Keelhauling: The Naval Punishment Worse Than Drowning

“A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.” -Samuel Johnson

Today, to say that somebody has been “keelhauled” usually means that they have received a particularly severe telling off. A manager might jokingly threaten to keelhaul an employee who has made an expensive mistake. Thankfully, the modern meaning has travelled a considerable distance from the original. For sailors hundreds of years ago, being keelhauled meant being tied to a rope, thrown from the side of a ship and physically dragged beneath its hull. If the sea did not kill you, the ship itself might.

Life aboard a wooden sailing ship was already extraordinarily unpleasant by modern standards. Sailors lived in cramped conditions surrounded by disease, rats, rotting food, damp clothing and the constant possibility of drowning. Discipline could be equally brutal. Flogging, confinement, hanging and various forms of public humiliation were accepted methods of maintaining order among hundreds of men trapped together for months at sea. In that environment, keelhauling acquired a particularly terrifying reputation because the instrument of punishment was the ship itself.

Keelhauling is often described as a medieval punishment, although this is not entirely accurate. Maritime punishments involving immersion and dragging have much older roots and similar practices appear in medieval maritime traditions, but the clearest evidence for formal keelhauling comes from the early modern period. The Dutch became particularly associated with the practice, and an ordinance from 1560 is frequently cited as its earliest official appearance in Dutch naval regulations. The Dutch word kielhalen essentially means to drag someone along or beneath the keel.

The procedure was horrifyingly simple. A rope was passed beneath the ship from one side to the other. The condemned sailor was secured to it, sometimes with additional weights attached to ensure that he sank deeply enough beneath the vessel. He could then be hoisted from a yardarm, dropped into the sea and hauled underneath the ship before being dragged back to the surface on the opposite side. In some versions the victim travelled across the width of the vessel. In others he could be dragged along a greater portion of the hull.

There was no particularly pleasant speed at which this could happen. Pull the man too quickly and he could be smashed against the hull or keel. Pull him too slowly and he remained underwater for longer and risked drowning. Even if everything went exactly as those administering the punishment intended, the sailor still had to survive being dragged beneath an enormous wooden warship while bound to ropes and surrounded by men who were deliberately trying to punish him. Then there were the barnacles.

A wooden ship that had spent considerable time at sea could acquire marine growth across its submerged hull. Barnacles, shells and other organisms attached themselves to the wood, creating a rough surface beneath the waterline. A sailor dragged against this could suffer cuts and abrasions across his body. Saltwater entered the wounds immediately, and in an age before antibiotics even an injury that was survivable during the punishment could become dangerous afterwards through infection.

This detail has sometimes been exaggerated into the claim that every keelhauled sailor was deliberately shredded against a wall of razor-sharp barnacles. That is too simplistic. The exact severity depended upon the vessel, the condition of its hull, the length of rope, the speed at which the man was pulled and how deeply beneath the keel he travelled. Some victims may have passed sufficiently far beneath the hull to avoid the worst contact with it. Others were not so fortunate.

Avoiding the hull created another problem. The deeper the sailor travelled, the longer he remained underwater. It was a punishment in which successfully avoiding one method of injury increased the possibility of dying by another. Historical descriptions suggest that the procedure could also be repeated. One 17th-century description of Dutch maritime punishment claimed that a sailor who struck an officer could be pulled around the keel three times. He would be brought back to the surface between passages before being sent underneath again. Lesser maritime punishments sometimes involved simply dropping or “ducking” a sailor into the sea from the yardarm. Keelhauling took that basic idea and added several tonnes of ship above his head.

There was apparently theatre involved as well. Nathaniel Boteler, writing about naval life in the 17th century, described a great gun being fired while the condemned man was beneath the water. The explosion was intended partly to increase his terror and partly to alert others nearby to what was happening. Naval punishment was not simply about hurting one person. It was about making sure that everybody else aboard understood what happened to people who broke the rules.

This is an important part of understanding historical punishment. There was little value in quietly punishing someone where nobody could see it. Executions took place in public squares, criminals were placed in stocks before crowds and sailors were flogged in front of their shipmates. Fear was part of the system. A keelhauled sailor therefore became a living warning to everybody standing on deck watching him disappear beneath the water.

One of the most remarkable surviving images of the practice is a 17th-century painting by Dutch artist Lieve Pietersz. Verschuier. It is traditionally described as The Keelhauling of the Ship’s Surgeon of Admiral Jan van Nes. The enormous warship dominates the scene while crowds gather to watch the punishment. Boats full of spectators sit nearby and sailors climb the rigging for a better view. The unfortunate man can be seen suspended beside the vessel, awaiting what is about to happen.

There is an important historical problem with the painting. The Rijksmuseum, which owns it, now describes the traditional identification of the victim as Admiral Jan van Nes's surgeon as unproven and unlikely. We therefore cannot confidently tell the unfortunate surgeon's personal story as fact. What the painting does demonstrate extraordinarily well is that keelhauling was sufficiently familiar within Dutch maritime culture to become the subject of a major contemporary work of art.

The Dutch are important here because popular culture has done something rather strange to keelhauling. Ask most people who practised it and pirates immediately come to mind. Films, books and television programmes have made pirates almost inseparable from walking the plank and keelhauling unfortunate prisoners. In reality, the strongest historical evidence for formal keelhauling comes not from pirates but from organised navies, particularly the Dutch.

In other words, this was not simply something Blackbeard dreamed up. It could be an officially sanctioned punishment. There are references suggesting that variations of it were known or discussed in England, France and elsewhere, although historians disagree over how frequently true keelhauling was actually practised by the Royal Navy. Some later accounts confidently describe it as a standard British punishment, but the documentary evidence is considerably stronger for Dutch use. This is another example of history becoming more dramatic as stories are repeated. The punishment itself was real. That does not mean every pirate captain and naval officer was routinely dragging people beneath ships.

Nor was keelhauling necessarily intended as an execution. This is perhaps the strangest element of all. A sailor might actually be expected to survive it. The objective was punishment, terror and humiliation rather than automatically killing the offender. The problem was that the distinction between punishment and execution became rather academic when somebody was tied to a rope and pulled underneath a warship.

Drowning was an obvious danger. So was striking the head against the hull. Rope injuries, broken bones and serious abrasions were possible, while open wounds exposed directly to seawater brought the additional possibility of infection. A victim could therefore survive the actual journey beneath the ship only to suffer serious complications afterwards. Medical treatment aboard an early modern warship was not exactly reassuring either.

The offence had to be considered serious enough to warrant such treatment. Naval discipline depended upon obedience because disobedience aboard a ship could endanger everybody. A drunken sailor asleep during his watch, a man attacking an officer or somebody creating disorder during battle could potentially threaten the survival of hundreds of people. That reality was used to justify punishments which today appear completely disproportionate.

There is nevertheless something particularly disturbing about keelhauling because it turned the sailor's entire environment against him. A prisoner ashore might fear the gallows. A sailor already spent every day surrounded by the possibility of drowning. The sea was beneath him when he slept, worked and ate. Keelhauling took that constant fear and deliberately placed him inside it.

Imagine standing on the deck knowing what was about to happen. Your hands are secured. Ropes are being passed beneath the vessel. Men you have lived and worked beside are preparing the tackle. Beneath you sits the hull, covered with whatever months or years at sea have attached to it, and beyond that is dark water. You are not being told that you are going to die. In some ways that may have made it worse. You are being told that you are expected to go underneath the ship and come back alive. Whether you actually did was another matter.

Keelhauling eventually disappeared as naval discipline changed and corporal punishments became increasingly unacceptable. Yet the word survived long after the punishment itself. We still threaten, jokingly, to keelhaul somebody without giving much thought to what the phrase originally described. Perhaps that is fortunate. Because the original meaning was not a particularly harsh reprimand. It was not being shouted at by a captain or receiving extra duties aboard ship. It meant being bound with rope, dropped into the sea and pulled underneath the vessel on which you lived.

Samuel Johnson famously compared being aboard a ship to being inside a prison with the additional possibility of drowning.

Or being keelhauled.