of the convicts from Bencoolen, Penang itself, as a penal
settlement, had already been supplied from India with a number of
transported criminals of all tribes and castes, who were working in
gangs under free warders; but from vacancies and dismissals, and the
consequent inability to supply the place of these warders, where free
labour of the kind required was not obtainable, an attempt was then made
to enlist the services of well-behaved convicts to oversee their
fellow-prisoners. But it does not appear to have at all succeeded at
that time, and we have it on record that the Governor in Council at
Penang, in the year 1827, deemed it necessary to revise the regulations
under which these Indian convicts were controlled; and accordingly we
learn that a committee was appointed to assemble at Penang in November,
1827, when a code of revised rules was drawn up, and the following
comment was made by the committee as to the employment of convicts as
warders: "With regard to the present system of employing convicts as
tindals and sirdars, the committee think it very objectionable, as it is
impossible that men so intimately connected with those over whom they
are placed can exercise that authority and control which is so essential
in the management of such a body of men as the convicts. The duties at
present performed by these servants are provided for in the proposed
increase to the establishment."

These rules, subsequently known as the "Penang Rules," received the
sanction of the Governor in Council, and were sent for guidance to the
Resident Councillor at Singapore, to which settlement some few convicts
had already been sent. This remark of the Penang committee, which in all
fairness we have quoted, was doubtless quite true at the time when it
was penned, and when the system of employing prisoners as warders was in
its infancy, and, moreover, when the whole prison discipline was
acknowledged to be in more or less an indifferent state; but, as will
hereafter be shown, it did not hold good when the system was well
established, and the choice of warders was made from those classes best
suited for the control of their fellow-prisoners, especially in the
outstations, or "commands" as they were called, where gangs of convicts
were placed under their control in the construction and repairs of roads
or in stone-quarrying.

In these early days, no organised system of industrial employment
appears to have been carried on in this Pena