“Ha, my joker,” cried Nemesis, in the shape of this young corporal, who I saw was surrounded by a small crowd of my grinning shipmates, “I’ve caught you this time!”
He had, with a vengeance; for not only had he seized me ‘flagrante delicto,’ as the captain said to me subsequently, he being a Latin scholar, the meaning of which was, I suppose, that I had the delicious fragrance of the ’baccy about me, but Smithers, the corporal, wrenched the pipe that was the cause of all the mischief from my hand, as I hastily removed it from my mouth and attempted to conceal it.
He reported me in due course to ‘Jimmy the One,’ our first lieutenant, who in due course put me in the black list; and I was brought up the next day on the quarter-deck before the captain, when we all mustered for ‘divisions’ on the upper deck.
The commanding officer spoke to me kindly, saying he was sorry to see me in such a position; but, all the same, the offence being one which he said he could not possibly excuse, as he was determined to stop the pernicious habit of smoking, which, if indulged in by young boys, would ruin their constitutions for life, he sentenced me to have six strokes, the usual penalty.
Accordingly, ‘the horse’ kept for the purpose, a sort of rough and round wooden structure with four posts for legs, similar to those saddle-blocks seen in harness shops, was rigged, and one of the gunner’s mates gave me the allotted number of administrations of the cane that I had earned.
The boys on board the Saint Vincent in their slang called this stroking business ‘stroniky’; and they have a rude rhyme anent it, which embodies likewise what they catalogue as the hardships of the service—
“Pea doo and bolliky,
Hard work and stroniky,
Who wouldn’t join the Navy!”
I bore my punishment unflinchingly, for, really I knew I deserved it; but, although the gunner’s mate did not spare his arm and the cuts he gave me with his cane stung sharply, sharper than the pain I felt physically was the consciousness that I had lost my good character!
My leave, too, was stopped, so that I did not get home for a month; not that I cared about this much, for, to tell the truth, I hardly liked to face father and Jenny till the recollection of my punishment had become somewhat deadened by time and the chaff of my messmates.