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- palate a questionable smack as of a compounded wine. To any stray
inheritor of these primitive qualities found, like Caspar Hauser,
wandering dazed in any Christian capital of our time, the poet’s famous
invocation, near two thousand years ago, of the good rustic out of his
latitude in the Rome of the Cæsars, still appropriately holds:--
‘Faithful in word and thought,
What hast Thee, Fabian, to the city brought.’
Though our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can
expect anywhere to see; nevertheless, like the beautiful woman in one of
Hawthorne’s minor tales, there was just one thing amiss in him. No
visible blemish, indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occasional
liability to a vocal defect. Though in the hour of elemental uproar or
peril, he was everything that a sailor should be, yet under sudden
provocation of strong heart-feeling his voice, otherwise singularly
musical, as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to develop an
organic hesitancy,--in fact, more or less of a stutter or even worse. In
this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch-interpreter,
the envious marplot of Eden still has more or less to do with every
human consignment to this planet of earth. In every case, one way or
another, he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind
us--I too have a hand here.
The avowal of such an imperfection in the Handsome Sailor should be
evidence not alone that he is not presented as a conventional hero, but
also that the story in which he is the main figure is no romance.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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