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- III
At the time of Billy Budd’s arbitrary enlistment into the _Indomitable_
that ship was on her way to join the Mediterranean fleet. No long time
elapsed before the junction was effected. As one of that fleet the
seventy-four participated in its movements, though at times on account
of her superior sailing qualities, in the absence of frigates,
dispatched on separate duty as a scout, and at times on less temporary
service. But with all this the story has little concernment, restricted
as it is to the inner life of one particular ship and the career of an
individual sailor.
It was the summer of 1797. In the April of that year had occurred the
commotion at Spithead, followed in May by a second and yet more serious
outbreak in the fleet at the Nore. The latter is known, and without
exaggeration in the epithet, as the Great Mutiny. It was indeed a
demonstration more menacing to England than the contemporary manifestos
and conquering and proselytising armies of the French Directory.
To the Empire, the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade
would be to London threatened by general arson. In a crisis when the
Kingdom might well have anticipated the famous signal that some years
later published along the naval line of battle what it was that upon
occasion England expected of Englishmen; _that_ was the time when at the
mast-heads of the three-deckers and seventy-fours moored in her own
roadstead--a fleet, the right arm of a Power then all but the sole free
conservative one of the Old World, the blue-jackets, to be numbered by
thousands, ran up with hurrahs the British colours with the union and
cross wiped out; by that cancellation transmuting the flag of founded
law and freedom defined, into the enemy’s red meteor of unbridled and
unbounded revolt. Reasonable discontent growing out of practical
grievances in the fleet had been ignited into irrational combustion as
by live cinders blown across the Channel from France in flames.
The event converted into irony for a time those spirited strains of
Dibdin--as a song-writer no mean auxiliary to the English Government--at
this European conjuncture, strains celebrating, among other things, the
patriotic devotion of the British tar--
‘And as for my life, ’tis the King’s!’
Such an episode in the Island’s grand naval story her naval historians
naturally abridge; one of them (G. P. R. James) candidly acknowledging
that fain would he pass it over did not ‘impartiality forbid
fastidiousness.’ And yet his mention is less a narration than a
reference, having to do hardly at all with details. Nor are these
readily to be found in the libraries. Like some other events in every
age befalling states everywhere, including America, the Great Mutiny was
of such character that national pride along with views of policy would
fain shade it off into the historical background. Such events cannot be
ignored, but there is a considerate way of historically treating them.
If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or
calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without
reproach be equally discreet.
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