James Norman Hall - The Mutiny on the Bounty - Complete Trilogy

The half-minute bell began to sound, and the noise of drumming grew louder—the doleful tattoo of the rogue’s march. Then, around the bows of the Tigress, came a procession I shall never forget.

In the lead, rowed slowly in time to the nervous beat of the drum, came the longboat of a near-by ship. Her surgeon and master-at-arms stood beside the drummer; just aft of them a human figure was huddled in a posture I could not make out at first. Behind the longboat, and rowing in time to the same doleful music, came a boat from every ship of the fleet, manned with marines to attend the punishment. I heard an order “Way enough!” and as the rowing ceased the longboat drifted to a halt by the gangway. I glanced down over the rail. My breath seemed to catch in my throat, and without knowing that I spoke, I exclaimed softly, “Oh, my God!” Mr. Bligh gave me a sidelong glance and one of his slight, grim smiles.

The huddled figure in the bows of the boat was that of a powerful man of thirty or thirty-five. He was stripped to his wide sailor’s trousers of duck, and his bare arms were bronzed and tattooed. Stockings had been bound around his wrists, which were stoutly lashed to a capstan bar. His thick yellow hair was in disorder and I could not see his face, for his head hung down over his chest. His trousers, the thwart on which he lay huddled, and the frames and planking of the boat on either side of him were blotched and spattered with black blood. Blood I had seen before; it was the man’s back that made me catch my breath. From neck to waist the cat-o’-nine-tails had laid the bones bare, and the flesh hung in blackened, tattered strips.

Captain Courtney sauntered placidly across the deck to glance down at the hideous spectacle below. The surgeon in the boat bent over the mutilated, seized-up body, straightened his back, and looked at Courtney by the gangway.

“The man is dead, sir,” he said solemnly. A murmur faint as a stir of air in the treetops came from the men crowded on the booms. The Captain of the Tigress folded his arms and turned his head slightly with raised eyebrows. He made a gallant figure, with his sword, his rich laced uniform, his cocked hat and powdered queue. In the tense silence which followed he turned to the surgeon again.

“Dead,” he said lightly, in his cultivated drawl. “Lucky devil! Master-at-arms!” The warrant officer at the doctor’s side sprang to attention and pulled off his hat. “How many are due?”

“Two dozen, sir.”

Courtney strolled back to his place on the weather side and took from his first lieutenant’s hand a copy of the Articles of War. As he swept off his cocked hat gracefully and held it over his heart, every man on the ship uncovered in respect to the King’s commandments. Then, in his clear, drawling voice, the captain read the Article which prescribes the punishment for striking an officer of His Majesty’s Navy. One of the boatswain’s mates was untying a red baize bag, from which he drew out the red-handled cat, eyeing it uncertainly, with frequent glances to windward. The captain concluded his reading, replaced his hat, and caught the man’s eye. Again I heard the faint sighing murmur forward, and again deep silence fell before Courtney’s glance. “Do your duty,” he ordered calmly; “two dozen, I believe.”

“Two dozen it is, sir,” said the boatswain’s mate in a hollow voice as he walked slowly to the side. There were clenched jaws and gleaming eyes among the men forward, but the silence was so profound that I could hear the faint creak of blocks aloft as the braces swayed in the light air.

I could not turn my eyes away from the boatswain’s mate, climbing slowly down the ship’s side. If the man had shouted aloud, he could not have expressed more clearly the reluctance he felt. He stepped into the boat, and as he moved among the men on the thwarts they drew back with set stern faces. At the capstan bar, he hesitated and looked up uncertainly. Courtney had sauntered to the bulwarks and was gazing down with folded arms.

“Come! Do your duty!” he ordered, with the air of a man whose dinner is growing cold.

The man with the cat drew its tails through the fingers of his left hand, raised his arm, and sent them whistling down on the poor battered corpse. I turned away, giddy and sick. Bligh stood by the rail, a hand on his hip, watching the scene below as a man might watch a play indifferently performed. The measured blows continued—each breaking the silence like a pistol shot. I counted them mechanically for what seemed an age, but the end came at last—twenty-two, a pause, twenty-three ... twenty-four. I heard a word of command; the marines fell out and trooped down the poop ladder. Eight bells struck. There were a stir and bustle on the ship, and I heard the boatswain piping the long-drawn, cheery call to dinner.

When we sat down to dine, Courtney seemed to have dismissed the incident from his mind. He tossed off a glass of sherry to Bligh’s health, and tasted his soup. “Cold!” he remarked ruefully. “Hardships of a seaman’s life, eh, Bligh?”

His guest took soup with a relish, and sounds better fitted to the forecastle than aft, for his manners at table were coarse. “Damme!” he said. “We fared worse aboard the old Belle Poule!”

“But not in Tahiti, I wager. I hear you are to pay the Indian ladies of the South Sea another call.”

“Aye, and a long one. We shall be some months in getting our load of breadfruit trees.”

“I heard of your voyage in Town. Cheap food for the West Indian slaves, eh? I wish I were sailing with you.”

“By God, I wish you were! I could promise you some sport.”

“Are the Indian women as handsome as Cook painted them?”

“Indeed they are, if you’ve no prejudice against a brown skin. They are wonderfully clean in person, and have enough sensibility to attract a fastidious man. Witness Sir Joseph; he declares that there are no such women in the world!”

Our host sighed romantically. “Say no more! Say no more! I can see you, like a Bashaw under the palms, in the midst of a harem the Sultan himself might envy!”

Still sickened by what I had seen, I was doing my best to make a pretense of eating, silent while the older men talked. Bligh was the first to mention the flogging.

“What had the man done?” he asked.

Captain Courtney set down his glass of claret and glanced up absently. “Oh, the fellow who was flogged,” he said. “He was one of Captain Allison’s foretopmen, on the Unconquerable. And a smart hand, they say. He was posted for desertion, and then Allison, who remembered his face, saw him stepping out of a public house in Portsmouth. The man tried to spring away and Allison seized him by the arm. Damme! Good topmen don’t grow on every hedge! Well, this insolent fellow blacked Allison’s eye, just as a file of marines passed. They made him prisoner, and you saw the rest. Odd! We were only the fifth ship; eight dozen did for him. But Allison has a boatswain’s mate who’s an artist, they say—left-handed, so he lays them on crisscross, and strong as an ox.”

Bligh listened with interest to Courtney’s words, and nodded approvingly. “Struck his captain, eh?” he remarked. “By God! He deserved all he got, and more! No laws are more just than those governing the conduct of men at sea.”

“Is there any need of such cruelty?” I asked, unable to keep silent. “Why did they not hang the poor fellow and have done with it?”

“Poor fellow?” Captain Courtney turned to me with eyebrows raised. “You have much to learn, my lad. A year or two at sea will harden him, eh, Bligh?”

“I’ll see to that,” said the Captain of the Bounty. “No, Mr. Byam, you must waste no sympathy on rascals of that stripe.”

“And remember,” put in Courtney, with a manner of friendly admonishment, “remember, as Mr. Bligh says, that no laws are more just than those governing the conduct of men at sea. Not only just, but necessary; discipline must be preserved, on a merchantman as well as on a man-of-war, and mutiny and piracy suppressed.”