228 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT described the scene with characteristic force in his life of Colonel Jack. According to the practice of the time^ the Police Court men and women taken into custody by the watch were practice. iii-t . -iii brought before the magistrates and usually committed to Bridewell. They were then brought before the Court of Governors on their usual sitting day; the offence in eack case was stated by the beadles^ and the Court gave its decision^ generally to the effect that the offenders should be corrected on the spot. The beadles at once prepared the culprits for punishment by stripping their clothes off, and the flogging was administered until the president thouglit proper to stop it, which he did by rapping with a hammeT on the table. At the close of this ceremony, the prisoners were handed over to the officials to pass the term of their imprisonment in beating hemp.* The practice of flogging in the army and navy was carried to an extreme in Phillip's time which seems incredible in the present day. The most notorious instance of excessire Governor punishment will be found in the trial of Governor Wall, 8 case, ^j^^ ^^g executed in 1802 for having caused the death of a sergeant named Armstrong at Goree, an island off the African coast, twenty years previously. According to the statement made by the Attorney-General at the trial, Ann- strong's offence consisted in his having gone with several other soldiers to the paymaster's house for a settlement of their claims. Although he was not guilty of any mutinous or disrespectful conduct, Wall, who was commandant of the garrison, without any form of trial or inquiry, ordered him to be punished with eight hundred lashes^ and per- Fioffgingto sonally superintended the flogging. The unfortunate man was stripped and tied to a gun-carriage, and two black men were employed to flog him with a rope one inch in diameter. He died in hospital five days afterwards.f
- History of the Rod, pp. 150» 196. Flogging was as common in SootUnii
as 121 England. The last exhibition in the streets of Edinburgh is dfiscribed at length in the same work, p. 189. t Burke, Celebrated Naval and Military Trials, p. 339. Digitized by Google
