by Dudley Pope
The moment Pigot saw the man climbing out on the yard he ‘instantly in very harsh language desired to know the cause’.
Casey called down (‘in a most respectful manner’) an explanation, but Pigot ‘instantly launch’d out in the most abusive and unofficer-like language, calling me a damn’d lubber, a worthless good-for-nothing, that I never did anything right, and used many other severe expressions that I cannot and do not wish to recollect, and which may as well perhaps be omitted, to all of which I made no reply’.
There was, of course, no excuse for the reefpoint; but there was an explanation. In the half-light, with Pigot yelling and bellowing, every man was rushing his work, fearful of being singled out by Pigot for a ‘starting’. But frightened men rarely work properly.
Casey was in an unenviable position: Captain Pigot had always been friendly and had on several occasions recommended him to Sir Hyde Parker for promotion. (Sir Hyde had accepted, promising to make him lieutenant after a year’s probation). Casey wrote that up to then Pigot had treated him with ‘mark’d attention’.
So Casey was more hurt than angry over Pigot’s outburst; but if he hoped that this violent humiliation in front of the whole crew had ended the incident, then he hoped in vain, and the reason was Pigot’s own personality. His usual impulsiveness, poor judgment and lack of self-control, had made him abuse Casey at the top of his voice in a manner out of all proportion to the incident: in a matter of moments it had assumed for him an enormous and obsessive importance: without a thought for the significance of what he had done or was about to do, he pursued it, like a dog at a bone, his pride, his fear of loss of face and his lack of judgment driving him on and providing its own momentum.
Reed gave the order ‘Down from aloft’. The point where Casey and his maintopmen scrambled from the rigging on to the bulwarks was at the quarterdeck; and it was on to the quarterdeck that they then jumped, to find Pigot waiting, his face florid, his body tense with anger. Casey wrote: ‘He again attacked me in similar language as before, when my feelings were so excited from his dreadful and unmerited abuse.’
Casey was a spirited youth and certainly no coward. ‘I replied that I was no such character as he described, of which he and every officer in the ship was well convinced.’
Pigot’s pride hung on too slender a thread to accept such a spirited reply; in any case he had lost too much control to restrain himself or draw back. ‘Silence, sir!’ he shouted, ‘or I will instantly tie you up to the gun and flog you.’
To threaten to flog a midshipman, particularly one of Casey’s age and experience, was extremely unusual. Casey of course knew this, and his sense of injustice and bewilderment forced him to answer when it would have been wiser to have kept silent. He said: ‘I hope not, sir. This is cruel treatment, Captain Pigot, and what I don’t deserve.’
‘You are under arrest: go below to your berth,’ ordered Pigot.
Casey’s thoughts can be imagined: he probably regarded his career as ruined, since a court martial would seem to be inevitable.
By now it was dark, and a few minutes later Pigot went below to his own cabin. His steward, John Jones, brought him a lantern. He then considered the situation. We do not know what he thought; but from what he subsequently did we can easily reconstruct the way his mind was working. He was, because a seaman had failed to tie a reefpoint, committed to flog a favoured senior midshipman, one he had often recommended to the Commander-in-Chief. But it is unlikely Pigot saw it in that light, any more than when two months earlier he had accused Lt Harris—and received a well-deserved snub in the court’s verdict. Yet even as he sat in his cabin he seems to have wondered whether on this occasion he had gone too far and was undoubtedly looking for a way to extricate himself without losing face.
Finally he passed the word for the First Lieutenant, the Master and the Purser. As soon as Reed, Southcott and Pacey arrived, he started questioning them about Casey’s behaviour earlier. All three said they had seen nothing. He then sent for Casey, telling the others to stay in the cabin.
The course Pigot had decided on was as simple as it was crude: he would humiliate Casey publicly: that would be sufficient. Indeed Pigot no doubt considered public humiliation (which he himself so clearly dreaded) a far worse punishment than flogging.
As soon as Casey appeared in the cabin, Pigot delivered himself of a judgment which Casey recorded as follows:
‘Mr Casey, I have sent for you before these officers to express my disapprobation of your conduct this evening, and to know from them if they observed it. They seem ignorant, otherwise I would try you by a court martial I have also questioned them as to your character, and they give you the highest character possible, and I must say myself that your conduct since with me has given me the greatest satisfaction.’
He went on to ‘express his sorrow for my misfortune,’ wrote Casey, saying ‘that he [had] pitied me, and treated me more like one of his lieutenants than a midshipman; but from that moment he would change his conduct and consider me the same as any other midshipman in the ship, with the exception that I should never dine at his table, and if I did not go down on my knees the following morning on the quarterdeck he would flog me most severely, and in the most degrading way possible.
‘I endeavoured to express my sincere sorrow,’ Casey added, ‘and I commenced in the most respectful and submissive manner to make every possible atonement for any real or imagined offence. I also endeavoured to express my gratitude for all his kind conduct to me while with him. But it was all unavailing.’
Pigot merely declared: ‘You shall and you must submit to my decision that you go on your knees tomorrow morning. You are still under arrest: leave this cabin and return to your berth.’
Pigot, realizing that Casey was not likely to submit, dismissed the Master and the Purser but told Reed to stay. Pigot appears to have thought that if the wretched youth would not listen to his Captain he might listen to the First Lieutenant if Reed went about it the right way. He therefore gave Reed certain instructions.
Back in the midshipmen’s berth Casey reflected on Pigot’s ultimatum. It was to his credit that he had given Captain Pigot the only honourable reply possible.
Later that night Casey was asleep in his cot when one of the quartermasters came down and woke him: the First Lieutenant wanted him on deck. Hurriedly dressing, Casey went up to find Lt Reed with the officer of the watch, Lt Douglas. Reed at once began carrying out the Captain’s instructions and acting as the Devil’s advocate. He asked Casey if he was going down on his knees before the Captain next morning. When Casey said he would not, Reed asked him if he realized the consequences, and pressed Casey to accept his advice as a messmate and a friend, which was to submit to the Captain, because that was the only way of preventing the disgrace of a flogging.
Casey wrote later that ‘I indignantly refused, adding that I thought he knew me better.’
‘The poor fellow seemed greatly distressed at his failure, and at what I believe he considered my obstinacy,’ Casey added. ‘He well knew what would follow, and he was most anxious to prevent it.’
Early next morning some of the other officers spoke to him privately—among them Lt Foreshaw, and the Master, Southcott. They all ‘endeavoured to change my resolution. They were all more or less apparently attached to me, and anxious to prevent my disgraceful punishment, but,’ Casey added significantly, ‘none would attempt to persuade the Captain to change his cruel intention: they all appeared to be greatly in dread of him.’
Shortly before 11 a.m. the boatswain’s mates appeared at the hatchways to pipe ‘All hands aft to witness punishment’. The Marines, hot and sticky in their scarlet uniforms, clumped up on deck, clutching their muskets, and the seamen swarmed aft, falling in round the quarterdeck. The officers stood in a group on the port side, and finally the Master-at-Arms, McDonald, brought Midshipman Casey up from the midshipmen’s berth and stood beside him at the capstan.
Pigot appeared with the inevitable copy of the
Articles of War tucked under one arm, and without any preliminaries began reading them in a loud voice. It took several minutes, but finally he reached the 36th and last. He then looked at the Midshipman standing by the capstan with his hat under his arm. The helmsman at the wheel a few feet away eyed the luffs of the sails towering overhead; but more than a hundred and fifty men were watching the youth: men from Chatham, overlooking the mud flats and saltings of the Medway, and from the bogs of Ireland; from cloistered Canterbury and the slums of Lambeth and Liverpool, Genoa and Leghorn; from mountainous Norway, and the palm-fringed island of St Thomas; black men, white men; men whose native tongue was Italian, German, Portuguese, Norwegian, French, Swedish, and Danish: men with vastly different backgrounds and standards of behaviour, but all of them with two things in common, a hatred of Captain Pigot, and a liking for Midshipman Casey.
Pigot said in a loud voice to Casey: ‘For your contemptuous and disrespectful conduct yesterday evening, I insist on your going down on your knees and begging my pardon.’
This would be the humiliation he sought; and he knew that in his search for it he had the powerful backing of the Articles of War. But Casey refused. He replied in a respectful manner; indeed, his voice was humble; but the words he used were firm. ‘I assure you, sir, that I had no intention of offering you the slightest insult: I am very sorry that you should think I did: I can only beg your pardon.’
‘I insist that you go on your knees,’ retorted Pigot.
But Casey refused. Pigot again insisted; Casey again refused. Pigot then declared that had Casey gone on his knees, he would have been the first to despise him—but that he would now never be able to continue in the Service.
By saying he would have despised Casey, Pigot seems to have been trying to imply that his demand had really been only a test of Casey’s character. He may have suddenly realized that in the eyes of the ship’s company the first round had clearly gone to Casey for, in the Midshipman’s own words, Pigot then ‘with an oath, or rather coarse curse, ordered me to strip, which I also declined, saying that I never stripped at a public place of punishment; that he might order whom he pleased to strip me, and I would not prevent him’.
Pigot barked out an order to the Master-at-Arms, and Sergeant Plaice: ‘Strip him and seize him up!’
They pulled off Casey’s jacket, shirt and stock: finally, when he was naked from the waist upwards, they twisted him round and tied him to a bar of the capstan. William Martin, the Boatswain, then took the red-handled cat-o’-nine-tails from its red baize bag.
It was an unusual task for him: usually a boatswain’s mate administered a flogging.
‘Give him a dozen,’ ordered Pigot.
Martin balanced himself against the gentle roll of the ship, and then suddenly his arm shot diagonally across his body. The tails of the cat whined for a split second, and then thudded into Casey’s back.
When Martin stood back after delivering the twelfth stroke, with the blood-stained cat still in his hand, Pigot snapped at McDonald and Sergeant Plaice: ‘Cut him down.’
The Midshipman was gasping, for each lash from the cat had knocked the breath from his lungs, and with blood running down his back from the network of cuts he stood to attention.
‘You will quit the midshipmen’s mess and do no more duty,’ declared Pigot. ‘And you will prepare to leave the ship at the first opportunity—and that will be as soon as possible.’ With that, he turned and went down the companionway to his cabin.
Casey picked up his jacket, shirt and hat, and went below: the pain from his back was probably no worse than the agony in his mind. He went to the midshipmen’s berth to collect his sea chest. Just forward of the gunroom was the steerage, an open space with the cabins of the warrant officers on either side, and there Casey decided to sling his hammock, using his sea chest as a table.
‘All the officers, as well as my unfortunate messmates, commiserated with me most feelingly,’ wrote Casey, ‘and all continued to treat me with great kindness and attention.’ But none of them dare talk to him openly. ‘My meals were regularly supplied from the gunroom, or my late mess, and some of the officers, as well as my late messmates, visited me occasionally, and sat and chatted with me by stealth’.
He added that ‘I have reason to know from the best authority [presumably Lt Reed] that Captain Pigot frequently after my punishment expressed his regret to some of the gunroom officers in very strong terms, and he was often heard to say that no circumstance of his life gave him more real pain than his very severe conduct to me, for he ever considered me much superior to any other midshipman in the ship, and indeed to do him justice, he gave me very strong proofs of his good opinion, until this late unfortunate circumstance.’
So Pigot expressed his regret; but did he really mean it? It seems unlikely: more probably he sensed definite but necessarily unspoken criticism of his behaviour towards Casey among the officers, and therefore made a superficial and unfelt profession of regret in order to allay this criticism, and to imply that he had been unwillingly forced into that particular course of action by Casey’s own stubbornness.
It had all started with a frightened seaman forgetting a reefpoint, and a gasket working loose. A reefpoint and a gasket: they were symbols of Pigot’s power over the ship’s company.
The Diligence had by this time used up most of her water and on Saturday, September 16, the day after Casey was flogged, she signalled the Hermione to ask for some. The frigate hove-to while the brig sent over empty casks in her boats to exchange them for full ones.
This took some time, since Pigot allowed Mends five tons, and there was plenty of opportunity for the Hermione’s men to laugh and joke with the crews of the Diligence’s boats as they lowered the casks, and plenty of opportunity for secret messages to be passed.
In charge of the brig’s boats was John Forbes, the former Master’s Mate in the frigate. When he went on board the frigate he heard about Casey’s treatment, and no doubt breathed a sigh of relief that, temporarily anyway, he was out of danger of being involved in such an affair.
On Sunday night Pigot was walking on the quarterdeck talking to Southcott when a shadowy figure loomed up out of the darkness and bumped into them. As he apologized both the Captain and the Master recognized him as John Watson, an able seaman, and Pigot remembered seeing his name on the Surgeon’s sick list.
There were several men on board at this time who were partly blind at night. It was a common enough complaint (caused by a vitamin deficiency) and since it was hard to diagnose, could be shammed without difficulty, particularly by topmen who did not want to work aloft.
John Watson was a topman, and earlier in the day the surgeon had recommended to the First Lieutenant that he should be excused duties. Reed had agreed and ordered that he should act as gunroom sentry. Accidentally bumping into the Captain and Master at night in these circumstances appeared a trivial incident; but like many other apparently trivial incidents at this time, it had a certain significance.
In the Hermione on Wednesday, September 20, five days after the flogging of Casey, the surgeon, Sansum, faced a busy morning: every day more and more men lined up to see him, and his ‘Journal of Physical Transactions’, a copy of which he had to give Captain Pigot, contained an ever-increasing number of entries. Some of the men claimed they were lame; others that they were blind, partly or temporarily. John Watson, the man who had bumped into Pigot and Southcott in the darkness, once again reported sick and was excused going aloft, but had to continue doing sentry duty. Peter Stewart, an able seaman, was so lame that he sat on the deck and dragged himself along backwards, using his hands. In addition he reported that he was going blind, and Sansum put him on a special list for a ration of wine. James Duncan, a topman, reported he had hurt his toe, and was given sentry duty.
The men’s bad health was due almost entirely to the complete lack of vegetables and fresh meat, and many had varying degrees of scurvy. A contemporary medical book shows that Sansum had no difficulty in
diagnosing it: ‘The first appearances of this malady are marked by a languid, torpid state of body; the patient has a pale, bloated look; there prevails a dejection of mind; and the breathing is affected on the slightest exertion. In a short time the gums acquire a softness and swelling; blood exudes from them and putrid ulcers are formed… The heart is subject to palpitations…’
These, it should be noted, were only the ‘first appearances’.
The patient causing Sansum most anxiety was the Marine officer, Lt McIntosh: the previous day he had suddenly collapsed with a fit of giddiness, complaining that he could not see. He had been taken to his cot at once and was soon covered in a cold sweat, followed by a high fever and a splitting headache. The most stupid man in the ship could have diagnosed the illness—yellow fever, the all too familiar ‘Black Vomit’. Before long McIntosh’s eyes were bloodshot, protruding and rolling wildly; then they turned yellow, and his skin also took on a yellow tinge. In fleeting moments of coherence he complained of violent pains in his back and the calves of his legs.
During the night he had calmed down, but the vomiting had started and he went into a delirium. The disease was following its usual course: there was little Sansum could do except administer opiates, since it was nearly always fatal. Sergeant Plaice, with commendable loyalty, was keeping a constant vigil beside McIntosh’s cot. The sick man had to be left in his cabin and he vomited and raved away his last few hours of life separated from his brother officers by a thin canvas bulkhead as they ate their meals or slept in their cabins.
The surgeon was not a popular man in the ship: perhaps he was ruthless with malingerers, and there were plenty of them. Two men already mentioned, Watson and Duncan, for instance, were shamming.
At this time Sansum’s servant, a fourteen-year-old boy named James Hayes, was full of a resentment against his master which he was only too willing to communicate to any of the crew who would listen. The reason was not hard to find—a few days earlier he had been caught stealing from the surgeon.