It would not be fair to the reader for me to attempt a detailed description of this flogging. In writing these chronicles I have tried to be fair, reasonable, and rational, and rather than chance misleading anybody by overstating the case I will touch only the high points and leave out the details. No hangman can describe an execution where he has officiated. The best he can do is to describe his end of it, and you have but a one-sided case. The man at a whipping post or tripod can’t relate all the details of his beating fully and fairly. He can’t see what’s going on behind him, and that’s where most of the goings-on are. Furthermore, he does not approach the subject with that impersonal, detached mental attitude so necessary to correct observing and reporting. Mentally he is out of focus, and his perspective is blurred.

If I could go away to some lonely, desolate spot and concentrate deeply enough I might manage to put myself in the flogging master’s place and make a better job of reporting the matter. But that would entail a mental strain I hesitate to accept, and I doubt if the result would justify the effort.

All along I had my mind made up to take my “tampin’ ” in as manly a way as possible and to bite my tongue rather than cry out. Also I had tried to hypnotize myself up to a pitch where I could bow my back out toward the blows and hold it there till the thing was done. The first blow was like a bolt of lightning; it shocked and burned. Looking back at it now, it seems to me I jumped six feet in the air. But I couldn’t have jumped an inch, I was too securely trussed up. I got through it without squawking, but fell down sadly on the business of bowing my back out. With each succeeding blow I shrank farther away from the blistering lash and when it was all over my back was concaved, my chest was bowed out, and I was trembling like a helpless calf under the hot branding iron.

It made no difference how I wriggled and squirmed, I got the full force and effect of every blow, and each one fell on a different spot. “ Mr. Burr,” God bless him! served his apprenticeship as a flogging master in the British Navy, and he knew his little book.