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.