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- 1053
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- 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
was to this effect: In the case of a warship short of hands, whose
speedy sailing was imperative, the deficient quota, in lack of any other
way of making it good, would be eked out by drafts called direct from
the jails. For reasons previously suggested it would not perhaps be easy
at the present day directly to prove or disprove the allegation. But
allowed as a verity, how significant would it be of England’s straits at
the time, confronted by these wars which like a flight of harpies rose
shrieking from the din and dust of the fallen Bastille. That era appears
measurably clear to us who look back at it, and but read of it. But to
the grandfathers of us graybeards, the thoughtful of them, the genius of
it presented an aspect like that of Camoens’ ‘Spirit of the Cape,’ an
eclipsing menace mysterious and prodigious. Not America was exempt from
apprehension. At the height of Napoleon’s unexampled conquests, there
were Americans who had fought at Bunker Hill who looked forward to the
possibility that the Atlantic might prove no barrier against the
ultimate schemes of this portentous upstart from the revolutionary
chaos, who seemed in act of fulfilling judgment prefigured in the
Apocalypse.
But the less credence was to be given to the gun-deck talk touching
Claggart, seeing that no man holding his office in a man-of-war can ever
hope to be popular with the crew. Besides, in derogatory comments upon
one against whom they have a grudge, or for any reason or no reason
mislike, sailors are much like landsmen, they are apt to exaggerate or
romance.
About as much was really known to the _Indomitable’s_ tars of the
master-at-arms’ career before entering the service as an astronomer
knows about a comet’s travels prior to its first observable appearance
in the sky. The verdict of the sea-quidnuncs has been cited only by way
of showing what sort of moral impression the man made upon rude
uncultivated natures, whose conceptions of human wickedness were
necessarily of the narrowest, limited to ideas of vulgar rascality--a
thief among the swinging hammocks during a night-watch, or the
man-brokers and land-sharks of the seaports.
It was no gossip, however, but fact, that though, as before hinted,
Claggart upon his entrance into the navy was, as a novice, assigned to
the least honourable section of a man-of-war’s crew, embracing the
drudges, he did not long remain there.
The superior capacity he immediately evinced, his constitutional
sobriety, ingratiating deference to superiors, together with a peculiar
ferreting genius manifested on a singular occasion, all this capped by a
certain austere patriotism, abruptly advanced him to the position of
master-at-arms.
Of this maritime chief of police the ship’s corporals, so called, were
the immediate subordinates, and compliant ones; and this, as is to be
noted in some business departments ashore, almost to a degree
inconsistent with entire moral volition. His place put various
converging wires of underground influence under the chief’s control,
capable when astutely worked through his understrappers of operating to
the mysterious discomfort, if nothing worse, of any of the
sea-commonalty.
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