In December 1801, in Trinidad, Louisa Calderon was brought before Governor Thomas Picton following an investigation into the theft of a sum of dollars from the man with whom she cohabited. The magistrate charged with her examination, according to the prosecutor who unfolded the case in London, possessed no legal power to compel her speech. He therefore applied to the Governor. The order attributed by the prosecution to Picton consisted of a single sentence in his own hand: to inflict torture upon Louisa Calderon.
The trial took place several years later, in London, and turned as much upon the body of a child as upon the laws in force within an island recently brought beneath the British sceptre. Trinidad had capitulated in 1797 to the expedition under Sir Ralph Abercromby. The leading counsel for the Crown, Mr. Garrow, recalled that the General had guaranteed the preservation of local laws until the King’s pleasure should be known. If torture were still sanctioned by those laws, the defence contended, the Governor might well have believed himself to be acting in the execution of his duty. If it were not, the order was a criminal one.
Garrow represented Louisa as a child. Her precise age remains a subject of dispute in the sources. The prosecutor described her as living under the protection of Pedro Ruiz; he alleged that she had fallen under suspicion of complicity after Carlos Gonzalez, an acquaintance of Ruiz, had made off with a quantity of dollars. The young girl denied any participation in the crime. The magistrate, powerless to extract more by his own authority, had recourse to Picton. It was then that Garrow produced what he tendered as the Governor’s written order, declaring that its execution had followed without delay.
Louisa was warned that she would be put to the question if she did not confess, and that she stood in peril of losing her limbs or her life. She persisted in her denial. The prosecution next related that two or three black women, themselves threatened with torture for sorcery, had been brought into the prison to heighten her terror. The torment inflicted upon Louisa was termed "picketing" by certain witnesses, though Garrow disputed the appellation: in his view, it was not the military punishment of the picket, but an engine of torture ordered by the Governor. The account describes the girl suspended by one wrist from a ceiling rope, one foot poised upon a wooden stake, whilst the opposite hand and foot were bound together behind her back. On the following day, the ordeal was repeated, the feet being reversed.
Taking the stand, Louisa confirmed that she had been imprisoned with her mother following the theft, and conducted before Picton. She testified to having heard the Governor threaten to deliver her into the hands of the hangman if she did not disclose who had taken the money. She was straightway conducted to the chamber where the apparatus had been prepared. She described her left wrist lashed to a cord running through a pulley, her right hand bound behind her back, and her left foot resting upon the sharpened peg. The court was likewise shown a drawing of the scene. When Louisa beheld it, she shuddered; the presiding judge at first declined to permit its exhibition to the jury, but consented once the defence had agreed to its presentation.
She testified that she had remained upon the spike for three-quarters of an hour on the first occasion, and for twenty-two minutes on the following day. She swooned before being taken down each time. Thereafter, she was confined in irons termed grillos, fastened to the wall, wherein she declared she had languished for eight months. Her wrists and ankles had swollen; her wrists still bore, so she maintained, the scars of her duress. Her testimony did not end with these two bouts of torment: she named those present, amongst whom were the gaoler, the magistrate, his scrivener, an alguazil, and the executioner.
Rafael Shando, an alguazil in Trinidad, corroborated a portion of this chronology. He stated that he had returned from the interior of the island on the 22nd of December 1801, and had seen Louisa after she had been lowered from the instrument, when a glass of water was being given to her. The magistrate, he said, had directed him to fetch Carlos, that Louisa might repeat her declarations in his presence. Nothing coming of this confrontation, she was returned to her irons. Shando further affirmed that she was tortured anew on the 23rd of December, between the hours of eleven and twelve, for twenty-two minutes. He caught her in his arms when she swooned on two occasions.
According to his testimony, the magistrate sent vinegar to the executioner to be administered to Louisa. No person was assigned to her defence; no surgeon was in attendance to afford her assistance. Shando declared that he had never known the practice of torture in the island prior to Picton’s arrival. He recollected only the appearance of the instrument in the barracks, and subsequently in the gaol. He had, he added, witnessed the Governor direct the gaoler to carry a black man to the guardhouse and put him to the question. The Crown thus portrayed the proceeding against Louisa not as an isolated incident, but as the introduction of an engine hitherto unknown.
To measure the scope of the defence’s pretensions, Garrow recalled that torture held no place in English jurisprudence. Following the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham by John Felton, the Privy Council had contemplated examining the assassin upon the rack to discover his accomplices; the judges, upon consultation, had unanimously declared that such a course was not allowable by the laws of the realm. Garrow contrasted this ancient limitation with the mandate he now imputed to a British governor in Trinidad.
The defence did not contest that the torture had been decreed; it joined issue upon the point of law. Mr. Dallas, counsel for the accused, argued that Spanish law, maintained in Trinidad following the conquest, sanctioned such an interrogation. Picton had therefore merely enforced the law he believed himself bound to administer. He contended further that the Governor had acted without malice: even were his reading of the statutes erroneous, an honest mistake of law ought to shield him from a criminal conviction. Garrow, for his part, urged the absence of any inhabitant who could recall an instance of judicial torture prior to Picton’s administration.
In the course of the trial, several treatises on Spanish colonial law were produced and identified by the Attorney General of Trinidad. After lengthy disputation, Lord Ellenborough instructed the jury to direct their minds to a single question: did torture form part of the law of Trinidad at the hour of the island’s surrender to the British arms? He reminded them that the preservation of local institutions did not imply that every municipal regulation of Spain obtained within her dependency. Treatises might illuminate the law; it was for the jury to determine whether they proved that torture had indeed been authorised in the island.
The jury returned a verdict finding that no law of torture existed in Trinidad at the time of the capitulation. The Chief Justice thereupon informed them that Picton could claim no sanctuary beneath a purported law that had possessed no force, and directed a verdict of guilty. At this juncture, the Crown had secured the finding it sought upon the question of law; but the records do not conclude here.
On the 25th of April, Dallas moved for a new trial. He advanced four principal grounds: the information laid against Louisa by the island authorities, Picton’s conviction that torture was warranted, the total absence of malice, and the citation of a Spanish law treatise which had been procured only after the conclusion of the trial. This work, he maintained, was to be read in conjunction with the laws of Spain whenever the colonial code remained silent upon a criminal matter. The Court granted a rule to show cause why a new trial should not be had. The chapter in Borrow concludes at this stage; yet the legal process continued.
In 1808, the second trial shifted the judicial ground. According to the researches of the historian James Epstein, the jury returned a special verdict: they recognised that torture was indeed authorised by the laws of Trinidad at the time of the cession, and acquitted Picton of any malice separate from the illegality of the act itself. The legal consequences of this finding remained to be argued. The hearings dragged on into 1810; in 1812, the court respited Picton’s recognisances until further order. The cause terminated without any final judgment, and no sentence was ever pronounced against him.
In London, Louisa had shown the scars upon her wrists and described the fetters that had bound her for eight months. The jurymen were called upon to decide what laws had traversed the ocean alongside the governors. She, in order to address them, had been obliged to relate what those supposed laws had permitted men to inflict upon her flesh.