ats are lowered also, and each ship
in harbour sends a boat manned by marines to attend. Then, with the
master-at-arms and the ship's surgeon, the boat is cast off. The
boatswain's mate begins the floggin', and the boat rows away to the
half-minute bell, the drummer beatin' the rogue's march. From ship to
ship the long-boat goes, and the punishment of floggin' is repeated. If
he faints, he gets wine or rum, or is taken back to his ship to recover.
When his back is healed he goes out to get the rest of his sentence.
Very few ever live through it, or if they do it's only for a short time.
They'd better have taken the hangin' that was the alternative. Even a
corpse with its back bare of flesh to the bone has received the last
lashes of a sentence, and was then buried in the mud of the shore with
no religious ceremony.

"Mind you, there's many a man gets fifty lashes that don't deserve them.
There's many men in the fleet that's stirred to anger at ill-treatment,
until now, in these days, the whole lot is ready to see the thing
through--to see the thing through--by heaven and by hell!"

The pockmarked face had taken on an almost ghastly fervour, until it
looked like a distorted cartoon-vindictive, fanatical; but Dyck, on
the edge of the river of tragedy, was not ready to lose himself in the
stream of it.

As he looked round the ship he felt a stir of excitement like nothing
he had ever known, though he had been brought up in a country where men
were by nature revolutionists, and where the sword was as often outside
as inside the scabbard. There was something terrible in a shipboard
agitation not to be found in a land-rising. On land there were a
thousand miles of open country, with woods and houses, caves and cliffs,
to which men could flee for hiding; and the danger of rebellion was
less dominant. At sea, a rebellion was like some beastly struggle in one
room, beyond the walls of which was everlasting nothingness. The thing
had to be fought out, as it were, man to man within four walls, and God
help the weaker!

"How many ships in the fleet are sworn to this agitation?" Dyck asked
presently.

"Every one. It's been like a spread of infection; it's entered at every
door, looked out of every window. All the ships are in it, from the
twenty-six-hundred-tonners to the little five-hundred-and-fifty-tonners.
Besides, there are the Delegates."

He lowered his voice as he used these last words. "Yes, I know," Dyck
answered,