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- with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged
edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less
finished than an architectural finial.
How it fared with the Handsome Sailor during the year of the Great
Mutiny has been faithfully given. But though properly the story ends
with his life, something in way of sequel will not be amiss. Three brief
chapters will suffice.
In the general re-christening under the Directory of the craft
originally forming the navy of the French Monarchy, the _St. Louis_
line-of-battle ship was named the _Athéiste_. Such a name, like some
other substituted ones in the Revolutionary fleet, while proclaiming the
infidel audacity of the ruling power, was yet, though not so intended to
be, the aptest name, if one consider it, ever given to a warship; far
more so indeed than the _Devastation_, the _Erebus_ (the Hell), and
similar names bestowed upon fighting-ships.
On the return passage to the English fleet from the detached cruise
during which occurred the events already recorded, the _Indomitable_[9]
fell in with the _Athéiste_. An engagement ensued, during which Captain
Vere, in the act of putting his ship alongside the enemy with a view of
throwing his boarders across the bulwarks, was hit by a musket-ball from
a port-hole of the enemy’s main cabin. More than disabled, he dropped to
the deck and was carried below to the same cock-pit where some of his
men already lay. The senior lieutenant took command. Under him the enemy
was finally captured, and though much crippled, was by rare good fortune
successfully taken into Gibraltar, an English port not very distant from
the scene of the fight. There Captain Vere with the rest of the wounded
was put ashore. He lingered for some days, but the end came. Unhappily
he was cut off too early for the Nile and Trafalgar. The spirit that
’spite its philosophic austerity may yet have indulged in the most
secret of all passions, ambition, never attained to the fulness of fame.
Not long before death, while lying under the influence of that magical
drug which, soothing the physical frame, mysteriously operates on the
subtler element in man, he was heard to murmur words inexplicable to his
attendant--‘Billy Budd, Billy Budd.’ That these were not the accents of
remorse, would seem clear from what the attendant said to the
_Indomitable’s_[10] senior officer of marines, who, as the most
reluctant to condemn of the members of the drum-head court, too well
knew, though here he kept the knowledge to himself, who Billy Budd was.
-----
Footnote 9:
Cf. p. 63 note.
Footnote 10:
Cf. p. 63 note.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXV
Some few weeks after the execution, among other matters under the head
of _News from the Mediterranean_, there appeared in a naval chronicle of
the time, an authorised weekly publication, an account of the affair. It
was doubtless for the most part written in good faith, though the
medium, partly rumour, through which the facts must have reached the
writer, served to deflect, and in part falsify them. Because it appeared
in a publication now long ago superannuated and forgotten, and is all
that hitherto has stood on human record to attest what manner of men
respectively were John Claggart and Billy Budd, it is here reproduced.
‘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.
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