Back during the ancient world and the Middle Ages the ship represented the pinnacle of
the military.
The ship was a sacred thing, and as time went by it was those who ruled the waves that became
the most powerful nations.
But during The Age of Discovery when ships were discovering new worlds and crossing vast
oceans, life was tough for sailors.
The Age of Discovery was also an era of mutiny.
When an aggrieved crew turned against their captain all hell could break loose and there
was nowhere to hide.
That’s why some particularly horrifying punishments were reserved for out-of-control
sailors.
Welcome to Keelhauling.
Our viewers have likely seen the movies that depict mutinies on ships or sailors that no
longer follow commands.
For their transgression the punishment had to be quite severe because when you’re in
the middle of the ocean you just can’t afford to let things slide.
On the other hand, if a captain is too stern this might create a conspiracy to take him
out and that’s what we call mutiny.
Maybe the most well-known of those was, “The Mutiny on the Bounty.”
A captain had to be hard, but fair, lest he lose the respect of his crew.
The most common types of punishment then were not keelhauling, which could be said to be
the most severe form.
It was more likely that the offending sailor would receive some strokes of the cane, or
worse, the whip.
He might simply be tied to the mast and left to think about what he’d done.
But let’s say a sailor had been part of a mutiny and that mutiny had failed.
Or what if the villains of the seas, pirates, had wanted to come down hard on someone.
What was the worst thing they could do?
They might be hanged, but it was a particularly painful type of hanging because rather than
be dropped the person would be pulled up while his head was in the noose.
He would be run up something called the yardarm, which is part of the timber cross-section
on the mast from where the sails are set.
There was a case of hanging by the yardarm in 1860 and that happened to Royal Marine
John Dalliger on the HMS Leven.
There were also cases when men were thrown overboard, but in one infamous instance of
this happening the men hadn’t committed a crime.
The crime was against them.
It’s now known as the Zong massacre and 130 slaves were thrown overboard a British
ship.
And then there’s the punishment you might all have heard of from reading books or watching
movies about pirates, and that’s the ghastly treatment that involved a man having to walk
the plank and into the ocean.
Despite this being the most recognizable punishment in the era of pirates, it’s mostly a thing
of fiction.
There have been some recorded instances, such as a mutineer in the 18th century confessing
that he had made his officers walk the plank while blindfolded, but the details are sketchy
on this and many believe it never happened.
There are some other instances that sound true and were reported in the newspapers of
the day, but walking the plank was certainly a rare thing to happen.
So now we come to keelhauling, which definitely did happen and you might argue was a worse
punishment than any of the above.
The keel of the ship is like the backbone of the ship.
It’s the bottom part.
When someone is hauled under that keel this is called keelhauling.
That person might be hauled with ropes from one side of the ship to the other, or even
worse, dragged the entire length of the ship from what are called the bow and the stern.
As you can imagine, this would be rather unpleasant to say the least.
You might think, well, if the operation was short enough at least you could hold your
breath and make it to the other side.
You might then dry yourself off, issue some apologies, and be back to work.
That wasn’t really the case, though, because being bashed up against the ship was a painful
affair.
There was a good chance bones would be broken or a head injury could mean the person was
pulled up dead.
It was actually quite an extreme form of punishment because ships are generally not smooth on
the surface of the hull – the part of the ship that floats in the water.
Those wooden ships’ hulls were covered in barnacles, which are those ultra-sharp crustaceans
that stick to things.
We are sure some of you have experienced slipping on a rock and being cut by these razor-sharp
things.
Now imagine your body being hauled against them with pressure.
The keelhauled man would be shredded all over his body and he might come out looking like
victim of Freddy Kruger.
It was a fate worse than marooning, which is when pirates just left people to die on
a deserted island.
Jokingly, some pirates called this making someone the “governor of an island.”
Back to keelhauling, sometimes weight was placed on the man so the people pulling him
had more control of the movement of his body.
There was an upside and a downside to this.
He might have actually missed all those sharp barnacles if he went low enough, but he might
have also drowned.
This punishment was rare to say the least, but there have been depictions of it in paintings
going back to ancient times and the Middle Ages.
There is this picture that was sketched sometime in the 15th or 16th century England It was
discussed in 1880 in British parliament when one politician asked the Secretary to the
Admiralty about an instance of keelhauling that had been reported in Italian newspapers.
It allegedly happened on the HMS Alexandra, but the Navy denied it ever happened.
There is also a well-known painting that is called “The keel-hauling of the ship's surgeon
of Admiral Jan van Nes.”
The event happened on a stationary ship in front of many spectators, but it seems the
punishment was never supposed to kill the offender but only act as a warning to others
who thought about not towing the line.
Pun intended, that expression is a reference from the navy.
Historians have written that keelhauling did happen in the Dutch Navy.
They described as we have, saying the man was lowered on pulleys and ropes into the
water and weights were attached to him.
He was then pulled back up the other side of the ship.
Although it’s also written that he might have been given some time to get his breath
back and then it started again.
This was apparently much more severe in the winter when the water was freezing cold, and
severe injury could happen due to the man hitting his head.
It wasn’t supposed to be a death sentence, though.
In the case of this keelhauling it was under the command of a 17th century Dutch admiral
named Jan Jansse van Nes.
We just can’t find any resource that tells us what the guilty surgeon had done to deserve
this wicked treatment.
Keelhauling is described in a book called “A Relation of Two Several Voyages Made
into the East-Indies” that was published in 1700.
Again, it’s the Dutch that did it.
Here is an excerpt from that book: “He that strikes an Officer, or Master of
the Ship, is without hopes of pardon to be thrown into the Sea fasten’d by a Rope,
with which he is thrown in on one side of the Ship, and drawn up again on the other,
and so three times together he is drawn round the Keel of the Ship, in the doing of which,
if they should chance not to allow Rope enough to let him sink below the Keel, the Malefactor
might have his brains knockt out.”
It sounds like the lower the man sank the better his chances were of keeping his head
intact and not being sliced by barnacles.
There are other cases of keelhauling that were described in the journal of a Dutch Admiral
named Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp.
In 1639 he described something similar to the above.
In the 18th century a piece of writing by an Englishman said the English don’t do
it, but the French do.
One instance is described when a French sailor went around the ship five times.
It was published in November 1869 in a publication called Onward magazine.
The person who witnessed this and wrote about it said the sailor had “injuries of the
most serious nature, or death itself, certain of being the result.”
Oy matey, not that you’ve gotten through this video, let’s stick together and watch
another.
We’ve picked two for you so choose this one over here or this video here.
Pick now or you might end up keelhauled yourself.
Just kidding… or are we?