Chapter 71 - Page 2

neither of these
acts explicitly empowers an officer to inflict the lash. It would
almost seem as if, in this case, the British lawgivers were
willing to leave such a stigma out of an organic statute, and
bestow the power of the lash in some less solemn, and perhaps
less public manner. Indeed, the only broad enactments directly
sanctioning naval scourging at sea are to be found in the United
States Statute Book and in the "Sea Laws" of the absolute
monarch, Louis le Grand, of France.[4.1]

Taking for their basis the above-mentioned British Naval Code,
and ingrafting upon it the positive scourging laws, which Britain
was loth to recognise as organic statutes, our American
lawgivers, in the year 1800, framed the Articles of War now
governing the American Navy. They may be found in the second
volume of the "United States Statutes at Large," under chapter
xxxiii.--"An act for the _better_ government of the Navy of the
United States."

[4.1] For reference to the latter (L'Ord. de la Marine), _vide_
Curtis's "Treatise on the Rights and Duties of Merchant-Seamen,
according to the General Maritime Law," Part ii., c. i.
----

Nor is it a dumb thing that the men who, in democratic Cromwell's
time, first proved to the nations the toughness of the British
oak and the hardihood of the British sailor--that in Cromwell's
time, whose fleets struck terror into the cruisers of France,
Spain, Portugal, and Holland, and the corsairs of Algiers and the
Levant; in Cromwell's time, when Robert Blake swept the Narrow
Seas of all the keels of a Dutch Admiral who insultingly carried
a broom at his fore-mast; it is not a dumb thing that, at a
period deemed so glorious to the British Navy, these Articles of
War were unknown.

Nevertheless, it is granted that some laws or other must have
governed Blake's sailors at that period; but they must have been
far less severe than those laid down in the written code which
superseded them, since, according to the father-in-law of James
II., the Historian of the Rebellion, the English Navy, prior to
the enforcement of the new code, was full of officers and sailors
who, of all men, were the most republican. Moreover, the same
author informs us that the first work undertaken by his respected
son-in-law, then Duke of York, upon entering on the duties of
Lord High Admiral, was to have a grand re-christening of the men-
of-war, which still carried on their sterns names too democratic
to suit his high-tory ears.

But if these Articles of War were unknown in Blake's time, and
also during the most brilliant period of Admiral Benbow's career,
what inference must follow? That such tyrannical ordinances are
not