the usual brutality
Walton is referring obliquely to the wide-spread practice of flogging to
keep discipline aboard ship. It had been a serious issue in Great
Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, a spur to the mutinies that took place
in the British navy at Spithead and the Nore in the spring of 1797. The
Shelleys' friend Leigh Hunt wrote several
attacks on the practice in his
weekly newspaper The Examiner. The ship's master would have the
responsibility for maintaining order, and what most attracts Walton to
this veteran mariner is his capacity to do so without violence.
