APPENDIX A

The Effect of a Flogging

ULTIMATELY any judgment on the physical effect of Captain Pigot’s cruelty to his crew depends on a knowledge of what a lash from a cat-o’-nine-tails did to a man. Present day pundits disagree and all base their arguments on the very few existing written descriptions by victims of a flogging. The author therefore made some experiments to determine the effect of a lash.

The dimensions of one of the last cat-o’-nine-tails used in the Royal Navy—in 1867 on board the steam corvette Malacca—were taken. The handle, of wood covered in red baize, had been weakened by woodworm and could not be used for experiments, and in Pigot’s time the cat usually had a rope handle, but of the same length and diameter as the wooden handle. The author therefore made up a cat to the same specification—which is similar to several others described in contemporary documents—using a rope instead of a wooden handle. The rope was 1-in. diameter manilla, two feet long. One end was whipped and nine pieces of ¼-in. diameter (¾-in. circumference) line were spliced into the other end, leaving tails two feet long. A Turk’s head knot of the same line was placed over the splice and sailmaker’s whippings were put on the ends of the tails. The completed cat weighed thirteen ounces.

Using a five-barred shipyard wooden trestle as a ‘grating’, the cat was then tested on pieces of wood of various sizes. The horizontal bars of the trestle were made of 5-in. by 2-in. wood spaced twenty inches apart measuring from centre to centre. A piece of ½-in. by 2-in. pitchpine, free of knots, three feet long, was lashed vertically to two bars of the trestle with an equal amount overlapping the bars top and bottom. The centre of this piece of wood was midway between the top and bottom bar and 4 ft. 6 in. from the ground (the height at which blows would fall on an average man’s shoulders when flogged), and was unsupported by the horizontal bars for fifteen inches.

The person wielding the cat was 5 ft. 10 in. tall and weighed 152 pounds. He intended to strike the centre of the pitchpine and made a preliminary swing with the cat, using only about two-thirds of his strength, to test the distance and his stance. The piece of pitchpine broke in two pieces and it was estimated the nine tails had spread about three inches at their widest at the point of impact.

A piece of ¾-in. by ¾-in. pitchpine of the same length and free of knots was substituted, and a blow delivered using the man’s full strength. The wood broke into three pieces. The middle piece, where the tails hit, was five inches long and landed seventeen feet from the trestle—the remaining two pieces were of course lashed to the bars.

A piece of 1-in. by 1-in. pitchpine of the same length and also free of knots was then substituted. The first blow of the cat had no apparent effect and the tails appeared to spread about three inches. The second blow broke the wood into two pieces, the break being four and a half inches long.

Each piece of wood, although unsupported for fifteen inches, was of course supported for five inches at the top and five inches at the bottom by the bars of the trestle.

Pitchpine was chosen for the experiments because it has the highest modulus of elasticity of any readily available wood: 850, compared with 730 for larch, 730 for American elm and 450 for English oak. Its tensile strength is 2.1, compared with 1.9 for larch, 4.1 for American elm and 3.4 for English oak. Since one was trying to measure the impact of a lash, the most important factor was the modulus of elasticity.

So much for the effect on wood. What about the effect on a man? It was clear that a man standing braced but unsupported would have been knocked down by one blow. The effect on a man lashed to a grating, unable to ‘give’ with the blow, can only be guessed, but from the above experiments it is certain that one lash would break the skin and severe bruising would result.

From further experiments made with composition boarding, canvas and a sandbag, the author has no reason to suppose that the description quoted on page 62, beginning ‘The pain in my lungs was more severe, I thought, than on my back. I felt as if I would burst in the internal parts of my body…’ was in any way exaggerated.