Fingerprints: Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity. Colin Beavan
of some of the world’s earliest paintings. To prehistoric people, it symbolized the physical manifestation of the innermost self. Hungry, and they watched their hands rummage for berries and roots. Angry, and in their hands they felt the weight of a fighting club. Through action, their hands gave outward expression to their inner thoughts. Through the sense of touch, they gave inner experience to outward existence. The hand stood as gatekeeper between self and other. Its symbolic representation, the handprint, acquired deep meaning.
Sealing promises with the gods, asserting dominion over territory, signaling their maker’s existence—these were the probable functions of prehistoric handprints. Twenty-nine thousand years later, hand prints still did the same jobs. During the ninth-century Mayan Empire, the soon-to-be victims of ritual human sacrifice left bloody handprints on the temple walls to make a last record of their lives. Ottoman sultans, in the same period, ratified treaties with handprints made in sheep’s blood, a royal seal signifying intent to keep a promise.
In Europe, the more convenient, less messy alternative to the handprint—the finger mark—appeared only occasionally, and not until the last several hundred years. In 1691, 225 citizens living near Londonderry, Northern Ireland, sent two ambassadors to petition Protestant King William III for compensation for losses they’d suffered during his battle with Catholic James II. The citizens promised to pay their ambassadors, if their negotiations were successful, one-sixth of the amount granted by King William. They signed a covenant to this effect with the marks of their fingers. Though this rare European use of finger marks was reminiscent of the more sophisticated fingerprints that came later, its significance, like the handprint’s, was entirely symbolic. The lineations left in the marks by the finger ridges went unnoticed.
In fact, not until the seventeenth century’s invention of the first crude microscope, the optic tube, did modern western science make mention of the ridges that run across the gripping surfaces of the hands and feet. One of the first microscopists, Dr. Nehemiah Grew, a physician born in Warwickshire, England, in 1641, whiled his hours away dissecting plants and scrutinizing their magnified innards. A member of both the College of Physicians and the Royal Society by the age of twenty-five, Grew founded the field of plant anatomy and was the first to identify flowers as the sexual organs of plants. He also stumbled upon the ridge detail on the ends of his fingers. He published his findings in 1684, making himself the first scientist known to have observed the fingertip patterns that would later be impressed to make fingerprints.
In 1788, another scientist, J. C. A. Mayers, became the first to observe the facet of finger ridges most essential to their use in identification—their uniqueness. He wrote in his illustrated textbook Anatomical Copper-plates with Appropriate Explanations that “the arrangement of skin ridges is never duplicated in two persons.” In 1823, a professor at the University of Breslau, Poland, Jan Evangelista Purkyne, in his thesis on the skin, noticed that finger ridge patterns fell into distinct categories, the second most important element of fingerprint identification. The categorization of fingerprints would eventually allow them, once filed away, to be easily referenced again, like dictionary entries classified by letter.
Although Grew, Mayers, and Purkyne anticipated the fundamentals of the fingerprint system of identification, their interest was in the advancement of pure science, not its practical application. They had not realized that their discoveries could be used to identify criminals or as evidence in trials, and fingerprints fell into obscurity for the next fifty years. When they reemerged, it would be thanks to a group of illiterate Chinese workers in a region of India governed by one of the first fingerprint pioneers.
Three Like Rats with No Rat-Catcher
In July 1858, William James Herschel was promoted and given charge of a rural subdivision in Bengal, India. At the young age of twenty-five, after five years as someone else’s gofer, he was suddenly the final authority on everything from his district’s tax collection to its road building. He was mayor, sheriff, and judge all wrapped into one, except he didn’t get his position because he was popular and he hadn’t won an election. He had been imposed on the local people by the British Lieutenant-Governor. And the ambitious young Herschel intended to make a splash, a particular challenge because of the period’s civil unrest.
At the time, Indian citizens would do anything to make things difficult for the much-hated British administration. They didn’t show up for their jobs. They stopped cultivating the British landowners’ farms. The didn’t pay the rent. Frustrations were great for accomplishment-minded young officers like Herschel. Many of their orders were deliberately disobeyed, and much of the rest had no one to carry them out.
Undeterred, Herschel decided, within weeks of his new appointment, to construct a new road. He negotiated the necessary contracts in the sticky heat at his new headquarters at Jungipoor, up the Hooghly River from Calcutta. One of the deals he struck was with Raj Konai, a contractor, for the supply of road-making materials. Herschel was proud of their arrangement. The terms were favorable to the government. But contractors, no less subversive than the rest of the population, had lately made a habit of breaking their contracts. Herschel worried that Konai might deny his obligations.
Herschel’s mind raced as he read over their agreement, penned by Konai in Bengali script. Even this written contract might prove useless, Herschel realized, since contractors had begun to deny their own signatures. Suddenly, it occurred to him “to try an experiment by taking the stamp of his hand … to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his signature.” This spontaneous printing of Konai’s hand would later lead to Herschel’s being the first in British history to regularly use fingerprints officially.
Born on January 9, 1833, William James Herschel came from an eminent scientific family. His grandfather William Herschel, an astronomer, discovered the planet Uranus. His father, John Herschel, also an astronomer, invented the sensitized paper on which photographs are printed. As a young man, William James, too, was scientifically inclined, but his father encouraged him to strike out in a new direction, so he joined the Indian Civil Service at the age of twenty. Five years later, his promotion to Assistant Joint Magistrate and Collector came in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny, a beginning in India’s struggle for independence and the reason for the civil unrest in Herschel’s new district.
The mutiny began after sepoys, Indian troops employed by the British, protested the recent issue of the new Enfield rifle. To load the Enfield, the ends of its cartridges, believed to be lubricated with pigs’ and cows’ lard, had to be bitten off. This clashed with both Hindu and Muslim dietary prohibitions, and in April 1857, sepoy troopers at Meerut refused to use their new rifles. When they were jailed for their refusal, their incensed comrades rose up and shot their British officers, sparking a murderous rebellion that swept the country.
The British responded with ferocious vengeance. Shipped-in reinforcements took no prisoners, bayoneting to death captured sepoys in frenzied massacres. They hanged whole villages, including women and children, for their perceived sympathy with the mutineers. Even after the revolt was suppressed in mid-1858, British soldiers lashed sepoys convicted of mutiny to the muzzles of their cannons and fired cannonballs through their chests. With their bodies blown to pieces, according to Hindu religion, the victims had no hope of entering paradise, making the punishment even more cruel.
The slaughter ended but the conclusion of what the Indians called “the Devil’s Wind” did not halt the population’s defiance of the unpopular British ruling class. Terrified of revenge for outright rebellion, they subtly engaged in various forms of civil disobedience, including the breaking of contracts with administrators like Herschel. If the administrators took them to court, the Indians simply repudiated their own handwriting. The British were in no position to insist that a signature written in Bengali had come from any particular hand, especially given the region’s volatility.
Hoping to keep his road-building project on track Herschel wanted a signature from Konai that couldn’t be so easily denied. “I dabbed his palm and fingers over with homemade oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the whole hand on the back of the contract,” Herschel wrote in his memoir The Origin of Fingerprinting.