a torture / punishment, said (chiefly by Stedman) to have been used in colonists on enslaved people in Surinam, consisting of hogtying and then flagellating
1863, George Augustus Sala, The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, page 67:
[…] and I hope my Gentleman Merchant has as warm a niche in Signor Beelzebub's Temple of Fame, as the Great Dutch Philosopher who first dreamt of the Spanso Bocko.
1962 (quoting an earlier text by Stedman), Stanbury Thompson, The Journal of John Gabriel Stedman, page 185:
It was that bitch that gave poor Brand's mistress a spanso - bocko at the Fort, because he [some other man?] would not 1—herself, damn her!
1950, David Lowenthal, Historical Geography of the Guiana Coast:
[One] punishment was the spanso - bocko, in which the slave was "beaten with a handful of knotted tamarind branches, till the very flesh is cut away ... after which the lacerated wound is immediately washed with lemon juice and gun powder."
2008, C. Gallant, Blake's Antislavery Designs for" Songs of Innocence and of Experience", in The Wordsworth Circle, 2008 (U. Chicago):
[…] memorably noted its frequent use in the Suriname spanso bocko: […]
2019, David Onnekink, Gijs Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A History of a Global Power, Cambridge University Press (→ISBN), page 273:
Particularly gruesome was the spanso bocko. Stedman described this punishment in graphic detail: […]
2020, G. Slack, From Class to Race and Back Again: A Critique of Charles Mills' Black Radical Liberalism, in Science & Society, 2020 (Guilford Press):
[…] Thus, when he [the slave as Stirner imagines him — GS] lies trussed up in the spanso bocko torture of Surinam, unable to move hand or foot, or any other of his limbs, and has to put up with everything done to him, in such circumstances his power and peculiarity do not consist […]
mention, explaining meaning:
1806 (edition of 1992), John Gabriel Stedman, Stedman's Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society. An Abridged, Modernized Edition of Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, JHU Press (→ISBN), page 291:
The punishment called a spanso bocko is extremely severe, and executed in the following manner: the prisoner's hands being lashed together, he is lain down on the ground, when both his knees are thrust through between his arms, and separate from them by a strong stick as he lies on his side, the end of which being placed in the earth or held perpendicular, so that he can no more move than if he was dead. In this locked position, he is beaten […] till the very flesh is cut away; he is then turned over on the other side, where the same dreadful flagellation is inflicted, […]
