Blowing from a gun

Blowing from a gun is a method of execution in which the victim is typically tied to the mouth of a cannon which is then fired, resulting in death.

George Carter Stent described the process as follows: 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.

The method was used by the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries, from as early as 1509 across their empire from Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka)[2] to Mozambique[3] to Brazil.

[8] Destruction of the body and scattering of the remains over a wide area had a religious function as a means of execution in the Indian subcontinent as it prevented the necessary funeral rites of Hindus and Muslims.

At last, a rifle was fired into the back of his head, and the blood poured out of the nose and mouth like water from a briskly handled pump.

Several historians note that blowing people from the guns as a method of execution was an "old Mughal punishment" in the Indian subcontinent.

[19] Just prior to the institution of the reign of the first Mughal emperor, Babur, his son Humayun is said to have blown from guns 100 Afghan prisoners on 6 March 1526, in one incident of his father's many struggles against the Lodi dynasty.

[20] During the latter half of the 17th century, members of the Jat community in Northern India rebelled and raided against the Mughal Empire, and Emperor Aurangzeb is said in one account to have ordered one of their leaders blown from a gun.

For example, in a rather anecdotal story from the times of Jahangir (r. 1605 – 1627), the emperor had six mullahs blown from guns, for having consented to, and given approval of, the forcible abduction and marriage of a Hindu girl to a Muslim officer.

[26] During explorer Francisco Barreto's 1569–73 campaign in Monomotapa, he at one time imprisoned some 50 Muslim individuals, and had them "impaled, blown from mortars, torn apart on tree-trunks, axed or shot".

[29] The British had a long tradition prior to the Indian Rebellion of executing sepoys found guilty of mutiny or desertion in this manner.

Regarding blowing from a gun as an old Mughal punishment, the East India Company opted for this technique, as being, relative to death by flogging, more deterrent, more public and more humane.

In 1775, Muctoom Sahib, the Commandant of the 9th Native Battalion in the Madras Army, refused orders to embark on a transport ship for Bombay.

Colonel Burn deemed harsh measures were necessary, convened a court-martial, and two of the officers involved were blown from guns and nine others "severely flogged".

With full approval of the action, the writer observes: "a measure which, there is every reason to believe, had the best effect, as the corps behaved during the subsequent siege with the greatest steadiness and propriety".

[40] In the 1806 Vellore Mutiny, beginning with a nighttime massacre of British officers and soldiers, many sepoys were killed during the suppression, while six mutineers were sentenced to be blown from the guns.

[41] In 1812, a plot was discovered at Travancore to kill the European officers; two ring leaders were blown from the guns, and several others were hanged.

[42] In 1819, six deserters who had joined the ousted rajah of the annexed Kingdom of Nagpur were apprehended by the British and were blown from the guns on 7 February.

In the ensuing court-martial, he was condemned to be blown from a gun, but instead he was hung in chains, and after his death his body was placed in a gibbet for a few months.

A sense of the scale and frequency of the executions made by the British during the 1857 insurrection is demonstrated in the reports of incidents given in the journal Allen's Indian Mail, for the year 1857: On 8 June, two sepoys from the 35th light Infantry were blown from guns.

[51]As an example of official statistics, rather than a collection of newspaper reports, in an 1859 paper to the British House of Commons on the rebellion in the Peshawar Valley in the Punjab, for the period May–September 1857, 523 were recorded executed, of them 459 shot by musketry, 20 hanged (13 for desertion) and the last 44 blown from a gun.

[55] A specific case, mentioned by several sources, concerns that of Mr. and Mrs. Birch, Mrs. Eckford and Mrs. Defontaine,[56] all of whom were said to have been blown from guns at Fatehgarh.

[59] When the Bambatha Rebellion broke out, a dozen Zulus were tried under martial law and sentenced to be executed March 29 by being "blown up from the mouth of a cannon.

Lord Elgin backed down in the face of public opinion, and the Zulu men were "blown to death" on Monday, April 2, 1906.

Later that year, an Anglo–Durrani expedition commanded by General William Knott captured a rebel leader, who was executed on the orders of Shah Shujah's son.

The British official Humphreys wrote: "None was safe, houses were pillaged indiscriminately, women were ravished and a reign of terror was established unprecedented in the annals of bloody Afghan history".