Down came the lash upon my bare back. But the sting of its thongs was as nothing to the sting of shame which pierced my heart. Death would have been far less bitter than this disgrace!
The count went on. Stroke after stroke slashed across my back and shoulders as heavily as my imbruted executioner could strike. Soon the blood began to ooze, then trickle, then stream down. By the fiftieth stroke I should judge that my back was a mass of raw flesh. Yet the count continued, the strokes fell without ceasing, mercilessly.
Coming as I did from a people bred to endure the utmost torture of the Indian savage, I found no difficulty in restraining any outcry under this equally fiendish torture of so-called Christians. But as the little surgeon had said, no man can foresee the limits of endurance. At the seventy-third stroke I swooned. They did not cut me down, but let me hang by the wrists, and drenched me with buckets of sea-water, until I revived.
I gasped, stiffened, and writhed in the hell of agony which beset me with returning consciousness.
"Seventy-four!" called the officer.
The lash descended, all the more forcefully for the rest enjoyed by the wielder.
"Seventy-five!—seventy-six!—seventy-seven!" went on the merciless tally.
I gritted my teeth, and vowed to endure and live, that I might overturn heaven and earth to accomplish the shame and destruction of Britain. My glaring eyes looked out past the mast upon the sailors before me with such murderous rage that one by one they edged back and around beyond reach of my vision.
The count had now passed the eighties—it was at ninety. Only ten more strokes! But despite my rage, a deathly sickness was fast creeping upon me. I could no longer hold up my head. Try as I might, it sank lower and lower, until my chin was upon my quivering breast.
"Ninety-five!" The words came faint, from an immeasurable distance. I was again about to swoon.