‘Flogged before,’ said the boatswain. ‘Ay, I warrant thee. Aboard what ship?’ ‘Aboard no ship at all,’ roared the culprit. ‘On shore. Oh dear!—oh, dear!’ ‘On shore,’ answered the boatswain. ‘At the cart’s tail I presume?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ cried Bell; ‘but I give you my word of honour, sir—my sacred word of honour, that I was not guilty then. It was another man.’ ‘Not guilty then,’ says Nicky Hamstring. ‘No; no more than you are now, I dare affirm.’ The miserable devil gave no answer, but made as though he would catch the legs of the men about him, and cling to them. In all my life I never saw such a pitiful hound. ‘Keel-haul the fellow,’ says one of the men, ‘and see whether the brine won’t wash the roguery out of him.’ And the others joined in the cry: ‘Yes, yes, keel-haul him.’ At this the culprit sat up upon the deck and looked earnestly in the faces of the men through his tears. I do not think he understood what keel-hauling meant. ‘Anything,’ says he, whining like a hungry cat; ‘anything sooner than flogging.’ ‘Very good,’ says Captain Jem. ‘Be it so. Truly, on second thoughts, it would be degrading hemp to put it to any other use about such a scoundrel, except hanging him.’ Meantime, half a dozen of the men, in great glee at the anticipated ducking, went about the preparations without loss of time. The punishment of keel-hauling, I premise, that we borrowed from the Dutch. Its name describes its nature. The prisoner is fastened to a rope led under the vessel’s keel, and hauled beneath her bottom, as often as his guilt seems to require. It is evident that this is a punishment the severity of which depends greatly upon the size of the ship, and the frequency with which the process is repeated. To be hauled under the keel of a great ship of war is a very different thing from being hauled under the keel of a small sloop; but in order to give the punishment its requisite severity on board small craft, the culprit is often hauled all along the keel, being let over the bows, and taken up at the stern; a process by which he is sure to be at least half drowned and half scraped to death by the rough barnacles and jagged shell fish which generally encase a ship’s bottom. In the present case it was determined, however, that Bell should undergo the easier mode of punishment, and be hauled from bulwark to bulwark, but the dose was to be administered twice, giving him a breathing-time between. Accordingly, by the help of a sounding lead, first a thin line and afterwards a stout cord were conducted under the ship’s keel, Mr. Bell watching the process with great anxiety. ‘What—what are you going to do with me?’ at length he cried, beginning to comprehend the nature of his punishment. ‘You do not mean to drag me under the ship?’