CUSTOMS OF THE SEA Flogging, Empire, and the 'True British Seaman' 1770 to 1870

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, the British public construed both sailors and slaves as inhabitants of the imperial periphery with the bodies of adults but the minds of children. Consequently neither was considered worthy of the guarantees associated with metropolitan freedom ('British liberty'). Beginning in the 1790s, however, British sailors launched an aggressive campaign for naval reform. They constructed an analogy between the corporal discipline of the Royal Navy and the experience of plantation slavery. The sailors went on to equate whiteness, Britishness, and 'exquisite' emotions, arguing that no one who possessed the sensibility of a British man should be governed like a black slave. In response to this agitation, all forms of flogging aboard ship were eventually discontinued. If, however, 'British' sailors were entitled to the full rights of the metropolis, regardless of where they sailed, it could also be argued that colonial subjects retained their subordinate status even if their ships travelled to Britain itself. An incident of 1814 involving the flogging of one of the East India Company's Lascar seamen during his stay in a London boarding-house raised this question in an urgent way. Was the use of a 'customary' punishment by a serang {native officer} acceptable in the metropole, or was this a violation of British liberties? A series of new laws sought to evade the problem by restricting the number of colonial seamen in Britain and hastening their repatriation. These laws codified a language of racial difference, discriminating explicitly between 'British' sailors and the non-white seafarers who were also subjects of the Crown.