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- 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
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.
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