Cat o' nine tails

The cat was made of nine pieces of cord, each about a foot-and-a-half long, attached to a thick rope which served as a handle. Each length of cord had three knots near its striking end. The cat was kept in a red baize bag, and when the "cat was let out of the bag," sailors were flogged on the bare back for transgressing the Articles of War.

You've seen this in movies, of course. In Real Life, according to Patrick O'Brian, masterful author of twenty novels on the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, the process was ruthlessly efficient and commonplace.

Punishment always took place at six bells in the forenoon watch (eleven A.M.). Some ships set aside special days for flogging, others punished on a daily basis. The boatswain's mates piped 'All hands to witness punishment,' and the crew moved aft where the Marines were stationed with their muskets and all the officers were present in full-dress uniforms, wearing their swords.

"The master-at-arms brought his charges before the captain and the misconduct of which they were accused (usually drunkenness) was publicly stated. If the man had anything to say for himself he might do so, and if any of his particular officers saw fit they might put in a word for him.

"Having considered the case, the captain gave his decision--acquittal, reprimand or punishment. This might be extra duties or stoppage of grog, but often it was flogging.

"'Strip,' the captain would say, and the seaman's shirt came off.

"'Seize him up,' and the quartermasters tied his hands to a grating rigged for the purpose upright against the break of the poop, reporting, 'Seized up, sir.'

"Then the captain read the Articles of War that covered the offence, he and all the others taking off their hats as he did so. He said, 'Do your duty,' and a boatswain's mate, taking the cat-of-nine-tails out of a red baize bag, laid on the number of strokes awarded. Some hands screamed, but the regular man-of-war's man would take a dozen in silence."

--Patrick O'Brian, Men-of-War, Life in Nelson's Navy, W.W. Norton and Company, 1995.

Others, such as the monstrous Captain Hugh Pigot of the H.M.S. Hermione rigged the grating every day, and instead of six, or nine, or at the most twelve strokes, would sentence the men to hundreds of lashes.

Captain Pigot, it should be noted, was eventually hacked to pieces by his crew off the Spanish Main. They also killed most of the other officers and eventually turned the Hermione over to the Spaniards.

Brutes like Pigot were the exception, however, for good officers--the real-life counterparts to O'Brian's fictional Jack Aubrey--knew that a happy ship, a ship whose well-trained, well-conditioned men would follow their officers anywhere, was the essential tool of His Majesty's foreign policy. And for centuries the Royal Navy was the most efficient war machine on earth.

It was believed that the whip should have exactly nine lashes, because being punished by a 'trinity of trinities' can be seen as pious, sacred and more efficacious.

However, whips with a lesser number of tails certainly existed. For example, a criminal called John Lilburn was scourged in 1637 with a whip having only three lashes, but to compensate, each tail had twenty knots, and the culprit was struck with the whip every three paces between the Fleet and the Old Palace Yard of London.

During the reign of James II, Titus Oates received as many as 17000 lashes from a whip with nine tails (ouch!) on his way to Tyburn, according to a contemporary report.

The cat o'nine tails was once used by the British Army and Navy to punish offenders, but has since fallen into disfavour, just like some other forms of corporal punishment (see execution, lynching, dismemberment etc).

See also American Old Navy discipline.

Cat" o' nine" tails`.

See under Cat.

© Webster 1913.