s side, then on that--now
scraping the ship's hull under water--anon, hoisted, stunned and
breathless, into the air.

But though this barbarity is now abolished from the English and
American navies, there still remains another practice which, if
anything, is even worse than _keel-hauling_. This remnant of the Middle
Ages is known in the Navy as "_flogging through the fleet_." It is
never inflicted except by authority of a court-martial upon some
trespasser deemed guilty of a flagrant offence. Never, that I know of,
has it been inflicted by an American man-of-war on the home station.
The reason, probably, is, that the officers well know that such a
spectacle would raise a mob in any American seaport.

By XLI. of the Articles of War, a court-martial shall not "for any one
offence not capital," inflict a punishment beyond one hundred lashes.
In cases "not capital" this law may be, and has been, quoted in
judicial justification of the infliction of more than one hundred
lashes. Indeed, it would cover a thousand. Thus: One act of a sailor
may be construed into the commission of ten different transgressions,
for each of which he may be legally condemned to a hundred lashes, to
be inflicted without intermission. It will be perceived, that in any
case deemed "capital," a sailor under the above Article, may legally be
flogged to the death.

But neither by the Articles of War, nor by any other enactment of
Congress, is there any direct warrant for the extraordinary cruelty of
the mode in which punishment is inflicted, in cases of flogging through
the fleet. But as in numerous other instances, the incidental
aggravations of this penalty are indirectly covered by other clauses in
the Articles of War: one of which authorises the authorities of a
ship--in certain indefinite cases--to correct the guilty "_according to
the usages of the sea-service_."

One of these "usages" is the following:

All hands being called "to witness punishment" in the ship to which the
culprit belongs, the sentence of the court-martial condemning him is
read, when, with the usual solemnities, a portion of the punishment is
inflicted. In order that it shall not lose in severity by the slightest
exhaustion in the arm of the executioner, a fresh boatswain's mate is
called out at every dozen.

As the leading idea is to strike terror into the beholders, the
greatest number of lashes is inflicted on board the culprit's own ship,
in order to render him the