The Water Torture.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 17, 24 April 1902, Page 18

The Water Torture.

We are told by cablegram that an American officer has been accused of subjecting Filipinos to,the ordeal by water, possibly with the view of eliciting some information. All such methods of extracting evidence have long since fallen into desue'ude in civilised countries, having been replaced in modern courts by the more refined method of cross examination, which, in the hands (or mouth) of a skilful and unscrupulous advocate can, nevertheless, inflict mental pain quite as much to be dreaded as the torture by rack or boot. If the charge against the American officer be well founded it will probably transpire that his college reading has made him acquainted with mediaeval methods of examining suspects. The ordeal by water is a most severe one, its only redeeming feature being that if the victim recovered there was no mutilation, The f illowing is an authentic description of the torture inflicted upon Sir Walter Spens, who was charged with treason against James IV of Scotland :—": —" The Governor raised his hand, and at the signa* two men, masked, and with bare brawny arms, started out from a dark corner of the chamber in which they had been standing unobserved and seized their victim. He offered no resistance, and they speedily removed his light coat of mail. They laid his neck and his left foot bare. Then an iron chair was wheeled into the middle of the chamber, and Spena was placed in it. Stout cords were drawn across his breast, and secured to the back of the chair ; then his arms and legs were bound to the sides, so that he was unable to move a limb. The chair was finally screwed to the floor. The surgeon approached the patient and felt his pulse ; it beat with firmness and regularity. One of the two torturers brought two large pails full of water to the side of the victim, with a measure which might hold about a gallon, and a steel tube about a foot long with a wide mouth. * 1 The measure, filled with water, waa held to his lips and he drank. A second time the measure was filled, but he oould not

empty it. One of the men pressed his head back against the bar of the chair while the other forced the water down his throat to the last drop. The whole frame of the victim quivered spasmodically. Every vein seemed to be cracking and bursting. His brain seeme*J to swell till his eyes became dazed and his lungs seemed to be water-logpei. Still he would not confess. A third measure was raised to his lips. He took a few mouthfuls, and then his teeth closed with a convulsive jerk, and he seemed incapable of opening them. One of the executioners, with a sharp instrument like a chisel, forced his teeth open, thrust the steel between them, and forced it down his throat. The third measureful of water, and a fourth, were emptied into the mouth of the tube. The color of the patient changed from a deathly pallor to a bluish tint, his fingera clutched the bars of the chair with a vice-like grip, and his body shook and heaved in convulsive agony. Asked again whether he would confess, Spens, who was unable to speak, made a slight motion of his head to signify " No." Another measureful waß forced down the tube. The patient writhed, gave vent to a dull smothered cry of anguish, and burst the rope which bound his right arm. He seized the steel tube, and with more than human strength, he bent it and broke it in his hand. Then he sank back, insensible Spens was carried back to his dungeon by the men-at-arms, and the surgeon, who had been struck by the fortitude of the victim, set about reviving him with interest in the task. He at first began to entertain doubts of effeoting a cure ; but at the end of several hours he had succeeded in drawing off the greater part of the water which had been forced into the patient's stomach, and he trusted to the profuse perspiration which over-spread the body to prevent suffusion on the lungs.' This was early in the sixteenth century ; if the Americans revived the punishment late in the nineteenth, it becomes easy to believe some of the accounts of the barbarities to which the Filipinos have been subjected.