UNKNOWN

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 661, 18 April 1914, Page 3

UNKNOWN

MR. FRANK SCUDAMORE DE SCRIBES A SCENE OF HORROR.

A good deal of the terribly S2vere punishments that used to be inflicted on offending seamen of the Royal Navy s , though long obsolete and abandoned, are still, it is said, in the list of sentences which. £ commander of a British raan-c-war has the power to inflict on members of his crew.

"'Flogging round the fleet," for instance, has, I fancy,, not been practised since the famous mutiny at the Nore, and keelhauling, 'which was, perhaps, a few degrees more barbarous, fell into disuse at an even earlier date; yet neither oi these horribls .tortures has., apparently, been expunged from the punishment coiie; no doubt because it was unnecessary to do so. There must, indeed, be very few persons living who have had; the painful privilege of seeing men keelhauled, and the present writer is one of those few.

It happened at Alexandria, in 1882, two mornings after the memorable bombardments pi the forts by the British Fleet. I do not think that the horror of the scene, of which I was the involuntary witness, will ever cease to haunt my memory.

I was steaming out in a launch towards the telegraph ship, which had picked up the cable some distance outside the harbour, when we disconnected them with the town, the day before the fight. It was barely dawn as we passed under the lee of the Khedive's yacht, which lay at anchor off Ras-el-tin Palace.

The crew appeared—to be at quarters, . and apparently some function was in progress.

Suddenly my. companion seized my arm.

"Look," lie said, and as I gazed in the direction he indicated, I saw that an object, that gleamed silvery in the morning light hung suspended from the yardarm. In another moment it dropped slowly, towards the surface of the water, and then disappeared. In a * ow minutes times, rny glasses aiding, I caw rise slowly above the starboard bulwark an object which I did not at first- recognise as the one I had before seen. It rose, hauled by a rope, to the end o£ the yardarm, and hung there gyrating. Its colour was now almost wholly red. Some seconds elapsed before it dawned on me that there was not one object, but two, . and that they were two human beings, naked and bound back to back. The silvery sheen I had first observed, was but the. morning light on their bare limbs. The red that now covered thenr was blood from the many wounds torn in their flesh by the barnacles that covered the ship's sheathing, and against which they had been scraped during those awful moments when they were being dragged beneath the vessel's waist.

For tk'is -was a keelhauling, perhaps the most barbarous, inhuman, horrible form of torture ever devised by man's inhumanity to man.

We learned afterwards that there had been a mutiny on board ii-e Khedive's yacht, whoso- officers and crew were, of coursa, all Egyptians, and a zealous commander had made an example of the two unhappy wretches whose sufferings and death we had witnessed.

Such punishments, at such times, may, and do, have the desired effect with men of a primitive race and unbridled passions, but it is ghastly to think of the sufferings of the victims, whatever their deserts have "been. It is worse to recall that the punishment was at one time liable to' be infi'icted on. our own sailors. Franlc Scudamore in Modern Man."

THE JUDGE AND THE SMOKER.

There are many stories associated with the late Judge Grantham. He onee rebuked a man of sullen temper for blowing clouds in . a "non-smoker." "This is not a smoking carriage,"he observed, rather, wrathfuily. "I know that, old 'un," grumbled the stolid one, "but I be a'gooing on with this 'ere smoke." His Lordship's temperature rose spontaneously. He passed the yokel his card and said he would report him at the next station. When the nest stopping-place was reached the yokel quickly changed into another carriage, but the judge sent the guard to get his name "and address, as he intended to prosecute him. The guard went to the yokel's compartment, and returned to Mr. Lus : tice Grantham and whispered, "If I were you I would not prosecute that gent.jhe .has just given me his card —here it is—and he is Mr. Justice Trantham!" —"Westminster Gazette."