Cruel, wanton, reckless as was the deed of the Governor of Goree, such things were of everyday occurrence in the army of his time. Sir Charles Napier has left record of the merciless floggings of which he was an eye-witness a decade later. Forty years after the Peace of Versailles a court-martial had no hesitation in passing a sentence of a thousand lashes. Although the rope’s-end employed in the punishment of Armstrong and his fellows was probably a more formidable instrument than the regimental ‘cat’ it was no more dangerous than the bunch of knotted cords used in the navy. A social system that permitted women and children to be hanged for petty larceny had a Spartan code for its soldiers on active service. Moreover, any lack of firmness on the part of Joseph Wall might have brought him face to face with a serious mutiny. Riot was the sole means of expression of the inarticulate mob, both civil and military. A few months after the disturbance at Goree, General Conway, Governor of Jersey, was called upon to quell a fierce rebellion among his troops. About the same time wild insubordination was rife in the regiments quartered at Wakefield and Rotherham. The danger of a similar outbreak in a far-off island, garrisoned for the most part by gaol-birds, and close to the French possessions, was multiplied a hundredfold. Severe as were the methods of Wall, had such a man been in command at the Nore the nation would have been spared the terror and ignominy of ‘Admiral’ Parker. Unfortunately for himself, the discipline of the Irish giant was exerted to punish a personal affront. Had his soldiers refused to cheer the birthday of some German princeling, he might have flogged to death a whole company with impunity. Yet, relatively, the ways and means of inflammable Wall were tame. On the 4th of August 1782, Captain Kenneth Mackenzie, who ruled over a similar regiment of convicts at Fort Morea on the coast of Africa, blew to atoms a mutinous fellow-Scot, a private under his command, from the mouth of a cannon. For this deed, being brought to trial two years later, he was condemned to death, but subsequently granted a free pardon. At the time of his escape from the ‘Brown Bear’ at Reading, there were rumours (so Wall alleges) that the Governor of Goree had put to death soldiers in Mackenzie fashion. In which case he bore the stigma of another’s sin.