"Indians were often flogged while confined in the _cepo_, this notably in the special flogging _cepo_, with movable extremities, made by order of Aurelio Rodríguez at Santa Catalina, and referred to by its maker, Edward Crichlow, in his testimony to me. Sometimes the most abominable offences were committed upon Indians while held by the legs or leg in this defenceless position (see particularly the statement of James Chase, borne out by Stanley Lewis, as to the crime committed by José Inocente Fonseca at Ultimo Retiro upon a young Indian man). Some of the British subjects I questioned declared to me that they had known Indian women to be publicly violated by the _racionales_ while in this state of detention. As an added punishment, the legs of a man or woman would be distended and confined several holes apart in the stocks--some of the Barbados men asserted that they themselves had been confined with their legs 'five holes apart,' a distance, I should say, intolerable to be borne for any length of time. The Ultimo Retiro stocks were the worst I saw, for the leg-holes were smaller, and the beams to have locked on any ordinary sized leg must have forced down into the flesh. "An individual confined with his legs 'five holes apart' would have had them extended almost a yard at the extremities, and if confined for a few hours in this posture, he must have been in acute pain. Indians who spent long periods in the stocks were sometimes confined by only one leg. Whole families were so imprisoned--fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents. One man at Ultimo Retiro, himself a living witness to the enforced starvation he denounced, in the presence of Señor Jiménez and his subordinates, related before me and the members of the commission on the 8th of October how, in Señor Montt's time, a year previously, many of his countrymen and women had been so starved to death or flogged to death in the station _cepo_ that we were then inspecting and experimenting with. "Some of these agents drew fully £1,000 a year from the rubber they forced by this means and by other lawless methods from the surrounding native population.