1891: The Namoa pirates

ExecutedToday.com ^ | May 11, 2009 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

On this date in 1891, Chinese authorities beheaded 15 at Kowloon, including the leaders of the then-notorious Namoa pirates.

They were nicknamed for the steamer they had infamously commandeered six months before. The tale is related by an English maritime official’s orientalist (and now public-domain) memoir, The Mystic Flowery Land:

The most daring and disastrously successful piracy of late years … was the “Namoa” piracy in 1890. The startling news of this outrage created a general feeling of unsafety and consternation among the foreign communities in China, mingled with grief and just resentment for the cold-blooded murder of Captain Pocock and Mr. Petersen, both most popular and respected men, the latter being a member of the Customs Service.

On Sunday, the 3rd of December, 1890, the Douglas, Lapraik, and Co‘s coasting steamer, “Namoa,” commanded by my late most esteemed friend Capt. Pocock,* left Hongkong at noon, bound on her usual trip up the coast to Swatow, Amoy, and Foochow with several European and a large number of Chinese passengers, most of the latter being Fuhkien people returning to their native homes after many years absence in the United States and California, each with his little hoard of hard-earned dollars, gained by a small lifetime of frugal toil and self-denial in a distant land. These poor men were nearing their well-remembered haunts of earlier days, to once more spend among the relations and friends of their youth the fast-approaching New Year....

[M Kehoe]

Ping.

5.56mm

[chajin]

In other words, the pirates were found by the authorities and beheaded, and they were Namoa.

It is one of the ironies of capital punishment that it has to be meted out to be effective, but not too much, and where the "golden mean" stands is difficult to define. The death penalty means nothing in the US because very few of those sentenced actually are executed, and even then after decades of appeals, so they live in general as long as the rest of us. Conversely, the death penalty meant nothing in fin-de-siècle China, because so many criminals were beheaded that they began to think of it as just one of the costs of doing business, so it didn't deter them from their crimes.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

Also, few criminals ever think they’ll be caught and executed, whether the death penalty is applied rarely or freely.

“I’m too smart. They’ll never catch me, just those other guys.”

[Theophilus]

Deterrence should never be the objective of punishment. It is retribution. If we enjoy a deterrant effect it is by the grace of God not the brilliant wisdom of the exorbitant, so-called rehabilitationists.