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