Posted on 05/14/2018 8:58:18 AM PDT by harpygoddess
Execution by cannon was a method of execution in which the victim was typically tied to the mouth of a cannon which was then fired. The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back resting against the muzzle. When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun; and the body is literally blown away altogether, not a vestige being seen.
Although it was used in several cultures historically, this method of execution is most closely associated with the colonial government of the British Raj. Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, "blowing from a gun" was a method the British used to execute rebels as well as for those natives found guilty of desertion.
The destroying of the body and scattering the remains over a wide area had a particular religious significance as a means of execution in the Indian subcontinent as it effectively prevented the necessary funeral rites of Muslims and Hindus. Thus, for believers the punishment was extended beyond death.
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That was what started the great mutiny; the sepoys (soldiers) had to bite off the end of the powder packet to pour it down the muzzle, and the packets were waterproofed with a product made from rendered pig and beef fat. So they managed to create a situation of mortal offense to both Muslims AND Hindus.
Leave it to the Brits to come up with something like that; well they did invent the concentration camp idea that the Nazi’s picked up on (said Goering during his trial). During the Boer war the Brits burned their farms and incarcerated their women and children in a concentration camp where thousands died from starvation, disease and neglect.
Russia’s Kremlin’s Cannon was used to dispatch a Tzar
Dr Watson and Duncan Bleak fondly recalled their service there, and their souvenired taste for curry in “Terror By Night” (1946).
More like the main guns from the USS Missouri.
Well at least they are ‘head and shoulders above everyone else’
There should’ve been a prize of you caught the head on the fly.
It was a 3” explosive cannonball which killed Gen. Leonidas Polk (CSA, also an Episcopal Bishop), as he was checking potential battle ground elevations beneath Union guns. It was Gen. Oliver Howard (a radical Republican, do-gooder christian puritan, who was active in placing the Freedmen’s bureau crooks, and who founded Howard univ. in DC for... blacks).
The round when through his left arm, passed through his torso and out through his right arm, then exploded against a tree. Polk was nearly torn in half. Artillery rounds of the day— not pretty. Today— nothing left after an HE or white phosphorus, or a fragmentation bomb— shredded person, and horrific. War is not pretty. The brits were serious nasty colonial rulers, but nowhere near as bad as the French or even the Dutch. Such as it is.
Pershings use (through a subordinate who invented it) of burying Moros in the Phillipines inside pig carcasses shut down the revolt— the religious horror of both these “treatments” too much for the insurgents.
Excellent review of true history. Our Founders were beyond brave and at great personal risk, taking on the King— as subject to the Treason Law of the day.
Absolutely true. The self-righteous Brits were posing as anti-slavery in their lack of support for the CSA (also because the Brits then had a cheaper, closer supply of cotton for the mills in Manchester and the new mill in the beginning Indian Raj— Egyptian cotton). The Brits simply moved off to countries in their Empire that already had culturally developed slavery- like that in the Indian Raj and the caste system of large numbers of crude, disposable labor- rented from the Rajas who found new income.
This is how it has been with the Brits and virtually every other civilization, including any and all tribal groups-Hebrews too.
That is exactly why those guys should have had plenty of canister rounds.
There’s vid of Norks executing via anti air craft gun
Very true. And at the same time, the Brits were forcing China to allow the opium trade. It’s astonishing that so many out there see the Brits as this refined genteel people.
People forget, we ESCAPED the British fist.
The Brits freed the Hindus from the Muslims but then imposed their own vicious rule, largely done by the East India Company. The Crown actually took over rule to get the EIC out of the way as their management had been so despotic.
Except for the part where it blew out your eardrums but, yeah...
“Excellent review of true history. Our Founders were beyond brave and at great personal risk, taking on the King— as subject to the Treason Law of the day.”
Thanks!
One of my ancestors living in upstate NY, pre revolutionary war signed a letter/statement of concerns to send to King George about their concerns of what was happening in the colonies. They sent their signed concerns to the King.
They placed themselves and their family members in grave physical danger. He fled with his family to a remote part of
Virginia near a distant cousin. He and his wife had 5 daughters and there were no paved roads, rest stops or Howard Johnson’s on the way.
Later after the war was over, those brave signers were considered to be our first Revolutionary Warriors.
This ancestor, apparently after he got his family safely to Virginia, volunteered to fight the Brits in another colony.
The Belgians were the worst colonialists. King Leopold II ran the Congo as his own personal plantation.
Well that would be nice and painless.
That sounds like something the Masons came up with.
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