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- ‘On the tenth of the last month a deplorable occurrence took place
on board H.M.S. _Indomitable_. John Claggart, the ship’s
master-at-arms, discovering that some sort of plot was incipient
among an inferior section of the ship’s company, and that the
ringleader was one William Budd, he, Claggart, in the act of
arraigning the man before the captain was vindictively stabbed to
the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath-knife of Budd.
‘The deed and the implement employed sufficiently suggest that
though mustered into the service under an English name the
assassin was no Englishman, but one of those aliens adopting an
English cognomen whom the present extraordinary necessities of the
Service have caused to be admitted into it in considerable
numbers.
‘The enormity of the crime and the extreme depravity of the
criminal, appear the greater in view of the character of the
victim, a middle-aged man, respectable and discreet, belonging to
that minor official grade, the petty officers, upon whom, as none
know better than the commissioned gentlemen, the efficiency of His
Majesty’s Navy so largely depends. His function was a responsible
one; at once onerous and thankless, and his fidelity in it the
greater because of his strong patriotic impulse. In this instance,
as in so many other instances in these days, the character of the
unfortunate man signally refutes, if refutation were needed, that
peevish saying attributed to Dr. Johnson, that patriotism is the
last refuge of a scoundrel.
‘The criminal paid the penalty of his crime. The promptitude of
the punishment has proved salutary. Nothing amiss is now
apprehended aboard H.M.S. _Indomitable_.’[11]
-----
Footnote 11:
An author’s note, crossed out, here appears in the original MS. It
reads:--Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this
incongruous world of ours--innocence and infirmary, spiritual
depravity and fair respite.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVI
Everything is for a season remarkable in navies. Any tangible object
associated with some striking incident of the service, is converted into
a monument. The spar from which the foretopman was suspended, was for
some few years kept trace of by the blue-jackets. Then knowledge
followed it from ship to dockyard and again from dockyard to ship, still
pursuing it even when at last reduced to a mere dockyard boom. To them a
chip of it was as a piece of the Cross. Ignorant though they were of the
real facts of the happening, and not thinking but that the penalty was
unavoidably inflicted from the naval point of view, for all that they
instinctively felt that Billy was a sort of man as incapable of mutiny
as of wilful murder. They recalled the fresh young image of the Handsome
Sailor, that face never deformed by a sneer or subtler vile freak of the
heart within! This impression of him was doubtless deepened by the fact
that he was gone, and in a measure mysteriously gone. On the gun-decks
of the _Indomitable_ the general estimate of his nature and its
unconscious simplicity eventually found rude utterance from another
foretopman, one of his own watch, gifted as some sailors are, with an
artless poetic temperament. The tarry hands made some lines, which,
after circulating among the shipboard crew for a while, finally got
rudely printed at Portsmouth as a ballad. The title given to it was the
sailor’s.
BILLY IN THE DARBIES
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