मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

Their Occupation The Javras that made friends with the British Officers in the Andamans, have learnt some kind of trade and business as a result of their contact with the outside world. They gather beautiful conches and shells and other stones on the seashore, and bring them to English Officers in their cabins. They also sell these articles in exchange for glass toys and trinkets, sugar and tobacco. They stay for a while in the adjoining shawls built for that purpose, and again return and disappear in the dark regions of the dense forest that is their home Occasionally, they also sell honey. The Government collects all these things from them for export to foreign countries. The conches polished and set in silver or gold fetch a fancy price in the markets of Europe. These Javras, as a result of their contact with the Europeans, are domesticated enough to put a piece of cloth round their loans. And their women cover their parts with a single big leaf or with a garland of leaves round their waists. Their contact with the settlers has produced a generation which is the hybrid of two races. The Javra women are found to cohabit with soldiers and other Europeans in the settlement and their children show a distinct mark of this fusion in their white complexion and European features. The Hindus in that settlement have also taken to wife the Javra women, and the children born of that union are fairer in complexion than their parents. These children, when they grow into young men and women, are given a sort of education which finds employment for them in Government service. A woman or two have turned nurses, and become governesses. In private families. The wife of the Chief Commissioner of the Andamans had for her companion in the family, one of the trained Javra women. The modern history of the Andamans begins somewhere from 1766 A.D. Prior to that date, convicts from India were sent to Singapore, Penang, Malacca and Tenasserim islands to serve their term of transportation. Engineer Colebrooke and Captain Blair were the two Englishmen who, in 1766, treed to turn the Andamans into a regular settlement Before that time many a British boat foundered and was stranded on the shore of these islands. We can stall read the horrible accounts of these mishaps. When Captain Blair selected this spot for settlement, its climate and temperature were altogether detrimental to the health of settlers in that place. The first convicts brought to settle there perished almost to a man. Port Blair, the present harbour of the Andaman islands, derives its name from its early founder, no other than captain Blair himself. The captives in the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58, soldiers to be counted in their thousands, were also sentenced and despatched to this place to serve their term of imprisonment. And this was the beginning of settlement in the Andamans. When I was in the prison of the Andamans, an old man who was one of the surviving convicts of the place and captives in the Indian Mutiny, sent me a message of congratulation for my incarceration in this prison for an attempt to overthrow the Raj similar to the one they had planned in their day. I heard, later on, that the old convict had been released after serving sixty years of transportation, on the occasion of a durbar or some similar celebration. The settlement began with Imprisonment, in this place, of soldiers involved in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. And here I am today to end it as a convict in the conspiracy case of 1907-08 What a strange coincidence this! Some persons involved in the conspiracy and revolt of Wasudev