A time when social injustice and mere cruelty were to be aspired to

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 51.

The start of Britain’s war against Napoleon in 1803 turned an occasional annoyance into a major assault on American sovereignty. The Royal Navy’s manpower demands were proving insatiable: from 1803 on, the number of sailors and marines needed to man the fleet grew almost steadily at a rate of 12,000 year as the force more than doubled from 60,000 in 1803 to 145,000 by 1812.36 But even that did not tell the whole story because of the waves of desertions constantly taking place. To try to stem the loss of men, the navy instituted horrific punishments; deserters faced hanging or worse. James Durand, an American seaman who was trapped in the British service for six years after being pressed from a merchant ship in August 1809, witnessed one of these punishments carried out on a fellow American who had repeatedly tried to escape. He was sentenced to be whipped through the fleet, a total of three hundred lashes. The prisoner was stripped from the waist up, seized to a gallows erected in a large boat, and as the band played the rogue’s march was rowed from one warship to the next in the harbor. At each stop the boatswain’s mate of the ship came on board and delivered twenty-five lashes to the man’s bare back with the cat-o’-nine-tails. It was little but a long-drawn-out death sentence. “Alongside the last ship he expired under the brutality of the punishment,” Durand wrote. “So they gave his body ten lashes after he had died.”

Our present sensibilities are overwhelmed by the incomprehensible inhumanity of the past.