Flogging and the use of the cat were abolished in the American navy in 1805. This law meant the use of the cat-o’-nine tails as a regular punishment, but did not prohibit blows to enforce immediate obedience. Before that time it was a common practice for the punishment of minor offences as well as the more serious ones.
Flogging in the old days was an affair of much ceremony on board men-of-war. The entire ship’s company was piped on deck for the punishment, and the culprit, stripped to the waist, was brought to the mast. The boatswain’s mate, cat in hand, stood by the side of a suspended grating in the gangway, and the captain, officer of the deck, and the surgeon took their posts opposite him. The offence and the sentence were then read, and the stripes were administered on the bare back of the offender, a petty officer standing by to count the blows of the lash, while the doctor, with his hand on the victim’s pulse, was ready to give the danger signal when absolutely necessary.
The men bore it in different ways. The old hands gritted their teeth philosophically, but the younger men frequently shrieked in their agony as the pitiless lash wound itself around the tender flesh, raising at first livid red welts, and afterwards lacerating the flesh and tearing the back into bloody seams.
The effect upon the lookers-on was varied. The younger officers, newly come from well-ordered English homes, frequently fainted at the sight. But the horror of the spectacle soon died away, and before many weeks had passed, with hardened looks, they stood on the quarter-deck and watched the performance amusedly. Soon the spectacle got to be a part of their life, and the jokes were many and the laughter loud at the victim’s expense. The greater the suffering the more pleasurable the excitement.
Many yarns are spun of Jack’s tricks to avoid the lash or to reduce to a minimum the pain of the blows. Sometimes the men had their flogging served to them regularly, but in small doses. To these the punishment lost its rigor. For the boatswain’s mate not infrequently disguised the force of his blows, which came lightly enough, though the victim bawled vigorously to keep up the deception, and in the “three- and four-dozen” cases he sometimes tempered his blows to the physical condition of the sufferers, who otherwise would have swooned with the pain.
One Jacky, who thought himself wiser than his fellows, in order to escape his next dozen, had a picture of a crucifix tattooed over the whole surface of his back, and under it a legend, which intimated that blows upon the image would be a sacrilege. When next he was brought before the mast he showed it to the boatswain and his captain. The captain, a crusty barnacle of the old harsh school, smiled grimly.
“Don’t desecrate the picture, bos’n,” he said; “we will respect this man’s religious scruples. You may put on his shirt,” he said, chuckling to himself, “but remove his trousers, bos’n, and give him a dozen extra. And lay them on religiously, bos’n.”
All this was in the older days, and it was never so bad in the American as in the English navy. The middle period of the American navy, from before the Civil War to the age of iron and steel cruisers, presents an entirely different aspect in some ways.
Illegal punishments were still inflicted, for there were always then, as now, a certain percentage of ruffians forward who were amenable to no discipline, and could be managed only by meeting them with their own weapons. The “spread-eagle” and the ride on the “gray mare” were still resorted to to compel obedience.
They “spread-eagled” a man by tricing him up inside the rigging, taut lines holding his arms and legs outstretched to the farthest shrouds, a bight of rope passed around his body preventing too great a strain. He was gagged, and so he could not answer back.