"Give 'im a taste of the boatswain's rope-end, early in the morning!"

One of the prerequisites for sons of veterinarians is an appreciation for animals. I've owned cats all my life, and my parents adopted a rescue dog several years ago, with whom I promptly fell in love. The photo at the left is of me and said dog, Maggie.

Let's make it clear that I'm an equal-opportunity zoophile (ZU-oh-fyle; and not of the sexual kind, smartalecks) before I make an entry for this misunderstood idiom, because
1) I am neither a strict cat person nor a strict dog person
2) I dislike cruelty to animals as much as the next person
3) my father might disown me if he thought otherwise*

With that said, today's entry is a seafaring phrase (notice a pattern?) reviled for its presumed association to animal cruelty: enough room to swing a cat.

The "cat" in this phrase refers to a nasty whip known as a cat o' nine tails, used to punish lawbreaking sailors in the British Royal Navy until the 1800s. This flogging occurred on deck in full view, because below deck the ceilings were too low for the boatswain's (pronounced BO-sun's) mate to swing the whip.

Though other variations existed, the naval cat was made out of rope. Colonial-era rope was made of three thin ropes, each composed of three strands of cotton yarn - when unraveled at the end, nine separate strings would result, giving the whip its nine tails.**

The jury is out on whether they were usually knotted, but most accounts maintain they were. Each would cause intense pain when striping an insubordinate's back. If the crime was theft, the mate would employ the thieves' cat, each of its thongs knotted three times for additional pain (see right). Theft was an especially serious crime aboard a naval vessel.***

Several regulations about usage of the whip existed, but as we innovative humans often do, captains found ways to circumvent them. Though floggings exceeding 12 lashes were subject to court martial, captains often got away with as many as 72 without being caught. The mate put all of his strength into each blow, and if the captain decreed more lashes, another man would deliver the next set of 12 to ensure the punishment's severity.

The song "What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor" features a pseudonym for the cat, "the captain's daughter," seeing as in theory the cat was used only with his permission. Whether your version of the song says "give him a taste of the captain's daughter" or "put him in the bed with the captain's daughter," the singers are asking for a flogging.****

That the song requests this punishment doesn't surprise me. Punishment in British, colonial and piratical societies alike was public spectacle. People treated hangings and clapping a criminal in stocks as we might a free benefit concert or a fistfight in the schoolyard.

Nowadays, the use of the cat tends to be a private matter, as any BDSM devotee will discreetly***** tell you. Funny how what was once punishment, some of us today do voluntarily. Maybe some royal sailors deliberately violated the law? Who knows. What I do know is that where our contemporaries want to swing the cat, there's always [a] room [in which] to do it.



Information purloined from Captain Blood's Cove, Broadside, pride-unlimited.com, Pirates of the Caribbean: A Pyrate's Life, dictionary.reference.com; images purloined from Wikimedia Commons and my personal album



* - I may or may not have once fed Maggie a Jujube to point and laugh at her (and I'm kidding about that disownment part)
** - Any thoughts on why people have said cats have nine lives, besides surviving falls from great heights?
*** - one flaskful of liquor smuggled aboard could buy a lot of hardtack - we're talking, like, a 1:5 ratio here******
**** - if you were lucky, maybe even from the captain's daughter*******
***** - or vocally and in graphic detail
****** - What? It works as a deadly projectile if you don't have a rock...
******* - Before anybody gets excited about the further possibility for pirate pornography - yes, there is already a multimillion-dollar two-part series - bringing a woman or young boy aboard was punishable by death.