The punishment involved tying a person with rope, throwing them overboard, and then dragging them either under the ship from one side to the other or along the entire length of the ship.

To be keelhauled was just about the worst punishment a sailor could expect to be given short of death, and even here his chances of surviving the ordeal were no more than 50:50. Floggings were given for such misdemeanours as bringing women on board, striking another man, or not keeping weapons in an efficient state of readiness. The man who dished out the flogging on a pirate vessel was the quartermaster. A flogging was usually only decided upon as the form of punishment if the whole crew, or at least the majority, agreed that the man had broken one of the shipвЂ™s articles, that is the list of rules they swore to abide by. For pirates, the risk of bearing such treatment was much reduced since a captain rarely dared to use such methods on a crew that had probably turned pirate in the first place in order to escape such harsh features of a life at sea. The use of a whip to dish out punishments was a common occurrence on ships of all kinds of the period. Victims of piracy endured torture, floggings, and ceremonies of humiliation, but when brought to justice, the pirates were given such punishments as lengthy prison sentences, transportation to work in the deadly conditions of African mines, or public execution by hanging.

Pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) both dished out and received a wide range of imaginative punishments.

Iconator tweak piracy