On March 4, 1858, James Pattison Walker left Calcutta with the first batch of 200 convicts to be sent to the penal colony of the Andaman Islands. The convicts had been sentenced for participating in the 1857 Uprising.
Walker had been appointed the superintendent of the first penal settlement of Port Blair. The group arrived in the Andaman Islands on March 10 and was plunged into a nightmare.
The jungle was dense and impassable, Walker wrote. He sent the men in chains into the jungles with orders to build their own shelters on iRoss, Havelock and Chatham islands. The prisoners had their crime and their sentence carved on wooden neck tickets and were so sick and debilitated that they could not then be employed.
More ships arrived. Numerous men died during the voyage. Walker stuck to very strict rules, which provoked many convicts to try to escape, often unsuccessfully. When they were caught, Walker often had them killed. According to a report in The Guardian, on May 13, 1858, 81 of them limped back into Port Blair pleading for mercy and medicine, not having been able to negotiate the jungles, and Walker hanged them all in a day.
In 1858, about 200 convicts organised a plan to kill Walker, but it was unsuccessful.