death to the disgrace of thus
saving his life, he called again for his irons which had been struck
off. He did not long remain in prison, and he underwent his sentence
through the baseness of one of his accomplices. This awakening of a
sentiment of honour in the soul of a murderer is a psychologic
phenomenon worthy of reflection. The man who had so often shed the
blood of travellers in the plains recoiled at the idea of becoming the
passive instrument of justice in inflicting upon others a punishment
which he felt that he himself deserved.
If, even in the peaceful times when M. Bonpland and myself had the
good fortune to travel through North and South America, the Llanos
were the refuge of malefactors who had committed crimes in the
missions of the Orinoco, or who had escaped from the prisons on the
coast, how much worse must that state of things have been rendered by
discord during the continuance of that sanguinary struggle which has
terminated in conferring freedom and independence on those vast
regions!
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 142 of 635
Words from 38845 to 39157
of 174507