An­ge­lo Bisses­sars­ingh

When one thinks of tor­ture, the mind im­me­di­ate­ly con­jures im­ages of a dank me­dieval dun­geon, a masked man in­flict­ing pain on a hap­less vic­tim with evil im­ple­ments. Tor­ture is not as­so­ci­at­ed with 19th cen­tu­ry Trinidad or with the high of­fice of a British Gov­er­nor, but such was the case in­volv­ing an un­for­tu­nate child named Louisa Calderon. Louisa's on­ly crime may have been her be­ing a young, nu­bile girl, forced by pover­ty to live as the con­cu­bine to an old man.

Her keep­er, Don Pe­dro Ruiz, resided above his shop on Ma­rine Square and was a wealthy man. Louisa would have been on­ly 11 years old at the point which was a not un­com­mon re­la­tion­ship par­a­digm in 1801-a mere four years af­ter the is­land had been seized by the British from Spain.

Al­leged­ly, Louisa be­came in­volved with one Car­los Gon­za­lez with whom she con­spired to rob Don Pe­dro's cash box of a quan­ti­ty of gold. At the time it was wide­ly be­lieved that Don Pe­dro him­self had staged the 'rob­bery' and framed Louisa for her in­fi­deli­ty. The mat­ter was re­port­ed to the lo­cal mag­is­trate who in turn re­ferred it to Gov­er­nor Sir Thomas Pic­ton, a man to whom Don Pe­dro was per­son­al­ly known, Pic­ton hav­ing tak­en a glass of wine in his shop at least once.

Pic­ton was a man of a hard con­sti­tu­tion and rather than en­quire fur­ther in­to the mat­ter, took the dras­tic ex­pe­di­ent of forc­ing a con­fes­sion from Louisa via tor­ture. Ac­cord­ing to a con­tem­po­rary source, the pick­et was cho­sen as the in­stru­ment of ques­tion­ing, which was ap­plied thus:

"Her po­si­tion may be eas­i­ly de­scribed. The great toe was lodged up­on a sharp piece of wood, while the op­po­site wrist was sus­pend­ed in a pul­ley, and the oth­er hand and foot were lashed to­geth­er. An­oth­er time the hor­rid cer­e­mo­ny was re­peat­ed, with this dif­fer­ence, that her feet were changed. This prac­tice, I hope, will not in fu­ture be called pick­et­ing, but Pic­ton­ing that it may be recog­nised by the dread­ful ap­pel­la­tion which be­longs to it. She re­mained up­on the spike three-quar­ters of an hour, and the next day 22 min­utes. She swooned away each time be­fore she was tak­en down, and was then put in­to irons called the gril­los; which were pieces of iron, with two rings for the feet, fas­tened to the wall; and in this sit­u­a­tion she re­mained for eight months."

For this atroc­i­ty, Pic­ton faced Lord El­len­bor­ough, the King's Jus­tice in 1806. In a high­ly cel­e­brat­ed and pub­lic tri­al, much grue­some ev­i­dence was called to the fore which spoke to the man­ner in which Louisa had been tor­tured and maimed be­fore be­ing re­leased with­out hav­ing been ac­tu­al­ly charged with the crime. Pic­ton was found guilty, but ap­pealed the ver­dict in 1808 by which time he had be­come a lead­ing war hero. Pic­ton died at the Bat­tle of Wa­ter­loo in 1815 with great val­or, be­ing shot in the heat of the fray, but his mem­o­ry is haunt­ed by the tor­ture of Louisa Calderon.