[Illustration: Another View of the “Young Waterman” and the Press-gang. _From an English engraving._] In the year 1811 the British frigate _Macedonian_ was commanded by Capt. John S. Carden, and his executive officer was one David Hope. “It was a peculiar feature of the brutal punishment of flogging that officers and men who at first sickened and fainted at the sight of it gradually grew indifferent and in some instances acquired a craving for the bloody ordeal and took a fiendish delight in superintending it. David Hope was one of these. He took the exquisite delight of a connoisseur in the art of flogging, being especially fond of seeing the tender flesh of boys lacerated and torn.” One day a midshipman on the _Macedonian_ named Gale, “a rascally, unprincipled fellow,” lost a handkerchief. A sailor found it on the deck, and as it was unmarked, kept it. Gale saw it in the sailor’s possession, and the sailor was court-martialled, convicted of theft, and sentenced to be flogged through the fleet--to receive 300 lashes from the cat--and to serve one year in prison. On the day appointed the _Macedonian’s_ launch was put into the water and rigged, under the supervision of this David Hope, with a frame on which the bare-backed sailor was lashed. A surgeon, to keep watch that the man was kept alive, boarded the launch with the boatswain and the boat’s crew, and then all hands were called to man the rail and rigging, where all could view the torture. This done, the lash was applied to the man’s back until “the flesh resembled roasted meat burned nearly black before a scorching fire.” Then the launch was sent to another ship and to another and another, where fresh boatswains applied the lash anew to the raw back of the man, the doctor standing by and seeing that the man remained conscious to suffer the torment. When 220 blows had been given the doctor ordered the whipping stopped. The sailor begged to have the other eighty blows given that he might be done with it, but this was refused. He was carried back to the _Macedonian_ and cared for until he had recovered his strength, when the remaining eighty were given to him, and then he was flung into prison. [Illustration: A Flogging Scene. (“The Point of Honor”--a Sailor about to be Flogged is Saved by a Comrade’s Confession. _From a drawing by George Cruikshank._] Just before the War of 1812 a deserter from a British ship slipped on board the United States frigate _Essex_. When an officer with a gang came for him he was, of course, surrendered. On asking, then, that he be allowed to go below for his clothes, permission was granted, but instead of getting his clothing he ran to the carpenter’s bench, picked up an axe, and deliberately chopping off his left hand, he carried it on deck and threw it at the feet of the British lieutenant, saying he would cut off his foot also before he would serve again in the British navy. As he was no longer able to do duty as a sailor the lieutenant left him.