Rats will eat pretty much anything, alive or dead. Many are the semi-legendary tales of people partially eaten by rats after a fall or non-lethal heart attack, but this tendency was once seen as useful to the state in many countries, rather than annoying. At the Tower of London in Elizabethan times, there was a cell dubbed ‘The Dungeon of Rats’, located below the waterline of the River Thames. At high tide, the local rats would head into the cell to escape the rising water and take advantage of the free meal afforded by the injured and shackled prisoner.
Where the English were content to look the other way and let the rats go about their horrible business, during the Dutch Revolt against Spain in the seventeenth century, the dissident Dutch leader Diederik Sonoy did not want to leave anything to chance. He would bind his prisoners to a table, place a rat in a cage on top of them, and heat it up. The rat would desperately attempt to escape the searing heat by burrowing downwards… through the victim’s chest. In this way, Sonoy extracted crucial information about Spanish movements and, presumably, learned a lot about rodent biology.
A missionary in China is killed by Ling-chi, France, 1858. Wikimedia Commons
19. Death by a Thousand Cuts involved considerable skill and an agonizing death
Known in China as ling-chi, Death by a Thousand Cuts was practiced well into the 20th century in the country. In this form of execution, a victim was tied to a cross on a table which also contained a basket of razor-sharp knives, each with a different part of the anatomy written upon it, which was covered with a cloth. The executioner would slip his hand into the basket and draw a knife at random, like a diabolical raffle. He would read the knife’s inscription, and then slice the designated part of the body, before randomly selecting another blade.
The victim’s death could, technically, be instant. For amongst the knives (a thousand is obviously an exaggeration) was one instructing the executioner to stab the victim fatally through the heart. The executioner would have to keep the victim alive for as long as possible, which required near-medical knowledge of the limits of the human body. This also allowed an opportunity for bribes to be taken from friends and family to go straight for the heart. One modification of the execution was for amputations to be carried out rather than simple cuts, albeit in a prescribed order with a single knife.
A protest against waterboarding to mark the visit of Condoleeza Rice, Iceland, 2008. Wikimedia Commons
20. Thank God we’re so civilized today… actually, what about Waterboarding?
You were just beginning to rest on your laurels, weren’t you? Unfortunately, even in countries which are not run by despots, torture still goes on, and Waterboarding is by far the most notorious example. Water torture is an ancient practice, which aims to threaten the victim with drowning to extract information. Waterboarding is a slight modification of the technique, in that it intends only to simulate the terrifying experience of drowning, rather than actually drowning the victim. In Waterboarding, all that is required is a strip of cloth, a bucket of water, a victim… and a badge of authority.
The cloth is lain over the victim’s face, who is inclined at an angle of 10-20 degrees. Water is then poured over their face to fill the mouth and nostrils, causing such distress that information is usually given up. In some cases, the victim is killed, but other severe injuries can include brain damage from oxygen deprivation, damage to lungs, and broken limbs from struggling against restraints. The long-term psychological impact is utterly appalling, too. Despite this, during the War on Terror, the US government repeatedly stated that it did not see Waterboarding as a form of torture.
Waterboarding is used in military training, and some people have described their experiences. Chris Jaco, a former military pilot, underwent Waterboarding as part of his training, aged just nineteen. ‘It felt like you were choking to death on water and couldn’t stop it from being that way’, he remembers. ‘I was throwing people off of me because it was so overwhelming… It was like, I can’t breathe, water’s going up my nose and my throat was basically filled with water.’ And that’s despite Jaco knowing that he wouldn’t actually be drowned by his instructors. Haven’t we progressed as a species?
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