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- CHAPTER LXXXVIII.
FLOGGING THROUGH THE FLEET.
The flogging of an old man like Ushant, most landsmen will probably
regard with abhorrence. But though, from peculiar circumstances, his
case occasioned a good deal of indignation among the people of the
Neversink, yet, upon its own proper grounds, they did not denounce it.
Man-of-war’s-men are so habituated to what landsmen would deem
excessive cruelties, that they are almost reconciled to inferior
severities.
And here, though the subject of punishment in the Navy has been
canvassed in previous chapters, and though the thing is every way a
most unpleasant and grievous one to enlarge upon, and though I
painfully nerve myself to it while I write, a feeling of duty compels
me to enter upon a branch of the subject till now undiscussed. I would
not be like the man, who, seeing an outcast perishing by the roadside,
turned about to his friend, saying, “Let us cross the way; my soul so
sickens at this sight, that I cannot endure it.”
There are certain enormities in this man-of-war world that often secure
impunity by their very excessiveness. Some ignorant people will refrain
from permanently removing the cause of a deadly malaria, for fear of
the temporary spread of its offensiveness. Let us not be of such. The
more repugnant and repelling, the greater the evil. Leaving our women
and children behind, let us freely enter this Golgotha.
Years ago there was a punishment inflicted in the English, and I
believe in the American Navy, called _keel-hauling_—a phrase still
employed by man-of-war’s-men when they would express some signal
vengeance upon a personal foe. The practice still remains in the French
national marine, though it is by no means resorted to so frequently as
in times past. It consists of attaching tackles to the two extremities
of the main-yard, and passing the rope under the ship’s bottom. To one
end of this rope the culprit is secured; his own shipmates are then
made to run him up and down, first on this side, then on that—now
scraping the ship’s hull under water—anon, hoisted, stunned and
breathless, into the air.
But though this barbarity is now abolished from the English and
American navies, there still remains another practice which, if
anything, is even worse than _keel-hauling_. This remnant of the Middle
Ages is known in the Navy as “_flogging through the fleet_.” It is
never inflicted except by authority of a court-martial upon some
trespasser deemed guilty of a flagrant offence. Never, that I know of,
has it been inflicted by an American man-of-war on the home station.
The reason, probably, is, that the officers well know that such a
spectacle would raise a mob in any American seaport.
By XLI. of the Articles of War, a court-martial shall not “for any one
offence not capital,” inflict a punishment beyond one hundred lashes.
In cases “not capital” this law may be, and has been, quoted in
judicial justification of the infliction of more than one hundred
lashes. Indeed, it would cover a thousand. Thus: One act of a sailor
may be construed into the commission of ten different transgressions,
for each of which he may be legally condemned to a hundred lashes, to
be inflicted without intermission. It will be perceived, that in any
case deemed “capital,” a sailor under the above Article, may legally be
flogged to the death.
But neither by the Articles of War, nor by any other enactment of
Congress, is there any direct warrant for the extraordinary cruelty of
the mode in which punishment is inflicted, in cases of flogging through
the fleet. But as in numerous other instances, the incidental
aggravations of this penalty are indirectly covered by other clauses in
the Articles of War: one of which authorises the authorities of a
ship—in certain indefinite cases—to correct the guilty “_according to
the usages of the sea-service_.”
One of these “usages” is the following:
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