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- text
- journals. But considerateness in such matters is not easy in natures
constituted like Captain Vere’s. Their honesty prescribes to them
directness, sometimes far-reaching like that of a migratory fowl that in
its flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier.
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VII
The lieutenants and other commissioned gentlemen forming Captain Vere’s
staff it is not necessary here to particularise, nor needs it to make
mention of any of the warrant-officers. But among the petty officers was
one who, having much to do with the story, may as well be forthwith
introduced. This portrait I essay, but shall never hit it.
This was John Claggart, the master-at-arms. But that sea-title may to
landsmen seem somewhat equivocal. Originally, doubtless, that petty
officer’s function was the instruction of the men in the use of arms,
sword, or cutlass. But very long ago, owing to the advance in gunnery
making hand-to-hand encounters less frequent, and giving to nitre and
sulphur the pre-eminence over steel, that function ceased; the
master-at-arms of a great warship becoming a sort of chief of police
charged among other matters with the duty of preserving order on the
populous lower gun-decks.
Claggart was a man of about five-and-thirty, somewhat spare and tall,
yet of no ill figure upon the whole. His hand was too small and shapely
to have been accustomed to hard toil. The face was a notable one; the
features, all except the chin, cleanly cut as those on a Greek
medallion; yet the chin, beardless as Tecumseh’s, had something of the
strange protuberant heaviness in its make that recalled the prints of
the Rev. Dr. Titus Oates, the historical deponent with the clerical
drawl in the time of Charles II., and the fraud of the alleged Popish
Plot. It served Claggart in his office that his eye could cast a
tutoring glance. His brow was of the sort phrenologically associated
with more than average intellect; silken jet curls partly clustering
over it, making a foil to the pallor below, a pallor tinged with a faint
shade of amber akin to the hue of time-tinted marbles of old.
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