Our… our officers, rather than carry out a trial or carry out a real examination to find out, what they did was to put the guys who were accused in a special… what they called a hot box. It was a… a… one… what do you call it, a room of… of the ship, fairly down low in the ship. It had only little barred windows and the… the hatches on… on a room like that have big metal levers that you clamp down to… to clamp the thing shut, and on the inside, those had been taken off so these guys can't get out. They are in there for the night. There's no… there’s no beds, they’re not… they sleep on the bare floor, and then we had to take them out and work them all day, very hard. This was their punishment, and every night I had to go down and get them up on their feet.

There was one dog taken off the… the door altogether, and before I would go in, I would, you know, go up to that… well first I would… I would — I had a .45 and I would take the flap off of it and cock it — and I would look through the hole to see who was inside. There was always an eye on the other side of that door. And then you had to open the other dogs, swing the door open and say, 'Get back', and they'd get back, then you'd step into the room with these — oh, there might be 10 guys in there — and you'd say, 'On your feet', and they would get up and… and stand at attention and then you'd… then you’d dismiss them and go away. You had to do this every hour, and I didn't really like doing this. I didn't know whether they were guilty of what they had been charged; if so, I thought they ought to be charged and brought to trial on this. The… the officers didn't want to do that because it would bring… it would look bad for them.