Four days after leaving the Canary Islands, the attention of the convicts was attracted to some rather unusual preparations which were being made between decks. A detachment of fifty marines filed in and took up their position amidships. At a word of command on the part of their officer, they proceeded to load their rifles. Two gendarmes who were accompanying the convoy thereupon appeared and likewise loaded their revolvers, with a good deal of ostentation. A few minutes afterward the warders pasted up in each cage an “order of the day,” signed by the commander, wherein it was stated that in accordance with a decision of the court-martial, the four convicts who had attempted to escape in the harbor of Santa Cruz were about to receive forty lashes of the “cat.”
This instrument of torture, which is only used for the punishment of prisoners under sentence of penal servitude, is composed of five thongs of plaited whipcord, thirty inches long and about an inch thick. At the end of each thong are three knots, with small balls of lead. The handle is about two to three feet long and an inch and a half in diameter, and is composed of very heavy teak wood. The thongs are carefully tarred until they become as stiff and as hard as iron, after which they are dipped for several hours in the strongest kind of vinegar.
The officers having assembled, a wooden bench was brought in by two of the warders, and thereupon the men about to undergo punishment appeared on the scene, stripped to the waist and barefooted. The sentence was then read aloud by the officer of the watch.
Convict No. 21,003, the number by which Frederick was known, was the first to undergo the punishment. Two of the warders seized him, and stretching him at full length on the wooden bench, face downward, bound him thereto by means of ropes tied round his shoulders, waist, and ankles.
A brawny prisoner who had volunteered to act as corrector, now stepped forth from the ranks, seized the “cat,” and began to let it fall heavily and at regular intervals on the back and shoulders of the unfortunate Frederick, allowing enough time between each blow to make the suffering still more acute. The first strokes left long, livid stripes on the young man's white skin. Soon, however, the blood oozed forth, and by the time the twentieth blow was inflicted, Frederick's back was one mass of lacerated and bleeding wounds. He bore the cruel punishment with Spartan courage, never uttering a complaint or letting a moan escape him. But when they untied his bonds and attempted to raise him from the bench, it was found that he had become insensible.
For two weeks after this cruel punishment Frederick lay in the ship's hospital, part of the time in a state of delirium brought on by wound-fever. When at length he had recovered sufficiently to be able to leave the infirmary his tortures began afresh. Both he and the three convicts who had attempted to escape with him were set to perform the most disgusting and revolting kind of work that could be found on a vessel freighted with such an enormous cargo of human beings. It is needless to describe what these duties were, but it will be sufficient to state that they were peculiarly repugnant to Frederick, reared as he had been in palaces, and accustomed to every form of the most refined and elegant luxury. As a further disciplinary measure they were deprived of one of their two meals a day. The food on board the transport was execrable, and for some reason or other none was ever served out to the prisoners between the hours of 6 o'clock on Saturday morning and 6 o'clock on Sunday evening.
Frederick bore all these hardships in silence, but became more and more embittered against mankind. His heart grew as hard as stone. Every slight vestige of good feeling, morality, and humanity disappeared, and by the time he arrived in New Caledonia he had become the most desperate and dangerous of all the blood-stained criminals on board.