The Black Ship

by Dudley Pope

  On October 22, Pigot showed his teeth: he ordered five men to be flogged, and the day was rounded off by a man who had been sentenced to be flogged round the Fleet being brought alongside the Success so that one of her boatswain’s mates could administer the Success’s share of the punishment.

  Since the cat-o’-nine-tails and flogging enter into this narrative with painful frequency, both must be described if the significance of the subsequent events is to be understood. 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 power 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 regulation limited (before 1806) to. ordering a maximum of a dozen lashes, they 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 than 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 feet long. Each tail is also two feet long and a quarter of an inch in diameter. (Experiments made recently with a cat of these dimensions are described in Appendix A, page 332, and the Malacca’s cat is illustrated opposite page 113).

  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 put all his strength into each blow, was replaced after he had delivered only a dozen lashes.

  Obviously the cat-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 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 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.

  Since each was different it is understandable that we get diametrically opposed descriptions of what flogging felt like. 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 bit 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 (which was Pigot’s normal punishment for drunkenness) ‘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 made by the right-handed man’.

  The reasons why the Admiralty abolished the limit of a dozen lashes when the Regulations and Instructions of 1790 were revised in 1806 have never been given; but in their wisdom, the Board probably saw little point in continuing a regulation which they knew was being openly flouted—so openly that captains recorded the fact in their logs.

  Courts martial could, and of course did, award large numbers of lashes for serious crimes. Normally both captains and courts awarded them in dozens, up to eight or nine dozen; after that they were usually given in hundreds. On comparatively rare occasions captains ordered the extra half-dozen, and a few cases are recorded of less than a dozen being given.

  It has already been pointed out that the lonely life of a captain and the strain under which he lived led to the danger that his character and judgment would become warped, and William James, one of the most respected and accurate historians of the war at sea against Revolutionary France, who knew a great many contemporary officers, wrote of flogging: ‘Captains there are who seemingly delight in such work; and who, were the cruise long enough, would not leave a sailor with an unscarred back.’

  Only a year after the Admiralty had abolished the dozen limit, a lieutenant at Bombay ordered three men to be flogged and, Sir Samuel Romilly wrote, ‘the punishment was inflicted with such horrible severity that they all three died in less than twenty-four hours after it was over’. Such cruelty was rare, although plain harshness was more frequent. But the majority of captains were just and popular: the crew of the Vestal, for example, having heard in 1794 that their captain was being appointed to another ship, petitioned to be allowed to sail with him.

  Any judgment of the seaman’s conditions in Pigot’s day would be unbalanced without considering the way the seaman’s civilian brother lived on shore. As far as justice was concerned—if that is not using a too strong a word—the civilian was far worse off since he could be, and frequently was, hanged if he committed one of nearly two hundred offences. It was a brutal age: that factor must be borne in mind all the way through this narrative. The gibbet, the whipping post and pillory were all there for the errant civilian; and every hanging in Britain was public, attended by a noisy and jostling crowd who behaved as if it was a prize-fight, cheering the condemned man who stepped bravely to the scaffold and jeering at the reluctant.

  Justice at sea under the Articles of War, if fairly administered, was considerably more merciful than justice on land under the laws of England. The trouble was that the life at sea gave more scope for both wrong-doing and the unfair administration of justice. Like all rules and regulations, they were only as good as the men who administered them. In the hands of Pigot the Articles merely licensed sadism; in the hands of a reasonable man they were a good rule-of-thumb method of providing immediate and rough justice.

  On October 22, 1794, after he had been in command of the Success for six weeks, Captain Pigot ordered the First Lieutenant to send all hands aft to witness punishment. The boatswain’s mates were soon at the hatchways, their calls shrilling and the ship echoing to the shouts of ‘D’ye hear there: all hands aft to witness punishment! D’ye hear there…’

  In the Success, and later the Hermione, men to be flogged were lashed to the capstan: their arms were tied along one of the bars which radiated from the capstan drum like spokes of a wheel lying on its side. (In most ships it was more usual to up-end a wooden grating at the gangway.) The boatswain’s mates had not finished piping and shouting the order at the hatches before the men started to run on deck, to gather in groups near the capstan, which was just forward of the wheel. The Marines with muskets and bayonets clattered up the ladders, perspiring freely in uniforms which were ill adapted for any climate, least of all the tropics; the doctor joined the officers standing in a group on the starboard side. The Master-at-Arms then brought his five prisoners on deck, helped by the ship’s corporal and a Marine armed with a musket.
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  In a moment there was silence in the ship: in front of Captain Pigot, as he faced forward, were the solid row of red-coated Marines; to his right a small knot of officers; to his left were the five prisoners; on both sides were the seamen. Pigot was in full uniform of dark blue, with lapels edged with gold, and an inappropriate white-handled cavalry officer’s sword, which however had the virtue of lightness, hung at his left side.

  Pigot glanced down at the sheet of paper he had been holding. He read out the first of five names written on it. ‘John Me William!’

  One of the five prisoners shuffled forward, the Master-at-Arms at his side. Pigot wasted no time: the man was accused of drunkenness and showing contempt to his superior officer. Had he anything to say? McWilliam’s answer, if indeed he made one, is not recorded. However, the Captain was prosecutor, defence counsel, jury and judge, so that no time was lost in deciding if McWilliam was guilty.

  The seaman, his eyes still bloodshot from the previous night’s ill-considered assault on his hoarded grog, was led to the capstan, and Pigot gave the order for McWilliam to strip. The man pulled off his shirt, so that he was bare from the waist up, and then stood with his arms outstretched along a capstan bar and his legs wide apart. The boatswain’s mates then lashed his wrists to the bar.

  ‘Seized up, sir,’ reported the Master-at-Arms.

  Pigot then opened a copy of the Articles of War, and started reading from number thirty-six (the so-called ‘Captain’s Cloak’) which covered ‘All other crimes not capital, committed by any person or persons in the Fleet, which are not mentioned in this Act…’ While the Article was being recited everyone, including Pigot, had removed their hats, Pigot concluded: ‘… shall be punished according to the Laws and Customs of such cases used at sea’. He then announced the sentence—two dozen lashes.

  A boatswain’s mate produced a red baize bag, took out a cat-o’-nine-tails and shook it, so that the tails fell free, ‘Do your duty’, Pigot ordered.

  Standing behind and to one side of McWilliam, he swung the cat back to the full extent of his arm then, like a suddenly released spring, brought it down on the man’s bare back.

  ‘One,’ counted the Master-at-Arms.

  Again the cat swung through the air. ‘Two,’ intoned the Master-at-Ajrms. At roughly twenty-second intervals the cat fell. The surgeon watched to see that the man did not lose consciousness; Captain Pigot watched to make sure the boatswain’s mate was using all his strength.

  When the last of the two dozen lashes fell on McWilliam’s back, the seizings holding him to the capstan bar were cut and he was taken below to wait for the surgeon to attend to him—it was well known that even the slightest cut tended to suppurate in a tropical climate. The next name was called and the second of the five men stepped forward. For the third and fourth men the floggings were the first of a series that were to last for almost a year.

  Finally Pigot told the First Lieutenant to dismiss the men; but the days’ floggings had not finished, and the next session was to be the worst. The previous day, Captain Pigot had received an order from Commodore Ford saying, ‘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 Europa in order to attend the punishment of John Omeburg, private Marine, pursuant to the sentence of a court martial’.

  In other words, Marine Omeburg—whose crime had been mutiny—was to be flogged through the Fleet, receiving 300 lashes (if he did not die before the last one was administered). The total of 300 had been divided equally among the warships in the anchorage, each captain being told the number of lashes his boatswain’s mates would be responsible for administering.

  Flogging through the fleet was a spectacle which for magnitude and sheer horror would have made many a Roman emperor jealous. Port Royal anchorage was a vastly more impressive amphitheatre than the Colosseum in Rome, and even Nero could not have set in motion with the flutter of a signal a comparable ceremony as that in the great warships when their guns began booming and a procession of boats bore the victim to receive his punishment.

  The men had already drunk their morning ration of rum and eaten their dinner when, promptly at 1 p.m., a gun was fired from the Europa and a yellow flag fluttered at the foretopmast head. From every warship in the anchorage, including the Success, a boat commanded by a lieutenant, and carrying two armed Marines in addition to its normal crew, was sent off to the Europa, whose launch was already alongside, a grating rigged up vertically amidships.

  Eventually the launch, followed by a procession of boats from the other ships, arrived alongside the Success, a drummer in the bow beating the lugubrious ‘Rogue’s March’. Marine Omeburg, who had already been flogged alongside several vessels, was lashed to the grating once again.

  All the men of the Success were in the rigging or standing on the nettings; and one of the boatswain’s mates, clutching a red baize bag, climbed down into the launch. The Provost Marshal—who acted as the squadron’s chief of police—then read out in a stentorian voice the sentence of the court that had tried Marine Omeburg. Finally Captain Pigot bawled down from the gangway, ‘Boatswain’s mate! Do your duty.’

  For the sixth time that day the men of the Success heard the dull swish of the cat, and saw the wounds it inflicted on a spreadeagled man. Finally, the Success’s share of the 300 lashes having been laid on, the Marine was cut down.

  On the day just described, when Captain Pigot began flogging in the Success, he had been in command for forty-seven days. Although the operations carried out by the frigate for the rest of his command do not concern us, it is important to know the way he treated the frigate’s crew.

  His log, the only one to survive, begins when he joined the Success on September 4, 1794, and ends on September 30, 1795, the last flogging being on September 11. The punishment the log records is most revealing, both for its severity and inconsistency.

  From the time of the first floggings in October 1794 until the last entered in the log is a period of forty-six weeks; but it is probable that for more than eight weeks between June 3 and August 3, when the ship was at Port Royal, Pigot was not actually on board, because no floggings are recorded. In the preceding twenty-one weeks the longest gaps between recorded floggings were thirty-three, seventeen and eleven days, although the usual space was between two and seven days. It is likely that Pigot was also on shore for the thirty-three day period, since the ship was also in Port Royal at that time.

  However, for an examination of the floggings ordered by Pigot only the longest period, eight weeks, has been subtracted from the forty-six weeks he was in command. During these thirty-eight weeks, Pigot recorded eighty-five separate floggings, when he ordered a total of at least 1,392 lashes to be administered—a weekly average of two floggings totalling thirty-eight lashes. In that period there were between 160 and 170 men on board the frigate, so that Pigot had flogged the equivalent of half the crew.

  However, several men were flogged more than once; and the total of 1,392 lashes is also on the low side, because Pigot actually logged 1,272 lashes but in noting ten other floggings he omitted to mention how many lashes were given. He would not have ordered less than a dozen—as mentioned earlier, there are very few recorded instances of less than a dozen being given by anyone, and certainly Pigot is not responsible for any of them—so 120 lashes have been added to his total of 1,272, although in all probability there were many more. A complete list of all the floggings for the period with which we are concerned, October 22, 1794 to September 11, 1795, is given in Appendix C. The following table gives details of the men who received the most punishment during that period.

  Table I

  It will be seen that John Charles was given a dozen lashes on April 25, another dozen nine days later, and a third dozen seventeen days after that. It was impossible for the wounds to heal between each flogging; and in fact it took Charles just eighteen weeks to die as a result of the punishment. The table also
shows that Jeremiah Walsh was given twenty-four lashes on August 4 and another dozen on September 11. He was perhaps luckier than Charles, for he was dead by September 30.

  Although the cat-o’-nine-tails killed both these men, they were given comparatively few lashes compared with some of the crew: Martin Steady, for instance, who was flogged eight times in ten months. On one occasion Pigot did not log the actual number of lashes, but in those ten months Steady was given at least 132 lashes. Steady was twenty-three years old and an Irishman from Cork, and for ‘mutinous behaviour’, his sixth crime, he could have been flogged round the fleet, so he might be considered lucky getting only a couple of dozen. But from the dates of the five previous floggings it is obvious that for the eleven weeks between March 5 and May 21, Steady’s back must have been continually raw, except perhaps the short period after April 2, when it would have had a chance to heal slightly before the dozen on May 21.

  Was Steady a bad character? The Success’s muster book shows from the way he was promoted, that he was not. He joined on February 24, 1793 as a landsman—the lowest possible rank for an adult, which meant he was no seaman. Yet by June 3 he was an ordinary seaman and on February 4 the next year rated an able seaman by Pigot’s predecessor, who had obviously thought him a good man. The answer is probably that Steady was unlucky and a victim of Pigot’s obsessive hatreds.

  Another seaman, John Bowen, received 108 lashes in eighteen weeks and, like Martin Steady, is another example of crimes becoming successively worse the more a man was flogged. One can be forgiven for speculating what his behaviour would have been had he not been flogged for the original crime of uncleanliness, which was so insignificant that it could have been punished by stopping his grog, giving him extra duty, or in a dozen other less brutal ways than using a cat-o’-nine-tails.