Cat o' nine tails

What is a cat o’ nine tails?

A cat o’ nine tails (Dutch: kat met negen staarten) is a whip with nine loose ends fixed to a single handle. The Dutch word comes out of seafaring, and in nineteenth-century Dutch it stood for a disciplinary tool aboard ship. In BDSM it is heavy impact gear, used within impact play.

How the word entered Dutch

Along the quay. Jacob van Lennep took the expression into his Sailor’s Dictionary in 1856, as the sixth meaning of the entry kat: “Met negen staarten, zweep van touwen om mede te slaan” (with nine tails, a whip of ropes to strike with). One line, nothing more. His 1856 reader evidently already knew what it was about. The Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal still records the phrase as a fixed expression, described as a whip with several straps of leather or rope that was used for heavy corporal punishment.

What the Dutch navy really did with it

Striking by the book, and under a different name. In Marineblad, Rozemarijn Vlijm lays out the punishment system of the nineteenth-century Royal Netherlands Navy. Laarzen was imposed for crimes, handdaggen for crimes and disciplinary offenses alike. Keelhauling and falling from the yardarm were the heaviest, and those went in 1854. That same year a lighter punishment was added for boys under sixteen: knuttel strokes, dealt with nine ends of old, frayed log line. Explicitly without knots, and capped at sixty strokes in the criminal code and thirty in the military discipline regulations.

So the Netherlands did have a nine-tailed whip aboard after all. It just went by the name knuttel here, and the version for children was precisely the one without knots. In July 1876, a flogging aboard the guard ship Zr.Ms. Adder, then lying at Vlissingen, caused outrage across the country. Workmen on the shore cursed the commander and the newspapers wrote about it in shock. Three years later, in 1879, the last corporal punishments in the navy were abolished.

Why those knots matter

Because a nineteenth-century regulation thought them worth ruling out. When the navy set down its lightest variant in 1854, it added without knots. So that distinction is older than the scene itself. What I notice after twenty-five years and a cupboard full of whips: a cat without knots lays the blow down broad and feels like a heavy flogger. Knot the ends and the same swing lands on nine small spots, and the skin holds up a good deal less long. Whoever feels it for the first time gets the gentle version from me, on flesh that can take it.

Where this fits on this site

I bring whips along, and the cat is among them, in both versions. The page about the BDSM date covers how we agree in advance what does and does not come out of the bag that evening.

Sources

• Zeemans-woordenboek, letter K. Jacob van Lennep, 1856, digitized by the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren. Provides the oldest Dutch dictionary entry cited here: under the entry kat, meaning 6°, “Met negen staarten, zweep van touwen om mede te slaan.”
• de kat met de negen staarten. Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Establishes that in present-day Dutch the phrase is a fixed expression, meaning a whip with several straps of leather or rope that was used for heavy corporal punishment.
• De discussie rond lijfstraffen bij de Koninklijke Marine in de negentiende eeuw. Rozemarijn Vlijm MA, Marineblad no. 8 (2023), p. 18-25, published by the Koninklijke Vereniging van Marineofficieren. Provides the overview of laarzen, handdaggen, keelhauling and falling from the yardarm, the 1854 introduction of knuttel strokes for boys under sixteen with nine ends of old frayed log line without knots and maximums of sixty and thirty strokes, the incident aboard Zr.Ms. Adder in July 1876, and the abolition of all remaining corporal punishments in the navy in 1879.

Related terms

• Impact play. The umbrella term the cat o’ nine tails falls under, with the build-up and the agreements that go with striking.
• Flogger. What a cat without knots comes closest to: many ends, a broadly spread blow.
• Birch rod. The other instrument from the same disciplinary history, of wood instead of rope.
• Chain whip. The modern counterpart in metal, with a very different sound and weight.
• Riding whip. The single-tailed neighbor, where the force comes down on one point instead.