Note sull'episodio
The cat o' nine tails first appears in writing in a 1681 report of a London murder and reached a wider public in William Congreve's 1695 play Love for Love, with counterparts in Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. Its nine tails were not symbolic: ship's rope was laid from three strands of yarn into small ropes, and three of those into rigging, so unraveling a length of rigging twice gave nine cords. The 19th century British naval version was about 1.5 meters long, cut from rope roughly six centimeters thick, with a stiffened 90 centimeter handle and 60 centimeters of knotted tails, and weighed about 370 grams. Floggings were formal ceremonies: the crew was summoned to witness punishment, Royal Marines with fixed bayonets flanked the prisoner, and the boatswain's mate stood two steps back, combed the blood-clumped tails apart with his fingers between strokes, and swung with his whole body.
Sentences escalated from a dozen lashes for drunkenness to 200 for desertion, 300 for mutiny, 500 for theft, and in one 18th century court-martial 1,000, because the display was aimed at the watching crew as much as the prisoner. Boys faced a five-tailed boys' cat of smooth whipcord and were beaten bent over a gun, a ritual called kissing the gunner's daughter, and wealthy midshipmen received the same bare-bottom punishment as the poorest boys, a use of shame that denied them the status adult sailors won by taking the cat in silence. An 1832 account by a British Army soldier sentenced to 50 lashes described the first blow as a knife cutting through his body from toenails to fingernails.
- Punishing the backside rather than the hands kept boys fit to haul rope and climb rigging.
- The soldier said the second blow made the first seem sweet and agreeable by comparison.
- He felt the pain more in his lungs than on his back.
- He bit his tongue nearly in two and his face turned black as he choked.
- He said the flogging felt as long as his whole previous life.