At Gorée, on the 10th of July 1782, Benjamin Armstrong was drawn from the ranks, stripped, and bound to the carriage of a six-pounder gun. Governor Joseph Wall had ordered the garrison to form a circle about the parade. Several Black men, who did not belong to the regiment, were brought forth to inflict the punishment. They relieved one another in turns of five-and-twenty strokes. The count reached eight hundred. According to several witnesses, Wall urged the men to strike harder, shouting that they must cut Armstrong “to the heart and liver.” The sergeant cried for mercy. His torment concluded, he reached the hospital; he died five days later. Twenty years on, the governor stood indicted for having commanded a murder.
The trial did not open upon the tale of an isolated blow of the lash. It brought to judgment a commander and a garrison stationed upon the island of Gorée, off the African coast. The soldiers had been placed upon short rations for several months. The paymaster, Dearing, was to set sail for England alongside the governor the following day. The men sought settlement of the arrears due for that period before the ocean should part them from the officer who held their accounts. The prosecutor maintained that they repaired several times to the paymaster’s quarters, peaceably and without tumult, to claim their due. The defence portrayed rather a menacing throng, demanding that the stores be opened and threatening to force them themselves.
The accounts clashed from the very first encounter. Evan Lewis deposed that Armstrong had saluted Wall, hat in hand, explaining that the soldiers wished to speak with the paymaster. They withdrew upon the governor’s command. Lewis had heard no disrespectful language, nor seen any mutiny. Mrs Lacy, widow of an officer of the garrison, offered contrary testimony: she declared she had heard Armstrong threaten to break open the stores if their pay were withheld. In her account, the men returned in great numbers, shouting that they would not quit the island without satisfaction. A non-commissioned officer related that they had returned repeatedly, and that Armstrong, Paterson, and Upton had uttered explicit threats.
The interval between the demand for pay and the punishment remained shrouded in doubt. The prosecution emphasized that no formal inquiry into the morning’s incident was recorded before the evening’s execution. The witness Lewis recounted seeing Wall strike a sentinel, seize his bayonet, and cause the drums to beat to call the men to the parade. The soldiers assembled without arms. A circle was formed, and the officers conferred among themselves. Lewis saw Armstrong standing in the ranks, then called forth, stripped, and lashed to the gun carriage. He witnessed no proceeding wherein the accused might offer a defence. Another soldier, Roger Moore, claimed that a drumhead court-martial had indeed taken place: the officers had deliberated, whereupon Captain Lacy informed the prisoner of his sentence of eight hundred lashes. Yet Moore added that he had never witnessed such a manner of holding a court-martial, and that Armstrong was summoned, accused, and bound within mere minutes.
The manner of punishment was itself contested. Several witnesses spoke of a thick rope rather than the regulation cat-o’-nine-tails. Black men from outside the regiment were brought in to flog the sergeant; one witness explained that a linguist had to instruct them how to lay on the strokes. Soldiers testified that each struck five-and-twenty blows before yielding his place to the next, until the total of eight hundred was reached. Descriptions of the suffering varied. Some recalled the prisoner’s screams and the severity of his wounds; Surgeon Ferrich admitted that the punishment had caused the man’s death, and that the hazard thereof had been imminent. Yet he had not interposed with Wall while the flogging was administered.
The surgeon recalled that Armstrong lingered until the 15th of July, dying in the hospital. He considered the flogging the direct cause of death. His examination revealed extensive contusions with few lacerations of the skin; he explained that the heavy cord bruised the deep tissues far more grievously than a whip that tore the surface flesh. This medical testimony was material in linking the order of punishment to the demise that ensued. Yet it did not resolve the central question of the trial: had the governor exercised lawful disciplinary authority in the face of mutiny, or had he inflicted, without lawful trial, a punishment whose mortal issue was entirely foreseeable?
Wall was not brought to judgment at Gorée. He quitted the island for England the day after the punishment. In 1784, a warrant from the Privy Council was issued for his arrest. According to the opening address of the prosecution, Wall gave the King’s messenger the slip at an inn in Reading and was proclaimed an outlaw; a reward of two hundred pounds was offered for his apprehension. The Crown counsel observed that in 1802, nearly twenty years after the event, several officers who might have supported his defence had died. The immense gulf of time between the deed and the trial formed an element of the evidence as much as of the narrative: faded memories, vanished witnesses, and alleged flight mingled with the broader picture of military discipline.
The defence called Mrs Lacy, who claimed to have been present during the disturbances and maintained that a council of war had been resolved upon following the threats. She asserted that the regulation cats had been destroyed and that the governor went in fear of his life; the men appointed to administer the flogging were chosen, she said, because the drummers, being implicated in the mutinous assembly, could not be trusted to execute it. Character witnesses were then called to speak in Wall’s favour. Officers who had known him decades earlier described him as an officer of upright and humane conduct; a clergyman who had met him in Italy portrayed him as a tender husband and an affectionate father. These testimonials stood in stark contrast to the accounts of the flogging, yet they could not alter the reality of that day at Gorée.
Peter Williams brought to the defence a recollection that differed materially from the surgeon’s portrait. He affirmed that after the eight hundred lashes Armstrong walked to the hospital unaided, his shirt thrown over his shoulders. He claimed also to have seen the officers gathered in a council of war within the circle, though he had not overheard what they said to the sergeant. Lacy, he stated, had subsequently stepped out of the circle to make his report to the governor. This testimony gave form to a court-martial through the presence and movements of the assembled officers; it revealed nothing, however, of any defence Armstrong might have been permitted to urge.
The jury retired for about three quarters of an hour. Upon their return, the foreman, visibly shaken according to the chronicle, pronounced the verdict in a low and faltering voice: guilty. Twenty years separated the command given upon the parade-ground from this answer returned before the court. Wall had sailed from the island on the morrow of the punishment; Armstrong had remained in the hospital, dead before the week had run its course. The witnesses had spoken long of a governor, a drumhead court, military regulations, and mutiny. The verdict fixed the order given at Gorée upon the sole, personal responsibility of the man who had commanded it.
Wall obtained two respites, but was executed on the 28th of January 1802. A record in the British Museum pertaining to a satirical print of that year confirms this outcome, which does not appear in Borrow’s excerpt. The former governor had quitted Gorée leaving the sergeant to perish of his wounds; nearly two decades later, justice overtook the man who had ordered the strokes.