Discipline





Discipline
Starting
Flogging
Hanging
Other Punishments
Cat-O'-Nine Tails
The Effects of a Flogging
Marooning





Discipline in the Royal Navy of Nelsons time is often seen as a harsh and unbending code of 'starting', flogging and hanging. But to take punishment out of the context of the times is to miss the comparison between life on land and life at sea during the Georgian period.
The Georgian code of justice was known, with good reason, as the bloody code. On land a man could be given a long jail sentence or transported for life for relatively minor offences , he could be hanged for stealing as little as a handkerchief. Newgate prison routinely kept its prisoners 20 to a cell measuring twenty feet by fifteen. At sea the rules that the men obeyed were known as the Articles of War. A man could only be hanged for mutiny, treason or desertion. Sodomy was also a capital offence, but few men were prosecuted or hanged for it, and it seems likely that it was a rare occurance on a war ship. The open living space of the men providing few opportunities for privacy.
At sea discipline was relatively easy to maintain. The sailors knew that their lives depended on working together to stop the ship from foundering or being taken by the enemy. This may partly explain why it was possible for a 20 year old to command a ship of experienced seamen, (Nelson was not quite 21 when he was made a post captain, and he was not an exception) as long as the captain didn't endanger their safety the crew were willing to work for him. In port the job was harder, and frequently senior officers would think twice before going below decks.








Starting



Starting' a man was to hit him across the back with a rattan cane or short length of rope, usually done by the bosuns mate. It was used as a quick punishment for a man not thought to be pulling his weight or moving fast enough once an order was given. The practice of starting was greatly resented by the men, its use was arbitrary and very dependent on the captain. The Admiralty banned its use in 1809, after the court martial of Captain Robert Corbett. In fact most captains had already ceased the practice by then.








Flogging



In theory a captain could only order a maximum of 12 lashes, any more was supposed to be dealt with by a court martial. This rule was routinely broken quite openly, with captains writing in their journals the number of lashes awarded for each flogging. Up to 72 lashes would be unlikely to attract the attention of the Admiralty.
The men accepted this, the punishments handed out by court martial tended to be much more severe, possibly as a deterent to asking for a court martial. George Melvin of the Antelope received 300 lashes for desertion from a court martial. The limit on captains was removed in 1806, the new regulations stated that a captain was not to order punishment 'without sufficient cause, nor even with greater severity than the offence shall really deserve.' As a punishment flogging seems to have been fairly ineffective, even as a deterent, with the same man frequently being flogged for the same offence time and again. A harsh or sadistic captain could make the crews life a misery, and such ships tended to see a rise in desertions.








Hanging



A seaman could only be hanged for mutiny, treason or desertion. Hangings, possibly due to the shortage of men, were rare events. A mutineer would be hanged from the Yard arm of the ship. If he was well liked his crew mates might be able to haul him up fast enough to break his neck. Occasionally a man would jump overboard to avoid the slow strangulation of the noose (Richard Parker the Nore mutineer jumped, rather than strangle)





Other Punishments



For a thief the favoured punishment was to to run the gauntlet. Thieves were particularly unpopular with the men, who had nowhere to lock up their possessions. The offender was walked slowly through two lines of men who were armed with ropes with a knot in the end. They would then beat the man as he passed down the line. Major theft was punished by flogging, and only for this offence was the cat knotted, three knots at three inch intervals.
If the ships boys were caught up to trouble they might be made to' kiss the gunners daughter.' They were bent over a cannon and caned on the backside. The gunner was the officer in charge of the boys welfare. A man could also be seized up to the shrouds, that is tied up in the rigging and left to the mercy of the weather, for however long the officer who ordered the punishment felt the man should remain there.








Cat-O'-Nine Tails



The cat was used in both the Navy and the Army, although the Navy type was a lot heavier and, according to one of the leading authorities on naval jurisprudence writing in 1813, "It has been the ancient practice and usage in the Navy for the commanders to have the cat-of-nine-tails made of a cord of a certain weight and texture, that the same force or pwer applied to one lash, is equal to four of the common cat used in the Army." He declared that "one dozen of lashes, according to the present mode of discipline, applied to the bare back by a boatswain's mate, furnished with a naval cat-of-nine-tails, is equivalent to at least fifty lashes laid on by a drummer with a military cat." The explanation he gives for the difference in the sizes and weights of the cats is simple: since the naval captains were by regulations limited (before 1806) to ordering a maximum of a dozen lashes, the used heavier tails.
The naval cat-o-nine-tails consisted of a handle about two feet long, usually made of rope but sometimes of wood, and an inch in diameter--about as thick as the average broom handle. To one end of the handle were secured the nine "tails," each two feet long and made of line a quarter of an inch in diameter--a fraction less then the thickness of a normal pencil. The tails were never knotted unless the man was being punished for theft, in which case each tail was knotted every three inches or so.
A rope-handled cat weighed between thirteen and fourteen ounces. These dimensions and weight were general and probably varied slightly: one of the last cat-o'-nine-tails used in the Navy--on board H.M.S. Malacca in 1867--is covered in red baize and is two geet long. Each tail is also two feet long and a quarter of an inch in diameter.
When wielded by a strong man one lash from the cat would knock down the victim from the sheer impact, and the boatswain's mate, who had to pull all his strength into each blow, was replaced after he had delivered only a dozen lashes.
Obviously the ca-o'-nine-tails, being of a standard weight, was administered with roughly the same power; thus 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 indescriminate flogging was that the number of lashes were ordered on the assumption that every man had the same kind of hysique and personality, making no allowances 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.
To one man it was "nothing but an O, a few O my Gods, and then you can put on your shirt"; but another man, a soldier and flogged with a lighter cat-o'-nine-tails, 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...I put my tongue between my teeth, held it there, and almost bit it in almost two pieces. What with the blood from my tongue, and my lips, which I had also bitten, and the blood from my lungs, or some other internal part, ruptured by the writhing agony, I was almost choked, and became black in the face."
An eyewitness said that after two dozen lashes "the lacerated back looks inhuman; it resembles roasted meat burnt nearly black before a scorching fire." One authority said that "some captains boasted of having left-handed boatswain's mates who could cross the cuts of the right-handed man."








The Effect of a Flogging



The dimensions of one of the last cat-o'-nine-tails used in the Royal Navy--in 1867 on board the steam corvette Malacca--were taken. The handle, of wood covered in red baize, had been weakened by woodworm and could not be used for experiments. Using a similar cat made to the same specification using a rope handle instead of a wooden handle as described in contemporary documents. The rope was 1-in. diameter manilla, two feet long. One end was whipped and nine pieces of 1-4-in. diameter (3/4-in. circumference) line were spliced into the other end, leaving tails two feet long. A Turk's head knot of the same line was placed over the splice and sailmaker's whippings were put on the ends of the tails. The completed cat weighed thirteen ounces.
Using a five-barred shipyard wooden trestle as a "grating," the cat was then tested on pieces of wood of various sizes. The horizontal bars of the trestle were made of a 5-in. by 2-in. wood spaced twenty inches apart measuring from centre to centre. A piece of 1/2-in. by 2-in. pitchpine, free of knots, three feet long, was lashed vertically to two bars of the trestle with an equal amount overlapping the bars top and bottom. The centre of this piece of wood was midway between the top and bottom bar and 4 ft. 6 in. from the ground (the height at which blows would fall on an average man's shoulders when flogged)' and was unsupported by the horizontal bars for fifteen inches.
The person wielding the cat was 5 ft. 10 in. tall and weighed 152 pounds. He intended to strike the centre of the pitchpine and made a preliminary swing with the cat, using only about two-thirds of his strenght, to test the distance and his stance. The piece of pitchpine broke in two pieces and it was estimated the nine tails had spread about three inches at their widest at the point of impact.
A piece of 3/4-in. by 3/4-in. pitchpine of the same length and free of knots was substituted, and a blow delivered using the man's full strength. The wood broke into three pieces. The middle piece, where the tails hit, was five inches long and landed seventeen feet from the trestle--the remaining two pieces were of course lashed to the bars.
A piece of 1-in. by 1-in. pitchpine of the same length and also free of knots was then substituted. The first blow of the cat had no apparent effect and the tails appeared to spread about three inches. The second blow broke the wood into pieces, the break being four and a half inches long.
Each piece of wood, although unsupported for fifteen inches, was of course supported for five inches at the top and five inches at the bottom by the bars of the trestle.
Pitchpine was chosen for the experiments because it has the highest modulus of elasticity of any readily available wood: 850, compared with 730 for larch, 730 for American elm and 450 for English oak. Its tensile strenght is 2.1, compared with 1.9 for larch, 4.1 for American elm and 3.4 for English oak. Since one was trying to measure the impact of a lash, the most important factor was the modulus of elasticity.
So much for the effect on the wood. What about the effect on a man? It was clear that a man standing braced but unsupported would have been knocked down by one blow. The effect on a man lashed to a grating, unable to "give" with the blow, can only by guessed, but from the above experiments it is certain that one lash would break the skin and severe bruising would result.









Marooning





On the many wicked deeds attributed to pirates, there is one which has a secure foundation, and that is the marooning of victims on desert islands. It was particularly common among the pirates in the West Indies.
Marooning was also used among the pirates themselves as a punishment for certain offenses, such as deserting the ship or quarters in battle, or for stealing from other pirates. The second of the eleven articles decreed that if any pirates defrauded the crew of money, jewels, or plate, they were to be punished with marooning. On one occasion Blackbeard made use of marooning as a means of ridding himself of some of his crew. Following a successful raid on Charleston, South Carolina, he decided to disband his fleet and keep the plunder for himself. He ran two of his ships aground and escaped in the sloop used as a teneder to his warship Queen Anne's Revenge. He then took seventeen of his crew and marooned them "upon a small sandy island, about a league from the main, where there was neither bird, beast of herb for their subsistence...."
A description of privateers using marooning as a method of settling differences can be found in the deposition of Robert Dangerfield, which was recorded at Carolina in 1684. Dangerfield joined the crew of a barque commanded by Jeremy Rendell which set sail from Jamaica on a privateering voyage. They made for the Bay of Honduras, where a dispute arose among the crew. Rendell and three men were for going to the Bay of Campeche, but the rest of the crew, headed by John Graham, the ship's doctor, were determined to head across the Atlantic to the coast of Guinea. The majority rule prevailed, and the unfortunate Rendell and his supporters were put ashore "upon an island, giving them a turtle net and a canoe with their arms to shift for themselves, the said island not being inhabited and about 10 leagues from the main or any other inhabited place."
Although marooning could and sometimes did mean a slow death from starvation or exposure, it has acquired a romatic image which is far removed from the reality of the experience. Part of the reason for this is no doubt the association with islands, because islands have always had a powerful hold on peopl's imagination.
In particular, there is the image conjured up by desert islands. What is curious about this image is that, far from being an island with nothing but desert sand, for most of uss a desert island is a tropical island with sheltered bays and wooded hills; it is uninhabited, but it has palm trees and wild berried and parrots and goats. It would be lonely to be cast away on such an island, but it would be possible with some ingenuity to survive. This widely shared image is almost entirely due to a book which was first published in 1719 when its author was sixty years old. The full inscription on the title page of the first edition is as follows:
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on shore by Shipwrech, where-in all the Men perishec but himself. With An Account how he was at last strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself.












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