Viper Island

Viper Island sits in Navy Bay, about 4 km west of Sri Vijaya Puram (Port Blair). It takes its name from HMS Viper, the ship that brought Lt. Archibald Blair to the islands in 1789 and is thought to have been wrecked nearby. After the British founded a penal settlement at Port Blair in 1858 for prisoners of the 1857 uprising, a jail was built on the island between 1864 and 1867.

The Viper Jail, with its solitary cells, stocks and whipping stands, became known as the Viper Chain Gang Jail, where prisoners in leg irons were put to hard labour. Sher Ali Afridi, who killed the Viceroy Lord Mayo in 1872, was hanged here, and the jail lost its role once the Cellular Jail opened in 1906. Today the two-storey building is largely reduced to its plinth, and the gallows ruins remain on a hillock. Harbour cruises from Phoenix Bay jetty reach the island in about twenty minutes.