On this date in 1732, the deposed Dutch governor of Ceylon was executed by throat-slashing in Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia) for abuse of power.
Petrus Vuyst (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch) was a Batavia-born son of a Dutch mercantile empire already well upon its decline phase.
Following a loop back to the mother country for espousing and legal training, Vuyst returned to the East Indies and soon advanced in the colonial bureaucracy — governing Dutch Bengal before being appointed the Low Countries’ proconsul in Dutch Ceylon.
The scant information about Vuyst is mostly in Dutch; this public domain document details the proceeding slating him with corruption and wholesale cruelty.
On this day..
- 2020: Walter Barton, coronavirus milestone
- 1893: Ai Yone
- 1883: Not Alferd (sic) Packer, #nerdprom attendee
- 1558: Three reformers at Norwich
- 1865: Not Lambdin P. Milligan, ex parte man
- 1864: Nikolay Chernyshevsky's "civil execution"
- 399 BCE: Socrates
- 1998: Wissam Issa and Hassan Abu Jabal
- 1942: Shimon Cohen, ladykiller
- 2005: Richard Cartwright, uncensored
- 1817: Three criminals in Rome, as witnessed by Lord Byron
- 1536: Anne Boleyn