SOME HISTORIC MASSACRES.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 9823, 24 July 1900, Page 5

SOME HISTORIC MASSACRES.

The treacherous slaughter of all foreigners in Pekin and the surrounding districts recalls a number of somewhat similar horrors which blacken the pages of history. Even excluding those which were more or less partial, or in the ordinary conrse of war, the records are distressingly numerous. Sicily, still the home 'of Mafia lawlessness, massacred, all Carthagenian residents in 397. B.C , and all French residents in the "Sicilian Vespers" of 1282 A.D. Mithradrtes, tyrant of Pontus, caused every Roman in Asia Minor to. be slaughtered in 88 8.C.; the Latins were similarly exterminated in Constantinople in 1184 A.D. by the Greeks ; the Christians of Croatia in 1592 by the Turks. Paris has given us several instances of human ferocity, the most notorious being the massacre of St. Bartholomew, when 70,000 Protestants were murdered. In England we have had the massacre of the Danes on the night of November 13, 1002, by order of Ethelred the Unready, when churches were no sanctuary and the sister of Sweyn, the Danish king, held as a treaty-hostage, was among those treacherously killed. Sweyn took terrible vengeance ; the subjugatiou of England to the Danish dynasty was the result. .In 1189 the Jews were generally massacred through England, 500 killing themselves, their wives and children at York rather than fall into the hands of the mob ; there were thenceforward practically no Jews in England until Oliver Cromwell arbitrarily suspended the law existing against them. Least of all historic massacres, but among the most lamentable, is that of the Macdonalds of Glencoe, as late as 1592—a deed which indelibly stains the otherwise constitutional revolution of 1688. Across the channel, in Ireland, the O'Neill rebellion of 1641 was ushered in by a wholesale massacre of Protestant" British settlers; from 30,000 to 150,000 men, women, and children are variously estimated to have been slaughtered, with the usual accompaniments of such ferocious outbreaks, a holocaust which explains the ruthless suppressive methods of Cromwell.

In the West Indies the uprising of the St. Domingo blacks in 1804 was accompanied by a massacre of all whites, from which only a few on the seaboard escaped. In modern Asia, men still living have seen the horrors of the great mutiny and the stern payment exacted by our soldiery, and remember the Cabul massacre of 1842, when only one man (Dr. Bryden) escaped of 5000 capitulated troops and 12,500 camp followers, and the second Cabul massacre of 1879, when the residency was stormed and Sir Louis Cavagnari and his guard fell, sword in hand.

The Chinese themselves were exterminated in Batavia by the Javanese in 1740, 12,000 being slaughtered. North America was horrified by the Mountain Meadow massacre of a "Gentile" emigrant band by Mormons and Indians in 1857. South America saw, as late as 1872, the Gaucho Indiana sweep over the Southern Argentine provinces and carry death, outrage, and rapine to within a day's ride of Buenos Ayres; they paid the penalty of almost complete extermination. To conclude the long list, which shows how lightly the wild beast slumbers under the human skin, New Zealand still remembers that terrible 10th ot November, 1868, when Te Kooti leaped down upon Poverty Bay and murdered, without mercy, man, woman, and child, quenching his wrath in innocent blood.