The Press Gangs - long version

Punishment

Taken from Life in Nelson’s Navy, by Dudley Pope.

Punishment was always carried out in public; indeed, the ‘spectacle’ aspect was regarded as most important. ‘Punishment’ usually meant flogging or hanging.

Keelhauling was never ordered by a Royal Navy court martial, though it was resorted to by captains in the Navy and merchant service until some time after the Civil War, and it was still used in the Dutch Navy in 1813. A line was passed from one end of the main yard under the ship and up to the other end, and the victim was secured to one end with a deep sea lead tied to his feet, dropped and hauled under the ship and up the other side. The weight of the lead kept him clear of the hull - otherwise the barnacles would tear him to pieces, apart from the possibility of being stuck against the keel.

‘Starting’, when a man was hit across the shoulders by a rattan cane wielded by a bosun’s mate, was not regarded as punishment in the same way as flogging; more frequently an exasperated officer would order a bosun’s mate ‘to start that man’ because he was slow. Most captains had stopped it by the time the Admiralty forbade it entirely after the court martial of Captain Robert Corbett in 1809, commenting that it was 'extremely disgusting to the feeling of British seamen’.

Two years later Captain Robert Preston of the Ganymede was court-martialled on a charge of cruel treatment, made by the ship’s company. Found ‘partly guilty ... in practising the summary punishment of starting’, he was warned by the court to change his conduct.

The ship’s boys, the ‘nippers’ and officers’ servants, were often caught in some mischief and they would be ‘put to the hoop’. Each boy would be tied by his left hand to a hoop (often from a cask but occasionally a large grommet of rope) and given a ‘knittle’ or piece of light cord, which he held in his right hand. When the word was given the boys had to run round in a circle, flogging the one in front with the knittle, an endless progress which usually brought laughter to watching seamen and tears to the boys.

Knittle (Nettle) Small line used for seizings, and for hammock-clues.
To Nettle, is to provoke

Liars on board a ship were only slightly less unpopular than thieves, and a particularly bad one was usually hoisted up to the mainstay by one of the forebraces with a broom and shovel lashed to his back, and with the ship’s company shouting ‘A liar! A liar!’ at him. When he was lowered to the deck again he spent the next week or so cleaning the seats in the head.

One of the worst crimes in a ship is theft: in a ship of the line with 800 or so men on board, the presence of a thief on board could make everyone’s life a misery, poisoning the air with suspicion, particularly because most men could not lock up their valued possessions. For minor offences a thief was made to run the gauntlet (probably from the Dutch gantlope: gant, all; loopen , to run). For this men were given rope yarns which they plaited into knittles, with a half hitch in the end. They then stood in two rows, facing each other and leaving a corridor between them. The thief then had to strip off his shirt and was made to pass along the corridor, the master-at-arms walking slowly backwards in front of him and holding a cutlass at his chest and a ship’s corporal following with another cutlass. The men then thrashed him with the knittles as he passed - as he slowly walked, not ran, the gantlet.

Major theft was punished by flogging, and the seriousness with which it was treated on board a Royal Navy ship is shown by the fact that only for theft was the cat of nine tails knotted: three knots at three-inch intervals were put in each tail. (For all other offences, including desertion and mutiny, the tails were not altered.)

Swearing as an offence depended on the captain: some were foul-mouthed, others occasionally relieving their feelings by a broadside of oaths. Some captains, though, and particularly those with strong religious feelings, forbade any cursing and punished men severely. One method, the most usual, was making the offender wear the cangue, a wooden collar made of two pieces of plank three inches thick and with a nine- or twelve-pound shot fixed to it. The man had to wear it - performing his usual duties - for a set time. In the Blandford frigate, according to William Spavens, the captain made offenders walk the lee side of the quarterdeck ‘until he should hear another swear’. This meant that the men in the cangue ‘would often stagger with design, and tread on the toes of some of the after guard or maintopmen? who would perhaps say, d-n your eyes, why don’t you keep your feet to yourself. . . when the prisoner would cry out, “Sir, such a man swears!”, when the collar was taken off him and fixed on the other.’

Spavens noted that ‘sometimes an exceeding noisy fellow is gagged with a pump bolt in his mouth’. This was secured by spunyarn behind the neck, and the man was then put in the weather mizzen shrouds for an hour, facing to windward.

The important point about punishment in the Royal Navy, despite all the nonsense written in twentieth-century accounts, is that it was intended to be a rough and ready and swift justice aimed at fitting the crime. A petty thief was an object of contempt and it was fitting that his shipmates, whom he robbed, should punish him.

Even a dirty man, repulsive to anyone having to work, eat and sleep near him, was given a suitable punishment, being stood in a tub of sea water and scrubbed with stiff brooms by some of the ship’s company, or at worst given a ducking, when he was lashed astride a thick batten, weighted with the lead, and ducked over the side a few times from a yardarm.

More serious crimes needed more serious punishment but it must be remembered that the Navy was always short of men, so the sentence of death was rare, particularly when the size of the Navy and the attitudes of the day are understood.

The court-martial records show that officers were brought to trial at the slightest hint of a breach of the Articles of War. In 1800, for instance, five lieutenants, two surgeons, one gunner and two boatswains from various ships were tried for offences ranging from throwing a cup of tea at another officer to behaving in a riotous and mutinous manner. In every instance the case was proved and all ten men were punished severely.

Sir Edward Hamilton, who had just received a knighthood for his bravery in cutting out the Hermwne from a Spanish port on the Main in circumstances which make it one of the bravest acts in the Navy’s history, was dismissed the service for seizing up the gunner and four seamen in the Trent’s rigging. He was later reinstated, but two admirals had to answer for their conduct in 1805 and the first lieutenant of the Hazard was hanged two years later after being found guilty of unnatural practices.

One of the more ludicrous trials in 1807 was of the Lieutenant of Marines and the surgeon of L’Aigle. The lieutenant was accused of pulling the surgeon’s nose and the surgeon was charged with provoking him to do so. The court found them both guilty, putting the lieutenant at the bottom of the list for 1804 (which meant that he lost three years’ seniority) and dismissing the surgeon from L’Aigle, which was less of a punishment because having a provocative nose proved no bar to finding another ship.

The captain of the Ulysses, the Hon. Warwick Lake, marooned a seaman on a deserted island and was tried by court martial and, on 5 November 1810, found guilty and dismissed the service amid a lot of unfavourable publicity, the Admiralty behaving remarkably well. Lake’s trial, on board the Gladiator at Portsmouth, caused something of a sensation as the story was told.

Robert Jeffery, from Polperro in Cornwall, was eighteen years old and a blacksmith’s apprentice when he signed on in the Lord Nelson privateer at Plymouth in 1807. Little more than a week later the Lord Nelson put into Falmouth, when the 18-gun brig Recruit, commanded by Captain Lake, sent a press gang on board and took up Jeffery. Lake was anxious to get men because the Recruit was sailing for the West Indies. She was small and made a slow passage, so that in November, well inside the tropics, the crew were put on short allowance of water.

Jeffery, who because of his training with metalwork had been rated an armourer’s mate, was then said by Captain Lake to have taken ‘a bottle with some rum in it’ from the gunner’s cabin, and a few days later (as he subsequently confessed) he went to the cask of spruce beer and took two quarts of it. He was seen by one of his shipmates, who reported him. Captain Lake ordered the Sergeant of Marines to ‘put him on the black list’.

Up to that point, Captain Lake had dealt with the youth lightly: either offence could have resulted in Jeffery getting a dozen lashes; instead he was merely on a list of people given the unpleasant job’s. But on 13 December 1807, three days after the beer episode, the ship passed Sombrero, an uninhabited island thirty miles north-west of Anguilla and 125 miles north-west of Antigua, astride the
channel joining the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Captain Lake saw it, asked the master and lieutenants the name of the island, and they described it to him. It is small and jagged, crevices being cut by the sea washing away the coral rock and giving the appearance of creases in a hat. The only fresh water comes from rain lying in the coral rock; the only plants are prickly pear, a type of cactus. The island’s sides are steep and at first sight the island appears inaccessible to all but the limpets stuck to the rocks.

‘Captain Lake then ordered Jeffery to be landed upon that island,’ wrote the chronicler of the war. ‘Accordingly at 6 p.m., the poor fellow was placed in a boat, with the second lieutenant of the brig, Richard Cotton Mould, a midshipman and four seamen, and landed without shoes on his feet, or any other clothes than those on his back, and without even a biscuit for food.’

The author can vouch for the fact that it is impossible to walk twenty yards on Sombrero with bare feet without being crippled by the long, thin, sharp and almost invisible spines of the prickly pear, which if not removed at once (and one incautious step can mean twenty almost transparent spines stuck in the flesh) usually become septic. Yet Jeffery would have to seek water among the rocks, and the sun all the year round is so hot that half an hour’s exposure can cause bad burns.

‘Observing that his feet were cut by the rocks, Lt Mould gave him a pair of shoes, which he [Mould] had begged one of the men together with a knife, and his own and the midshipman’s pocket handkerchiefs for making signals. The lieutenant then advised this victim of tyranny and oppression to keep a sharp lookout for vessels, and pulled back to the Recruit.

‘Her captain’s vengeance being thus gratified, the brig filled and made sail from an island until then little known except as a landfall or point of bearing for navigators but,’ wrote the contemporary chronicler, William James, ‘subsequently blazed about in every quarter of the globe, and never named without any execration upon the (must we say?) British officer who had acted so inhuman a part.’

Some weeks later the Recruit put into Antigua and the brig’s officers made sure that the Commander-in-Chief at the Leeward Islands heard what had happened. He immediately sent for Lake, reprimanded him and ordered him to go straight back to Sombrero ‘and bring away the man if he should chance to be alive’.

By 11 February, two days short of two months after Jeffery had been marooned, the Recruit was anchored in nine fathoms off the western end of the mass of rock and both lieutenants, the master, two midshipmen and several seamen scrambled up and searched among the crags and slots. There was no sign of Jeffery: no piece of cloth, no sign that he had ever been on the island.

The officers returned to the Recruit and reported to Captain Lake, who now had to deal with Jeffery’s name in the muster book. He could have put ‘D’ in the appropriate column, for ‘discharged’ - to another ship, or to hospital; ‘D.D.’ for ‘discharged dead’, meaning that he had died or been killed. Or he could put ‘R’ for ‘run’ or deserted. True to his type, Lake put down ‘R’, and the Recruit sailed once again.

Lake was relieved of the command of the Recruit by Captain Charles Napier, who almost immediately distinguished himself in battle with the 18-gun French Diligence, tackled a 74-gun ship a few months after that in a confused action off The Saintes, and by January 1809 was distinguishing himself in the capture of Martinique.

Early next year reports began reaching London from Marblehead, across the Atlantic in Massachusetts, that a former British seaman in the Royal Navy, once marooned on Sombrero, was now working there as a blacksmith. The Admiralty, learning about the episode for the first time, acted very quickly - it promptly ordered Captain Lake to face a court martial, which assembled on board the Gladiator at Portsmouth on 5 February 1810, almost exactly two years after he had gone back to Sombrero and found it deserted.

In a trial lasting two days Lake was accused of marooning a seaman, and he admitted it, although he claimed that he ‘thought the island was inhabited’ - a claim proved untrue when he admitted that he had not recognised the island and had to get the details from his officers. The court heard the story only from Lake -Jeffery was still in Massachusetts - and the man condemned himself: he was found guilty and sentenced to be dismissed from the Navy, a sentence confirmed by the Admiralty.

In the meantime orders were crossing the Atlantic to send Jeffery home; general anger was expressed in Britain by people ranging from admirals’ wives to Members of Parliament, some of whom were genuinely outraged and some looking for a cause to champion. Jeffery, now twenty-one years old, was taken up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the 10-gun schooner Thistle was waiting for him, and her captain, Lieutenant Peter Proctor, had orders to bring him at once to Portsmouth. By the time Jeffery arrived back in England, Lake had been a civilian for nearly six months, pointed out as a man who, but for what seemed a miracle, would have been a cold-blooded murderer.

The Admiralty questioned Jeffery and discovered that as soon as the Recruit’s sails dropped over the horizon he began looking for food and water on the bare and jagged rock. There were a few small pools of stagnant rainwater, but no food; he did not know that the spine-covered prickly pear cactus could be opened and eaten. He climbed down the almost sheer sides of the island and found limpets, which he managed to prise off and eat.

Occasionally he saw the sails of ships passing, but none came close: the unusual-shaped Sombrero was used as a landmark for ships from the Atlantic bound south to the Leeward or Windward Islands, or south-west through the Anegada Passage, one of the main entrances to the Caribbean. After seven days of living on limpets and lapping up water from the tiny rock pools, most of it brackish from
spray, Jeffery was almost too weak to crawl; the sun had scorched his face and arms, the glare left him dazed. Finally, and almost unbelievably, on the ninth day he saw a schooner passing northwards and quite close. Frantic, he waved the handkerchiefs left him by Lieutenant Mould, and they were seen, the schooner sailing into the lee of the island and anchoring.

She was the Adams, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, and Jeffery was soon on board being fed and telling his story to the master, John Dennis, who agreed to take him to Marblehead, to which the Adams was bound. Once on American soil, with sympathetic ears to hear of his experiences, Jeffery set up as a blacksmith, but in time his story was printed in the local paper, and copied by others, until eventually it was heard by the British minister, who in turn reported it to London.

On 21 October 1810, exactly five years to the day after the Battle of Trafalgar, Jeffery arrived in London by coach and the next day he reported to the Admiralty, where he found himself telling his story to the Lords Commissioners. They at once ordered the removal of the ‘R’ put against his name by Lake, which meant that, apart from not being listed as a deserter, he was owed more than three years’ accumulated pay (at £1 16s 6d a month). In addition, a group of friends of the former Captain Lake collected a sum of money for him, so he went back to Polperro a comparatively wealthy young man with a regular discharge in his pocket for good measure.

The cat of nine tails was a product of its times. To understand how it formed a part of the history of the Royal Navy it is necessary to view it through the eyes of society at the time it was used, otherwise any judgement is distorted because attitudes towards punishment change every decade. The author spent the whole of his school life in an atmosphere where any master could cane, and half of them did, yet when pupils were given the choice (‘six whacks or a hundred lines’) almost invariably they chose the ‘whacks’ rather than spend some of the evening copying out a hundred lines from a dull textbook.

With flogging, the seaman was given no choice, although it must be remembered that while his brother on land could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief from another’s pocket a seaman could be hanged only for mutiny, treason or desertion. On land a man could be given long jail sentences for trivial offences - and put in jail for debt if his creditor felt so inclined. For most of the war, it was usual at Newgate jail for twenty prisoners to be kept day and night in a cell measuring twenty feet by fifteen. Many years after the war the Inspectors of Prisons called Newgate ‘a monstrous place’.

For an offence bringing a seaman a dozen or so lashes, his brother on land might spend a year in jail or be transported for life. This did not ease the pain of a flogging, but it provides some much-needed perspective on discipline in the Navy, especially when it is remembered that many men avoided a few years in cramped cells by joining the Navy in the first place. That in turn conjures up a picture of jailbirds becoming seamen, which is true - except that often the jailbirds were not toughened criminals but men like sturdy poachers caught once again with a couple of brace of pheasants slung over their shoulders, or bricklayers celebrating on a Saturday night by tossing argumentative plasterers out of the inn and breaking furniture as well as the peace.

An agile young poacher soon made a good topman; a hefty brawler avoiding six months in jail by joining the Navy could become a handy focsleman; the nimble fingers of a pickpocket were better employed in one of the King’s ships tucking in a splice than picking oakum at one of the King’s jails.

The cat of nine tails used in the Navy was heavier than that used by the Army and the reason may have been that, up to 1806, the Regulations and Instructions laid down that a captain could not ‘inflict any punishment beyond twelve lashes upon his bare back’. For any offence deserving more a seaman was supposed to be court-martialled. The regulation was largely ignored; captains noted in their journals that they had awarded more. One captain in 1795 recorded fifteen floggings in his journals in nine months- five of 12 lashes, seven of 24, one of 36, and two of 72 (for desertion). The journals went to the Admiralty, where they were inspected, but nothing was done, and it was in many cases an advantage to the seamen. In the case of the two men given 72 lashes each, the ship was in the West Indies, and bringing them to trial would delay the ship and require at least five captains to form the court. It might take several weeks to assemble the court, and during that time the men would be under arrest. But much more important was the fact that a court would certainly award a much heavier sentence ‘ the 300 lashes for desertion awarded George Melvin, a seaman from the Antelope, was typical. As though recognising the advantage of speedy though probably lighter punishment, in 1806 the Admiralty lifted the limit on captains. The new Regulations and Instructions said only that a captain was never to order punishment ‘without sufficient cause, nor ever with greater severity than the offence shall really deserve’.

The naval cat of nine tails was made in a traditional way. The handle was usually made of rope in wartime (sometimes, after the war, it was made of wood), about two feet long and an inch in diameter - the size of the average broom handle.
The nine tails were made of line a quarter of an inch in diameter and each, two feet long, was secured to the rope handle, usually by tucking three tails into each of the three strands of the rope and putting on a whipping or turk’s head to secure them. Such a cat weighed thirteen or fourteen ounces.

There was a ritual attached to a flogging. A man was seldom flogged on the day that he was accused. He would be brought before the captain, his offence would be described, the details heard, and his guilt determined. If the captain sentenced the man to a flogging it would normally be set for the next day and a bosun’s mate would start to make a new cat of nine tails.

The same cat was never used twice. The sight of the bosun’s mate cutting up the lengths of rope and line, making the tucks and putting on the whippings, no doubt had its deterrent effect, and he finished the job by covering the handle with red baize and making a red baize bag, into which the cat was put until it was needed.

The tradition of carrying Out the flogging the following day was a good one because it gave the captain time to reflect on the punishment. Lashes were usually awarded in dozens, although there is at least one case of eighteen being awarded: the Niger, Captain Edward Griffith on 26 December 1797, logged:

‘Thomas Wright, seaman, was punished with eighteen lashes for plundering the prisoners’ (from the French privateer Deiphine, captured off Bolt Head on Christmas Day). Some captains awarded fewer than a dozen.

Curiously enough it was not the actual number of lashes that led to the worst mutiny in a single ship in the Royal Navy but the frequency of the floggings. When Captain Wilkinson commanded the Hermione he ordered 72 lashes for each of two men. At the same time Captain Pigot commanded the Success on the same station. Wilkinson in nine months ordered fifteen floggings in the Hermione while Pigot, during the same nine months, ordered more than seventy in the Success. Only five of Wilkinson’s fifteen were for a dozen. Pigot awarded only one of four dozen and one of three in his total; the majority were for a dozen lashes. Yet when the captains exchanged ships and Pigot started his more-frequent-but-fewer-lashes in the Hermione it was he who was murdered by his crew.

Part of the reason was the irrational nature of Pigot’s punishment: if a man decided to get drunk on a Saturday night at sea by hoarding his tot, he expected to get a dozen lashes the following Monday: that was, in effect, the going rate. If a man deserted he knew he risked being hanged and would certainly get at least 300 lashes. But Pigot played havoc with these accepted values: he gave a man 36 lashes for desertion; nine days later another man was given only 24 for the same offence. Ten days later a man received only 12 lashes for desertion - and on the same day a man received 12 for disobedience. Thus he showed his men, on 12 March 1795, that disobedience and desertion were equal in his mind. A fortnight later he awarded one man 24 for mutiny, another 24 for disobedience, and three others 24 each for drunkenness. So the men saw they could mutiny and get only the same punishment as they would if they were found drunk. Then, a month later, a man who only attempted to desert was given the most lashes that Pigot had ever ordered, four dozen.

Pigot’s inconsistent punishment meant that the men’s sense of values was given a violent shock. Throughout the Navy some men regularly got drunk and were regularly punished; it was as though an agreement existed - being quietly drunk meant a dozen lashes, and many men thought it worth it. Men rarely deserted, though: they had seen men flogged through the fleet, with drums beating; they had seen the smoke of a gun disperse to show a deserter dangling from a noose at the yardarm. Except that suddenly, under the new captain in the Hermione, it was all jumbled together ‘drunkenness, desertion, disobeying a petty officer, behaving mutinously towards an officer - it brought a dozen or so on your back. Except that suddenly someone received four dozen lashes for attempting to desert, something for which several men who had lately been caught after initially succeeding received only a dozen.

Yet the Pigots and Lakes were rare; in more than twenty years of bitter war when Britain fought France at sea all the time, Spain most of the time, and America some of the time, the Navy threw up only half a dozen or so Pigots, an average of less than one every four years, at a time when there were always more than 500 ships at sea.

There were harsh captains, men who enforced strict discipline, but they were rarely unpopular among the men for the simple reason that with such captains they knew where they stood. A good example was Edward Hamilton, who won a knighthood when he cut out the Hermione and was then dismissed the service, as mentioned earlier, for seizing up men in the rigging. In the Hermione affair he had received a head wound which may have unbalanced him, because Admiral Jackson, who first served under Hamilton as a midshipman, wrote:

‘I should be loth to say what my opinion of Sir Edward Hamilton might have become had I stopped much longer in the Trent. As each new day passed, so did I conceive new terrors of this man. A more uncompromising disciplinarian did not exist, or one less scrupulous in exacting the due fulfillment of his orders, whatever they were.’

Jackson wrote that, ‘The Trent, I must admit, was in excellent order; indeed, as regards discipline and the general efficiency of her company, she was equal, if not superior, to any other frigate afloat; but those qualities had all been prompted at no small sacrifice of humanity. No sailor was allowed to walk from one place to another on deck, and woe betide an unfortunate fellow who halted in his run aloft.’

Yet Jackson’s next captain was Robert Fanshawe, in the Carysfort, who ‘increased his kindness by making me always write my journals in his cabin, where I could be overlooked and instructed’. Fanshawe was, incidentally, less than twenty-one years old at the time and Jackson sixteen. ‘In addition to his abilities as a commander,’ Jackson added, ‘he possessed all the attributes of a gentleman and was deservedly esteemed. As regards the ship herself, we were also specially favoured, as she was believed to be the handsomest frigate yet built by English hands.’

Jackson’s next captain, George Bettesworth, commanding the 14-gun St Lucia, was only twenty years old and, by the time he was killed in action three years later, had been wounded twenty-four times. He was, Jackson wrote, ‘a kind and considerate man’, but was replaced by a man whose name ‘would soil the paper upon which it was written.., low objectionable fellow, who would at one moment be cracking unseemly jokes with the least on board, and the next assuming the consequence of an admiral . . . a queer mixture of gun-room officer and a marine store dealer. Whenever he could he cheated the men of their rations right and left and did not hesitate to deprive them openly of their legal quantity when the meat was being weighed out.

‘He was accordingly watched like a cat in the larder, and it was amusing to observe the men scrutinising his conduct at the scales. ‘‘Please, sir, take your thumb off the meat; you’re pressing down the scales.” ’

Yet a rough and ready justice caught up with him: he had been challenged to a duel by Bettesworth and refused, and later challenged by another officer he had insulted. He again refused, and was regarded as a coward and ignored by all officers he met. Subsequently he learned that he was to be court-martialled for his peculations and shot himself.

Jackson’s later captains were generally good - Captain Nairne ‘was essentially a kind and considerate man to everyone under him’. Another left a mark on a hungry young midshipman because when inviting the ‘young gentlemen’ to breakfast he sent them away little heavier than when they sat down. Captain John Shortland in the Junon ‘bore the character of an austere disciplinarian’, but Jackson liked him.

Young Robert Hay’s first captain was Cuthbert Collingwood in the Culloden. ‘How attentive he was to the health and comfort and happiness of his crew! A man who could not be happy under him could have been happy nowhere; a look of displeasure from him was as bad as a dozen at the gangway from another man.

The ceremony of a flogging began with the order for all hands to muster aft ‘to witness punishment’. A heavy grating taken from one of the hatches was put up vertically at the gangway in some ships.

The officers in full uniform stood to one side, the marines lined up aft, and the prisoner was brought on deck with a guard of two marines or the master-at-arms and his corporals. The bosun’s mates stood by, one of them holding the red baize bag containing the cat of nine tails.

Finally the captain came up on deck, bringing the slim volume of the Articles of War. Although the actual routine varied from ship to ship, he usually related the man’s offence and, while all officers and men removed their hats, read Out the particular Article of War that had been broken.

Quite frequently the Article was the thirty-sixth, generally known as the ‘Captain’s Cloak’ because it covered any offence that an inventive seaman might contrive that was not covered in the previous thirty-five. ‘All other crimes not capital,’ it said, ‘committed by any person or persons in the Fleet, which are not mentioned in this Act, or for which no punishment is hereby directed to be indicated, shall be punished according to the laws and customs in such cases used at sea.’

With the offence and article specified, the captain awarded the punishment. The man’s shirt was stripped off and a leather apron tied round his waist, protecting the lower part of his back. The next order was ‘seize him up’, and the man was spreadeagled against the grating, his ankles and wrists being seized to it with pieces of spunyarn. In some ships a man was seized to a capstan bar. The bar protruded horizontally from the barrel of the capstan like the spoke of a huge cartwheel at the height of a man’s chest, and his arms could be lashed along it. The bosun’s mate then took the cat from the bag and, at the order, laid on a dozen lashes. If the punishment was more than a dozen, a second bosun’s mate laid on the next dozen.

Captain Frederic Chamier describes how as a midshipman he saw his first flogging. ‘The Captain gave the order ‘Give him a dozen There was an awful stillness; I felt the flesh creep upon my bones, and I shivered and shook like a dog in a wet sack. All eyes were directed towards the prisoner, who looked over his shoulder at the preparations of the boatswain’s mate to inflict the dozen: the latter drew his fingers through the tails of the cat, ultimately holding the nine ends in his left hand, as the right was raised to inflict the lash. They fell with a whizzing sound as they passed through the air, and left behind the reddened mark of sudden inflammation....’At the conclusion of the dozen I heard the unwilling order [from the captain], ‘Another boatswain’s mate!’ The fresh executioner pulled off his coat.’ The prisoner had said nothing during the first dozen, but ‘on the first cut of his new and merciless punisher, he writhed his back in acknowledgement of the pain; the second stripe was followed by a sigh; the third by an ejaculation; and the fourth produced an expression of a hope of pardon. At the conclusion of the dozen, this was granted, and the prisoner released.’

Because the cat was a standard weight and each blow was struck with roughly the same strength, ‘the effect of a dozen lashes varied only with the type of victim; some men were more sensitive to pain; others had more pride, a sense of honour, which was damaged. Three dozen lashes could kill one man; another would survive 200. Probably the greatest indictment of indiscriminate flogging was that the number of lashes were ordered on the assumption that every man had the same kind of physique and personality, making no allowance for the sensitive man or the type who was by nature tough and brutal and who would be a criminal in any age or environment.’

The foregoing was written after experiments with an actual cat of nine tails weighing thirteen ounces, using pieces of wood lashed to a shipyard trestle. The first piece of wood was 4-inch by 2-inch pitch-pine which was unsupported for only fifteen inches, and a man 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing 152 lb broke it in half with a blow intended only to try out his stance. A second piece, I inch by 1 inch, free of knots, broke into three, and a third piece, 1 inch by 1 inch, broke in half at the second stroke. It was clear from these experiments that a man
standing braced but unsupported would have been knocked down; a man lashed to a grating would be severely bruised.

The very few existing descriptions by men who experienced floggings are so different as to be almost contradictory. One man described it as ‘Nothing but an 0, a few 0 my Gods, and then you can put on your shirt’. But another man, a soldier flogged with the lighter Army cat, wrote that after the first two or three strokes ‘The pain in my lungs was more severe, I thought, than on my back. I felt as if i would burst in the internal parts of my body.’

After two dozen lashes with a naval cat, according to one eyewitness, ‘the lacerated back looks inhuman; it resembles roasted meat burnt nearly black before a scorching fire’.

A flogging through the Fleet as a spectacle approached something arranged by a Roman emperor, and could be ordered only by sentence of a court martial. A typical sentence was that on Marine John Briscow, of the Diadem, who was sentenced to receive ‘200 lashes from ship to ship, and to be imprisoned six months in the Marshalsea’, while a seaman was later sentenced to 500 lashes and a year in the Marshalsea.

The Admiralty was of course much more concerned with the deterrent effect that such a flogging might have on others than the actual punishment for a particular man. At the time it was administered there would probably be ten ships of the line in the anchorage, quite apart from frigates and smaller vessels, so that 8,000 or more men would be watching from the ships of the line alone. As soon as the court’s sentence was confirmed by the Admiralty the admiral gave orders to the captain of the flagship. The man concerned was usually held prisoner in the flagship, whose captain was told: ‘You are hereby required and directed to hoist a yellow flag at the fore top-masthead of his Majesty’s ship under your command, and fire a gun at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, as a signal for the boats of the fleet to assemble alongside of his Majesty’s ship , to attend the said punishment.’

The captains of all the other ships were ordered: ‘When the signal for punishment is made tomorrow morning, you are to send a lieutenant with a boat manned and armed from the ship under your command to his Majesty’s ship -, in order to attend the punishment.’

The total number of lashes was divided by the number of ships present, and if they did not make an even number the extra were always given alongside the man’s own ship, whose captain was told officially of the man’s punishment, the court ‘having sentenced him to receive - lashes on his bare back, with a cat-of-nine tails, alongside such of his Majesty’s ships and vessels at this port.’

The order added that ‘You are hereby required and directed, when the signal is made for that purpose on board the [flagship] tomorrow morning.., to cause one of your lieutenants of the ship you command to attend and see the said sentence put in execution, by the said [prisoner] receiving - lashes alongside such of his Majesty’s ships named in the margin.’

It was unlikely that the whole sentence could be carried out in one day, and another order to the captain of the prisoner’s ship from the admiral said that ‘as I would not have more of the said punishment inflicted upon him at one time than he is able to bear, and as the lieutenant may not be a proper judge of the prisoner’s case, you are hereby required and directed to cause the surgeon of [your] ship to attend in the boat with the lieutenant for that purpose, as well as one of his mates, in the long boat, with the prisoner, and you are to give the lieutenant directions to stop the punishment until further orders when the surgeon shall give it as his opinion that he cannot bear any more with safety, and return on board with the prisoner.’

That did not mean that the rest of the sentence would be forgotten: the man would be kept in the care of the surgeon until he was recovered enough to have the remainder, and was technically still the prisoner of the provost marshal, who had also been ordered to attend the punishment. He was told ‘to read publicly the copy of the sentence ... alongside each ship respectively; and when the said prisoner shall have received the whole of the punishment adjudged him, you are to release and deliver him to the Commanding Officer of the –.’

When the punishment day came, and the yellow flag was hoisted on board the flagship and a gun fired, the boats from all the ships headed for the flagship, looking like a swarm of water beetles. The flagship’s boat was ready: a grating was already rigged up, tripod fashion, and as soon as the time approached for the punishment to begin marines climbed down into the boat and with them was a drummer, his drum usually covered with a piece of black cloth to muffle it. The prisoner was brought down, followed by the lieutenant, surgeon and surgeon’s mate of his own ship, the provost marshal, and one of the bosun’s mates of the flagship, carrying a red baize bag containing the cat.

By now at least a couple of dozen boats would be surrounding the flagship, and at the set time the flagship’s captain shouted down to the provost marshal to read out the sentence, and as soon as this was done, ordered the punishment to begin. Once the flagship’s share of the lashes had been laid on, the man would be given a blanket to cover himself and the boat would be cast off, to be rowed to the next ship.

The drummer standing in the bow would begin the slow steady beat of the Rogue’s March, and the rest of the boats would join up astern in a long column. At the next ship the crew would already be mustered - some admirals insisted they manned the rigging - and as soon as the flagship’s boat arrived alongside it was secured and the provost marshal read out the sentence once again. The captain would then order one of his own bosun’s mates down into the boat to lay on his ship’s share of the lashes, and as soon as this was done the provost marshal ordered the boat to proceed to the third ship on his list.

The steady thumping of a drum carries a considerable distance across water, and the leading boat was always very obvious because of the bright coats of the marines and the tripod of the grating, quite apart from all the boats following astern. The ships were always some distance apart, and the long row between them gave the prisoner a little time to recover. William Spavens records how he saw one such flogging, when the sentence of 600 lashes was carried out at the rate of 200 lashes at a time, once a fortnight. ‘We attended there through the process of the first day,’ he wrote, ‘when one of our Marines on guard in the bow of the boat fell asleep and lost the bayonet off the mizzle [sic] of his piece, and narrowly escaped getting a dozen for his offence.’

The men’s attitude towards flogging was that it was often necessary and it is significant that in the Great Mutiny flgging was not mentioned once in the mutineers’ list of complaints and demands. Even while the fleet at the Nore and Spithead were under the command of the mutineers, they ordered floggings.

Captain Glascock noted that the mutineers ‘still felt it necessary to maintain the discipline of the service on board, in the same way they had been accustomed to see it preserved under the old regime; and during the period of the mutiny there were repeated instances of severer corporal punishment on board the two fleets than would have taken place for similar offences under the then existing regulations, severe as it must be acknowledged those regulations comparatively were.’

There seems little reason to argue with Captain Francis Liardet, who wrote: ‘The best conducted seamen in the Navy will now candidly tell you that in ships where the cat is not used on proper occasions, that they are the most uncomfortable vessels to sail in, as the willing and hard-working men do the work of the lazy ones.

Captain Chamier, against too much flogging but seeing no other way of maintaining discipline with the Navy as it was, wrote: ‘I have known a man faint before he was seized up; but, although I have seen four hundred lashes applied, and at each dozen a fresh boatswain’s mate, yet I never knew a man who died of the punishment in my life. I speak of this merely to mention that naval punishment although unquestionably severe, and by no means pleasant either to order or to receive, are not of the dreadful, merciless, flagitious order so frequently asserted.’

This article is from Life in Nelson’s Navy, by Dudley Pope