“Can you wonder, then, that Lord Howe didn’t acknowledge them? But I’m still sure he acted promptly. He’s a big enough friend of the sailor to waste no time before doing his turn.”
Ferens shook his head morosely.
“That may be,” he said; “but the petitions were sent weeks ago, and there’s no sign from Lord Howe. He was at Bath for gout. My idea is he referred them to the admiral commanding at Portsmouth, and was told that behind the whole thing is conspiracy—French socialism and English politics. I give you my word there’s no French agent in the fleet, and if there were, it wouldn’t have any effect. Our men’s grievances are not new. They’re as old as Cromwell.”
Suddenly a light of suspicion flashed into Ferens’s face.
“You’re with us, aren’t you? You see the wrongs we’ve suffered, and how bad it all is! Yet you haven’t been on a voyage with us. You’ve only tasted the life in harbour. Good God, this life is heaven to what we have at sea! We don’t mind the fightin’. We’d rather fight than eat.” An evil grin covered his face for a minute. “Yes, we’d rather fight than eat, for the stuff we get to eat is hell’s broil, God knows! Did you ever think what the life of the sailor is, that swings at the top of a mast with the frost freezin’ his very soul, and because he’s slow, owin’ to the cold, gets twenty lashes for not bein’ quicker? Well, I’ve seen that, and a bad sight it is. Did you ever see a man flogged? It ain’t a pretty sight. First the back takes the click of the whip like a damned washboard, and you see the ridges rise and go purple and red, and the man has his breath knocked clean out of him with every blow. Nearly every stroke takes off the skin and draws the blood, and a dozen will make the back a ditch of murder. Then the whipper stops, looks at the lashes, feels them tender like, and out and down it comes again. When all the back is ridged and scarred, the flesh, that looked clean and beautiful, becomes a bloody mass. Some men get a hundred lashes, and that’s torture and death.
“A man I knew was flogged told me once that the first blow made his flesh quiver in every nerve from his toe-nails to his finger-nails, and stung his heart as if a knife had gone through his body. There was agony in his lungs, and the time between each stroke was terrible, and yet the next came too soon. He choked with the blood from his tongue, lacerated with his teeth, and from his lungs, and went black in the face. I saw his back. It looked like roasted meat; yet he had only had eighty strokes.
“The punishments are bad. Runnin’ the gauntlet is one of them. Each member of the crew is armed with three tarry rope-yarns, knotted at the ends. Then between the master-at-arms with a drawn sword and two corporals with drawn swords behind, the thief, stripped to the waist, is placed. The thing is started by a boatswain’s mate givin’ him a dozen lashes. Then he’s slowly marched down the double line of men, who flog him as he passes, and at the end of the line he receives another dose of the cat from the boatswain’s mate. The poor devil’s body and head are flayed, and he’s sent to hospital and rubbed with brine till he’s healed.
“But the most horrible of all is flogging through the fleet. That’s given for strikin’ an officer, or tryin’ to escape. It’s a sickenin’ thing. The victim is lashed by his wrists to a capstan-bar in the ship’s long-boat, and all the ship’s boats are lowered also, and each ship in harbour sends a boat manned by marines to attend. Then, with the master-at-arms and the ship’s surgeon, the boat is cast off. The boatswain’s mate begins the floggin’, and the boat rows away to the half-minute bell, the drummer beatin’ the rogue’s march. From ship to ship the long-boat goes, and the punishment of floggin’ is repeated. If he faints, he gets wine or rum, or is taken back to his ship to recover. When his back is healed he goes out to get the rest of his sentence. Very few ever live through it, or if they do it’s only for a short time. They’d better have taken the hangin’ that was the alternative. Even a corpse with its back bare of flesh to the bone has received the last lashes of a sentence, and was then buried in the mud of the shore with no religious ceremony.
“Mind you, there’s many a man gets fifty lashes that don’t deserve them. There’s many men in the fleet that’s stirred to anger at ill-treatment, until now, in these days, the whole lot is ready to see the thing through—to see the thing through—by heaven and by hell!”
The pockmarked face had taken on an almost ghastly fervour, until it looked like a distorted cartoon-vindictive, fanatical; but Dyck, on the edge of the river of tragedy, was not ready to lose himself in the stream of it.