"Prisoner: No, my lord; I can't say I am.
"The Lord Mayor: By how many Courts Martial have you been tried?
"Prisoner: By four. In Belfast I was sentenced to receive 500 lashes, but they only gave me 300; they forgave me 200. In Londonderry they gave me 250. He mentioned two other places, in one of which he received 200, and in the other 150. He had deserted eight months ago, and had been a miner ever since, and the very first day he ventured to town he was apprehended.
"The Lord Mayor: You must be incorrigible, or you would never have been so dreadfully punished. I cannot help committing you."
In Arnold's Magazine for September, 1833, a writer, speaking of flogging in the navy, says—
"I saw two men who were tried for desertion, and their sentence was to receive 500 lashes round the fleet. There is, perhaps, nothing on the face of the earth so revolting to human nature, as this most brutal of all outrages upon the feelings of gallant tars under such a sentence. The day the man is to be punished is known by the admiral making a general signal to copy orders. A midshipman from each ship goes on board the admiral's ship with a book, and copies the order, which states that, at a certain hour, on such a day, a boat, manned and armed, is to be sent from the ship from which the man is sentenced to be punished. On the day appointed, the signal is made from the admiral, for the fleet to draw into a line. The hands are then turned up in each ship, and every officer appears with his cocked hat and sidearms, and the marines are drawn up in the gangway, with muskets and fixed bayonets.
"The ship launch to which the delinquent belongs is hoisted out, and rigged up for the bloody tragedy. In this boat are two boatswain's mates, with their cats, together with the surgeon and master-at-arms. The poor creature is now taken out of irons, in which he has been confined both before and after his sentence, and brought down from the deck into the boat. The master-at-arms next desires the mates to tie him up; he is then stripped, and a blanket thrown over his shoulders. The boats of each ship then make their painters fast, one ahead of the other, and thus form a long line of boats. The captain now looks over the gangway, the master-at-arms reads the infernal sentence, and the quantity of lashes the victim is to receive at each ship. The captain calls the boatswain's mate, and says, 'Go on, sir, and do your duty.'
"The blanket is now removed from the shoulders of the poor fellow, and then commences the fiend-like exhibition. After the victim has received one dozen, the captain tells the other boatswain's mate to commence, and after the poor fellow has received the next dozen the blanket is again thrown over his shoulders, and the boats tow the launch alongside the next ship, the drummer and fifer playing the Rogue's March. The same ceremony is repeated from ship to ship, until the surgeon pronounces that the man can receive no more without endangering life; and woe be to the tyrant who dares to inflict one lash more after the surgeon has spoken. I must here remark that I never knew an instance of a surgeon in the navy being a tyrant; on the contrary, both he and his assistants are always respected for their tender regard for the sick under their care. After this degrading and cruel punishment the man is again towed to his ship and helped on board; he is next sent into the sick-bay, his back anointed in order to heal it, and, in case he has not received all his punishment, to enable him again to be tortured. When a man has been flogged round the fleet he is of no further service, his muscles are contracted, and he is no longer an able man."
Luckily there was no need for impressment to fill the navy, but it was legal, as it still is.
But most things were rougher and more brutal than nowadays, and nowhere was it better exemplified than in criminal punishment. Hanging was the punishment for many offences, but there was such a growing disinclination on the part of jurors to convict, and so many recommendations to mercy on the part of judges, that it was about time to modify our criminal legislature. Something must be done with the criminals, and they must be punished somehow. It was very certain that hanging was no deterrent to crime, which was so rampant that the gaols in England would have been utterly unable to hold the convicts. There was the alternative of sending them to colonize and be servants in that vast Australian continent, of which we then knew so little; or there was the employment of old men-of-war, called "hulks," as floating prisons, in which the prisoners were confined at night, working in the daytime on shore, in the dockyards, or elsewhere. These "hulks" were verily floating hells, but they had the merit over transportation, of economy, as we may see in a short leader in the Times of July 19, 1830:—