t sea! We don't mind the fightin'. We'd rather fight than eat."
An evil grin covered his face for a minute. "Yes, we'd rather fight than
eat, for the stuff we get to eat is hell's broil, God knows! Did you
ever think what the life of the sailor is, that swings at the top of a
mast with the frost freezin' his very soul, and because he's slow, owin'
to the cold, gets twenty lashes for not bein' quicker? Well, I've seen
that, and a bad sight it is. Did you ever see a man flogged? It ain't a
pretty sight. First the back takes the click of the whip like a damned
washboard, and you see the ridges rise and go purple and red, and the
man 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
long-boat, and all the ship's bo