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- 2026-01-30T03:48:16.150Z
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- 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.
This complexion singularly contrasting with the red or deeply bronzed
visages of the sailors, and in part the result of his official seclusion
from the sunlight, though it was not exactly displeasing, nevertheless
seemed to hint of something defective or abnormal in the constitution
and blood. But his general aspect and manner were so suggestive of an
education and career incongruous with his naval function, that when not
actively engaged in it he looked like a man of high quality, social and
moral, who for reasons of his own was keeping incognito. Nothing was
known of his former life. It might be that he was an Englishman; and yet
there lurked a bit of accent in his speech suggesting that possibly he
was not such by birth, but through naturalisation in early childhood.
Among certain grizzled sea-gossips of the gun-decks and forecastle went
a rumour perdue that the master-at-arms was a chevalier who had
volunteered into the King’s Navy by way of compounding for some
mysterious swindle whereof he had been arraigned at the King’s Bench.
The fact that nobody could substantiate this report was, of course,
nothing against its secret currency. Such a rumour once started on the
gun-decks in reference to almost anyone below the rank of a commissioned
officer would, during the period assigned to this narrative, have seemed
not altogether wanting in credibility to the tarry old wiseacres of a
man-of-war crew. And indeed a man of Claggart’s accomplishments, without
prior nautical experience entering the Navy at mature life, as he did,
and necessarily allotted at the start to the lowest grade in it; a man,
too, who never made allusion to his previous life ashore; these were
circumstances which in the dearth of exact knowledge as to his true
antecedents opened to the invidious a vague field for unfavourable
surmise.
But the sailors’ dog-watch gossip concerning him derived a vague
plausibility from the fact that now for some period the British Navy
could so little afford to be squeamish in the matter of keeping up the
muster-rolls, that not only were press-gangs notoriously abroad both
afloat and ashore, but there was little or no secret about another
matter, namely, that the London police were at liberty to capture any
able-bodied suspect, and any questionable fellow at large, and summarily
ship him to the dock-yard or fleet. Furthermore, even among voluntary
enlistments, there were instances where the motive thereto partook
neither of patriotic impulse nor yet of a random desire to experience a
bit of sea-life and martial adventure. Insolvent debtors of minor grade,
together with the promiscuous lame ducks of morality, found in the Navy
a convenient and secure refuge. Secure, because once enlisted aboard a
King’s ship, they were as much in sanctuary as the transgressor of the
Middle Ages harbouring himself under the shadow of the altar. Such
sanctioned irregularities, which for obvious reasons the Government
would hardly think to parade at the time, and which consequently, and as
affecting the least influential class of mankind, have all but dropped
into oblivion, lends colour to something for the truth whereof I do not
vouch, and hence have some scruple in stating; something I remember
having seen in print, though the book I cannot recall; but the same
thing was personally communicated to me now more than forty years ago by
an old pensioner in a cocked hat, with whom I had a most interesting
talk on the terrace at Greenwich, a Baltimore negro, a Trafalgar man. It
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