The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the British penal system developed nearly as numerous and creative forms of the whip as the Romans and all of the whips noted below were used mercilessly by prison guards, watchmen, beadles and others in authority, in an effort to keep the rabble in line.

  Flail.

  * * *

  CHAIN WHIP

  * * *

  Attached to a foot-long handle were three or four lengths of stout chain of the type now thought of as ‘towing chain’. The chain whip probably would not break the skin, but if wielded properly could certainly break ribs, arms and collar bones. This sort of device might be better classed as a weapon than an instrument of torture. It probably finds its inspiration in the military flail, which in turn was inspired by the agricultural threshing flail.

  Flail.

  * * *

  JAILER’S WHIP

  * * *

  With a short, stout wooden handle similar to that used on the chain whip, the jailer’s whip was fitted with a single, 8 or 10in length of chain with a 4–6oz cast iron or lead weight on the end. There is little doubt that if properly used it could crush a man’s skull like a ripe melon. As with the chain whip above, the inspiration behind this device can presumably be found in the military weapon of the flail, ball and chain, or morning-star.

  * * *

  BULLET WHIP

  * * *

  This interesting derivation on the standard whip was simplicity itself. Two or three dozen musket balls were sewn into a leather tube and attached either to a wooden handle as described above or to a simple leather strap that could be looped around the user’s wrist. When rolled up it could be concealed in a man’s pocket, but was as effective as a length of chain when put into action.

  BRITISH ARMY

  Although the British were as quick to flog disobedient soldiers as any other military establishment, it was not until the Mutiny Act of 1689 that flogging became a part of official British military policy. Standard sentence for minor infractions was established at ten lashes and anywhere up to thirty-nine could be administered for more serious transgressions. Naturally, as the whippings did little to eliminate insubordination, the number of prescribed lashes increased. By the early eighteenth century a deserter could be sentenced to as many as 900 lashes and if the desertion took place while the soldier was on guard or sentry duty it could go as high as 1,500. In October 1762, three men were convicted of dereliction of duty and sentenced, respectively to 800, 600 and 300 lashes. When such draconian sentences were imposed an army surgeon was always on hand to see that the man did not die of his wounds. If shock and blood loss became too severe, a temporary halt was called and the man taken to the base hospital where he could recover sufficiently before the remainder of the punishment was carried out. Most military floggings were carried out before the entire assembled company as a drummer beat time to keep the rhythm of the whip steady; the slower the drum beat, the longer the interval between lashes. Even as late as the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15), the Duke of Wellington himself remained convinced that his men were only effective so long as they lived under the threat of the lash. Wellington once remarked of his men: ‘They are the scum of the earth. I have no idea of any great effect being produced on British soldiers by anything but the fear of immediate corporal punishment’. A member of Wellington’s 1st Grenadier Guard regiment, having been convicted of insubordination, drunkenness on duty and refusal to surrender his musket to his superior officer was sentenced to 500 lashes. During the Peninsular War, carried out against Napoleon’s forces in Spain, a soldier was so seriously flogged for the offence of being dirty during an inspection that he died of his wounds several days later.

  As imitators of the British system, the American Colonial Army, under the Command of George Washington, suffered at least as harshly as their British counterparts. American soldiers could be mercilessly flogged for such minor infractions as wearing their hat at the wrong angle, ‘malingering’, swearing, not cleaning their musket properly, and not having their full compliment of ammunition.

  Military flogging as punishment for pillaging.

  BRITISH NAVY

  Throughout much of the seventeenth and eighteenth century the British Navy was made up not of recruits or volunteers, but of ‘impressed’ men. Press gangs wandered the streets and prisons looking for victims who could be ‘recruited’ by being abducted or bludgeoned into unconsciousness only to wake up aboard one of His Majesty’s ships already far from port. Considering the unwillingness of these recruits and the fact that they often had no idea what was expected of a sailor, brutal discipline was the tool of choice for teaching them the ropes – literally. When ordered to climb into the rigging, the last man up, and the last man back down, was often flogged.

  For this and other minor infractions, the victim was condemned to ‘Kiss the Gunner’s Daughter’ – that is to be bent across the barrel of a cannon while he was beaten with a 5ft length of rope, as thick as a man’s wrist, that had been coated with tar.

  Cat-o-ni ne tails.

  * * *

  CAT-O-NINE TAILS

  * * *

  Notorious among whips was the ‘cat-o-nine tails’, commonly used by the Royal Navy for formal punishments of all types. The condemned man was tied, spread-eagle, to an up-ended grating, lifted from one of the ship’s hatches, while officers and crew assembled on the main deck to witness the punishment. The punishment was usually administered by the Sergeant of Marines or, if there were no marines aboard, by the boatswain’s mate. It is worth noting that the cat could only be used on the open space of the main deck; the confined quarters and low ceilings of the lower decks allowed ‘no room to swing a cat’ – the origin of the common expression alluding to confined spaces. The ‘cat’ itself was a nine-thonged whip; each thong being about 2½ft in length and having two or three knots along the length of the thong. The nine braided tails cut through the skin and the knots ripped out pieces of flesh with each lash. After each lash, the punishment officer paused long enough to untangle the ‘tails’, lean back to apply the full force of his body to the work, take one step forward, sweeping his arm in an arc and bring the whip into contact with the miscreant. It has been said, by those who witnessed such punishment, that the bite of the cat was like having a furious hawk rip pieces of flesh from your back with its talons. The frequency with which this brutal weapon was used is made clear in the records of the Royal Navy. In 1759 alone there were four instances where ‘major’ floggings (more than two dozen lashes) with the cat took place. John Gazard received 600 lashes for insubordination, James Mansfield 400 for stealing, Thomas Golden and Francis French each receiving 350 lashes for desertion and ‘scandalous actions’, respectively.

  RUSSIA

  Russia may not have been infected with as many variations of the whip as the British or the Romans, but what they did have was the knout, introduced in the fifteenth century by Ivan III.

  * * *

  KNOUT

  * * *

  The knout was a one-handed whip like the cat-o-nine tails, but its three or four 2ft-long thongs were made from stiff, twisted rawhide rather than cured leather. At the end of one thong was a loop to which an additional narrow strand of hide could be attached. This secondary thong was intended to rip small pieces of flesh from the victim during the flogging. If particular severity was intended, the entire whip was soaked in water and allowed to freeze before the punishment commenced. When asked how many lashes it took to kill a man, a Russian executioner answered that a normal man would be dead after twenty strokes, while a particularly strong man might require twenty-five.

  * * *

  GREAT KNOUT

  * * *

  The Great Knout was identical to the Knout described above, with the exception of metal hooks attached to the end of the thongs. In a matter of a few lashes the Great Knout could literally tear a man to pieces.

  FRANCE

  While the French used the same whips as their English cousins, they ha
d one interesting variation, the battoir, which came into use during the persecution of French Protestants during the latter decades of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century.

  * * *

  BATTOIR

  * * *

  Not really a whip at all, the battoir was adapted from the common laundry paddle – a long-handled, mixing paddle used to stir vats of laundry while it was being boiled. To add to the nasty punishment the paddle itself was able to inflict, nails were driven through the spatulate end of the paddle, far enough that the point of the nail protruded slightly through the surface. The battoir was used to administer corporal paddlings to women accused of Protestant leanings or who were known to consort with Protestant men. The victim was bent forward, her skirts and petticoats thrown over her head and her bare rump was paddled until, in the words of one witness: ‘blood streamed from the women’s bodies and their screams rent the air’.

  Flail.

  Section IV

  CONCLUSION: WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

  If this book is to amount to anything more than a litany of horror and human degradation we must try to answer the basic question: what kind of mentality does it take to willingly inflict, or vicariously enjoy, the suffering of other human beings? We saw in Chapter 4 of Section II (Reforms of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) that over the course of a century or more, governments and individuals made valiant efforts to rectify the worst aspects of interrogation, punishment and the penal system. This seems only reasonable as, since the time of Classical Greece, there were thinking people who understood that torture, at least as a means of extracting reliable information, simply does not work. Almost anyone will confess to anything in an effort to ameliorate the pain.

  Tragically, since the end of the Second World War the movement toward reform has not only slowed, but in many cases has actually reversed. Precisely to what degree the use of torture has increased is difficult to determine. In many cases the abuse of prisoners may not have increased but we are now more aware of it than we were in times past. In other instances there has been a demonstrable return to the ‘bad old days’. Without doubt there are nations where the institution of torture is as pervasive as it was four or five centuries ago. In much of the Middle East and South East Asia thieves still have their hands cut off, and serious crimes still bring about beheadings, many of which continue to be carried out in public ceremonies reminiscent of the guillotining of Revolutionary France or the hangings at London’s Tyburn Tree. According to Amnesty International, as late as the 1970s at least sixty countries continued to use severe corporal punishment as a means of dealing with crimes both large and small. In 1991, Barbados actually brought back the cat-o-nine tails as a means of punishing drug dealers.

  For any nation, or group of people, to engage in the use of torture, a far more complex set of circumstances are required than the cruel whim of a dictator. Both the police and military must at least give their tacit consent, if not their full cooperation; the entire judiciary system must accept torture as useful and acceptable and, to some greater or lesser degree, depending upon how totalitarian the regime is, so must the people. In some cases this consent comes in the form of openly embracing torture while in others it takes the form of public denial that such goings-on take place while privately sanctioning them or dismissing the practice with a tacit acceptance. This last was the case in medieval and renaissance England, in Soviet era Russia and remains so in the United States and dozens of other countries to this day. If your immediate reaction is to deny that torture still takes place, particularly in seemingly civilised Western nations, consider the report released by Amnesty International on Wednesday, 23 May 2007. In its report AI concluded that the world is experiencing ‘a human rights meltdown’. ‘The politics of fear’, the report said, ‘are fuelling a downward spiral of human rights abuses … The “war on terror” and the war in Iraq, with their catalogue of human rights abuses have created deep divisions that cast a shadow on international relations. The US administration is treating the world as one giant battlefield for its war on terror.’

  If one asks why torture continues to exist and is still being practiced by so-called civilised nations, the answer remains much the same as it was stated in Section I of this book: weak, insecure, paranoid leaders feel safer if they can identify, isolate and destroy one or more ‘enemy conspiracies’. Once this enemy (for the Spanish Inquisition it was heretics; for the Puritans of Salem, Massachusetts it was witches; for Joseph McCarthy it was communists; for Ronald Reagan it was ‘the evil empire’; for George Bush it was ‘the axis of evil’) has been identified, its agents can be rounded up and forced to confess their crimes and the names of their confederates. The more forced and public the confessions are, the better their propaganda value. This is why Middle East terrorists force their own victims to confess in front of video cameras. Hence the witch hunts begin.

  This is not to deny that the world is under threat by a more than ample number of lunatics. We are up to our eyeballs in terrorists, political fanatics, fundamentalist zealots and dangerous people of every kind imaginable. But the truth is not as simple as governments would like us to believe – the conspiracies, if they actually exist, may not be nearly as organised or pervasive as we are told to believe. But governments and military leaders need to find simple, clean-cut solutions to easily identifiable problems. The problem as they see it, or at least as they like to sell it to the public, is that there is some great conspiracy out to destroy civilisation as we know it and all we have to do is find its members and crush them. It is on such neat, well-organised assumptions that Rome persecuted Christians, the Inquisition burned heretics and Hitler sent Jews to the gas chambers. The US, Great Britain and their allies use the same justification as the basis for the ‘War on Terrorism’. Of course, to be able to go after the bad guys (and spend the endless amounts of money required to do so) the governments and the military must convince their people (the voters who keep them in office) that there is a very real, identifiable, danger and that only Big Brother knows how to make the monster go away. Such convincing requires a major propaganda effort.

  The first step in convincing an entire country that someone is out to get them is by identifying who that ‘someone’ is. Heretics must be identified and publicly humiliated, or tortured, into confessing their sins. Sometimes government gets a lot of help in this process. After pointing the finger at Islamic extremists, particularly those in Iraq, since the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the biggest boost they could have asked for came on 11 September 2001, when a group of crazed terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As real as the threat from terrorists may be, it does not alter the fact that governments must identify the bogey man hiding in the closet, and it really doesn’t matter who the bogey man is or whether or not he presents any real danger. It would seem rather unlikely that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 but that made no difference to the US propaganda machine. Before the Islamic extremists it was the Soviet Union, before them it was the Nazis and before them it was the Unions. In every case, members of this vast conspiracy were arrested and paraded before the public like penitents at one of the Spanish Inquisition’s auto-de-fes. It is this turning of an otherwise invisible conspiracy into a tangible (but no longer acceptably human) object of ridicule that turns abstract fear into a very real object of hate and makes torture acceptable as official government policy.

  Inevitably, to turn fear and paranoia into an institutionalised policy of torture, the enemy must be carefully chosen in such a way that they appear demonstrably unlike the rest of us. In medieval France, Spain and Germany it was Jews and heretics; in Hitler’s Germany it was Jews, communists, Poles and Russians; in Stalin’s Soviet Union it was Western Imperialists and counter-revolutionaries. In every case, a specific group was identified and demonised before the rack, burning post, gas chamber and firing squad were brought into action. Once a few heretics (or commun
ists, or Jews, or terrorists) had been denounced as enemies of both God and man – that is to say, they no longer appeared to be quite human – then torturing them no longer seemed quite so horrible; in fact, it became everyone’s duty to support the just punishment of such ‘evil beings’. For an extended examination of just this kind of paranoia at work, read Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s political polemic and the book partially responsible for bringing him to power. If this is too much for you to bear, we offer the following extract from a speech by US Senator Joseph McCarthy, the man who started America’s communist witch hunts in the early 1950s.