Episode Details

Telling a coworker the boss keelhauled you sounds harmless until you know what the Dutch word kielhalen, to drag along the keel, meant at sea. A heavy rope was looped under a ship's hull, the victim was tied to one end and thrown overboard, and his own crewmates hauled him beneath the barnacle crusted bottom to the other side. Some accounts describe dragging from bow to stern. The crew's pace decided his fate: too fast shredded him on the hull, too slow drowned him. Despite pirate movies, there is little evidence pirates used it. The earliest definite mention is the Byzantine Rhodian Sea Law of around 700 AD, which prescribed keelhauling as a punishment for piracy.

The episode traces possible ancestors: Greek vases from 500 BC and Herodotus, debated as showing keelhauling or the strappado, and the ducking Nathaniel Boteler described in 1685, when very foul offenders were also drawn under the keel. Historians credit William of Orange with introducing it to the Dutch navy. On October 11, 1652, under Jan van Riebeeck of the Dutch East India Company, the sailor Jan Blank was keelhauled for deserting for nine days. By 1880 the practice had become an embarrassment, and after a report from Italy claimed a keelhauling aboard HMS Alexandra, George Shaw Lefevre flatly denied it in Parliament.

• Forcing crewmates to haul the rope made the whole ship complicit and discouraged solidarity against the captain.
• Jan Blank's sentence added 150 lashes and two years of enslavement to the keelhauling.
• In 1673 Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest ordered sailors keelhauled for murder.
• English writers William Monson and Nathaniel Boteler both recorded its use on English ships in the 17th century.
• Survival was possible, and the sources include records of men who lived through it.