3. Keelhauling would drown or maim victims
Onto the Golden Age of Piracy, and an improvised nautical method of execution bringing delight to legions of desperate, eye-patched and parrot-wielding criminals. Sailors are proverbially a tough bunch, and punishments on board vessels which were at sea for months at a time had to be especially cruel and instructive to others in order to maintain order. Keelhauling involved tying a wrongdoer to a rope that was then dragged under the ship (the keel), usually resulting in a drowning or, if the victim was exceptionally lucky, severe injuries from the barnacles under the ship that would usually become lethally infected.
But it wasn’t just pirates who practiced keelhauling, despite their reputation. Most navies in the eighteenth century resorted to the method, and in 1710 one English sailor’s keelhauling for blasphemy (of all things!) was recorded: ‘stripped of all his clothes except for a strip of cloth around his loins… a weight of lead or iron was hung upon his legs to sink him… thence let fall suddenly into the sea… passed under the ship’s bottom and after some little time, was hoisted up on the other side of the ship’. This was repeated several times, ‘after sufficient periods of breathing’.
