Across Siberia : on the great post-road / by Charles Wenyon.

  • Wenyon, Charles.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Across Siberia : on the great post-road / by Charles Wenyon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    Occasionally when we thought we were alone we were startled by a sndclen clank of chains, and, coming round a bend in the forest road, we met a gang of exiles on their w^ay to the ^jrisons of Kara or Saghalien. There were seldom less than two hundred persons in a gang—women as well as men. They wore long coats of coarse, earth- coloured frieze, and were chamed together as they walked. A file of soldiers with fixed bayonets marched on either side; there were vehicles in front for those who were sick, and for the little children of the exiles; and so, beneath the shadow of the ]3ines, without a word, and with no sound but the confused tramp of feet, and the mournful clanking of the chains, the procession wended its way eastward, never to return. Exiles were first sent to Siberia in 1591, and for the last hundred years they have been going there in an almost continuous stream. It is said that from seventeen to twenty thousand are now sent out there every year; but this number includes many of the near relatives of convicts, who voluntarily go out into exile with them, and some who are banished for a few years only to the towns of Western Siberia. The gangs of exiles we met on foot consisted entirely of criminals, and included amongst them some, of the vilest of the human race. Capital punishment is extremely rare in Eussia, and villains who in England would receive a death-sentence, and in some parts of the United States be lynched without judge or jury, are iu this country sent out as exiles to Siberia. It is said, also, that Eussian
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