KEELHAULED.

King Country Chronicle, Volume IX, Issue 739, 23 January 1915, Page 3

KEELHAULED.

Mil. FRANK SCUDAMORE ,DE : SCRIBES A SCENE OF HORROR. A good deal of the terribly severe punishments'that used to be inflicted on offending seamen of the Royal Navy, though' long since obsolete and abandoned, are still, it is said, in the list of sentences which a commander of a British man-o- 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 ol these horrible tortures has, apparently, been expunged from the punishment code; 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 of 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 l haunt my memory. I was steaming out iii 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 oS 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," he 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 few minutes times, my glasses aiding,. I saw. 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 ro£e, to the end of 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 them 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 th'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 Khedive's yacht, whose officers and crew were, of course, 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 infl'icted on our own sailors. Frank Scudamore in Modern Man."