Alan Maxwell Boisragon

Alan Maxwell Boisragon (22 January 1860 – 18 March 1922) was a British Army officer, and author, and was Captain Superintendent of the Shanghai Municipal Police from 1901 to 1906.

Quotes

Altars covered with streams of dried human blood, the stench of which was awful...huge pits forty to fifty feet deep were found filled with human bodies dead and dying, and a few wretched captives were rescued alive...everywhere sacrificial trees on which were the corpses of the latest victims...everywhere, on each path, were newly sacrificed corpses. On the principal sacrificial tree facing the main gate of the king’s compound there were two crucified bodies and forty-three more in various stages of decomposition. On another tree a wretched woman was found crucified, while at its foot were four more decapitated bodies. To the westward of the king’s house was a large open space, about three hundred yards in length, simply covered with the remains of some hundreds of human sacrifices in all stages of decomposition. The same sights were met with all over the city.
- The Benin Massacre (London: Methuen & Co, 1897) ch. 10, pp. 187–188. Quoted in A. C. Burns, History of Nigeria (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929) ch. 14, p. 185. Eye-witness account of the Benin Expedition of 1897. For different perspectives, see: Pereira (1508) · Ramusio (c. 1540) · D. van Nyendael (1702) · R. H. Bacon (1897) · P. A. Talbot (1926) · E. J. Huxley (1954) · R. E. Bradbury (1957) · J. D. Fage (1962)