"The blanket is now removed from the shoulders of the poor fellow, and then commences the fiend-like exhibition. After the victim has received one dozen, the captain tells the other boatswain's mate to commence, and after the poor fellow has received the next dozen the blanket is again thrown over his shoulders, and the boats tow the launch alongside the next ship, the drummer and fifer playing the Rogue's March. The same ceremony is repeated from ship to ship, until the surgeon pronounces that the man can receive no more without endangering life; and woe be to the tyrant who dares to inflict one lash more after the surgeon has spoken. I must here remark that I never knew an instance of a surgeon in the navy being a tyrant; on the contrary, both he and his assistants are always respected for their tender regard for the sick under their care. After this degrading and cruel punishment the man is again towed to his ship and helped on board; he is next sent into the sick-bay, his back anointed in order to heal it, and, in case he has not received all his punishment, to enable him again to be tortured. When a man has been flogged round the fleet he is of no further service, his muscles are contracted, and he is no longer an able man." Luckily there was no need for impressment to fill the navy, but it was legal, as it still is. But most things were rougher and more brutal than nowadays, and nowhere was it better exemplified than in criminal punishment. Hanging was the punishment for many offences, but there was such a growing disinclination on the part of jurors to convict, and so many recommendations to mercy on the part of judges, that it was about time to modify our criminal legislature. Something must be done with the criminals, and they must be punished somehow. It was very certain that hanging was no deterrent to crime, which was so rampant that the gaols in England would have been utterly unable to hold the convicts. There was the alternative of sending them to colonize and be servants in that vast Australian continent, of which we then knew so little; or there was the employment of old men-of-war, called "hulks," as floating prisons, in which the prisoners were confined at night, working in the daytime on shore, in the dockyards, or elsewhere. These "hulks" were verily floating hells, but they had the merit over transportation, of economy, as we may see in a short leader in the _Times_ of July 19, 1830:-- "Some useful papers have been printed by order of the House of Commons, exhibiting by a clear and distinct table the difference of expense attendant on the transport of convicts to New South Wales, as compared with the cost of their retention and employment on board of hulks in this country and in Bermuda.