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Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative):
Billy Budd,
Sailor is available as an
online text
The first American edition, edited by Raymond Weaver, was published in 1924. Since then the text has undergone a number of revisions as scholars attempt to present Melville's readers with a more definitive version. Chief among these are Weaver's second edition (1928), the "literal text" of F. Barron Freeman (1948), and Hayford and Sealts's double texts.
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Habitually living with the elements and knowing little more of
the land than as a beach, or rather, that portion
of the terraqueous globe providentially set apart for
dance-houses, doxies, and tapsters, in short what sailors call
a "fiddler's green," his simple nature remained unsophisticated
by those moral obliquities which are not in every
case incompatible with that manufacturable thing known as
respectability. But are sailors, frequenters of
fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with
landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of
crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness
than exuberance of vitality after long constraint;
frank manifestations in accordance with natural law. By his
original constitution aided by the co-operating
influences of his lot, Billy in many respects was little more
than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps
as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent
wriggled himself into his company....
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 interferer, 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.
--Chapter 2
It was the summer of 1797. In the April of that year had occured 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 manifestoes and conquering and proselyting armies of the French Directory. To the British 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 mastheads 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 bluejackets, to be numbered by thousands, ran up with huzzahs the British colors 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. --Chapter 3
Aside from his qualities as a sea officer Captain Vere was an exceptional character. Unlike no few of England's renowned sailors, long and arduous service with signal devotion to it had not resulted in absorbing and salting the entire man. He had a marked leaning toward everything intellectual. He loved books, never going to sea without a newly replenished library, compact but of the best. The isolated leisure, in some cases so wearisome, falling at intervals to commanders even during a war cruise, never was tedious to Captain Vere. With nothing of that literary taste which less heeds the thing conveyed than the vehicle, his bias was toward those books to which every serious mind of superior order occupying any active post in the world naturally inclines: books treating of actual men and events no matter of what era -- history, biography, and unconventional writers like Montaigne, who, free from cant and convention, honestly and in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities. In this line of reading he found confirmation of his own more reserved thoughts -- confirmation which he had vainly sought in social converse, so that as touching most fundamental topics, there had got to be established in him some positive convictions which he forefelt would abide in him essentially unmodified so long as his intelligent part remained unimpaired. In view of the troubled period in which his lot was cast, this was well for him. His settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds of those days, minds by nature not inferior to his own. While other members of that aristocracy to which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators mainly because their theories were inimical to the privileged classes, Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them not alone because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind. --Chapter 7
Well then, in his mysterious little difficulty going in quest of
the wrinkled one, Billy found him off duty in a
dogwatch.... Billy recounted his trouble, again wondering how it
all happened. The salt seer attentively listened,
accompanying the foretopman's recital with queer twitchings of
his wrinkles and problematical little sparkles of
his small ferret eyes. Making and end of his story, the
foretopman asked, "And now, Dansker, do tell me what
you think of it."
The old man, shoving up the front of his tarpaulin and
deliberately rubbing the long slant scar at the point
where it entered the thin hair, laconically said, "Baby Budd,
Jemmy Legs" (meaning the
master-at-arms) "is down on you."
"Jemmy Legs!" ejaculated Billy, his welkin eyes
expanding. "What for? Why, he calls me
'the sweet and pleasant young fellow,' they tell me."
"Does he so?" grinned the grizzled one; then said, "Ay, Baby lad,
a sweet voice has Jemmy Legs."
"No, not always. But to me he has. I seldom pass him but there
comes a pleasant word."
"And that's because he's down upon you, Baby Budd."
Such reiteration, along with the manner of it, incomprehensible
to a novice, disturbed Billy almost as much as
the mystery for which he had sought explanation. --Chapter
9
But for the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature
these hints are insufficient. To pass from a normal nature to him
one must cross "the deadly space between." And this is best done
by indirection....
But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so
exceptional a nature is this: Though the man's even temper and
discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject
to the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot
in complete exemption from that law, having apparently little to
do with reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter
implement for effecting the irrational. That is to say: Toward
the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity
would seem to partake of the insance, he will direct a cool
judgment sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the
most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous, but
occasional, evoked by some special object; it is protectively
secretive, which is as much as to say it is self-contained, so
that when, moreover, most active it is to the average mind not
distinguishable from sanity, and for the reason above suggested:
that whatever its aims may be -- and the aim is never declared --
the method and the outward proceeding are always perfectly
rational.
Now something such an one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of
nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or
licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short "a
depravity according to nature."
Dark sayings are these, some
will say. But why? Is it because they somewhat savor of Holy Writ
in its phrase "mystery of iniquity"? If they do, such savor was
far enough from being intended, for little will it commend these
pages to many a reader of today. --Chapter 11
With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart's, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part alloted it. --Chapter 12
BILLY IN THE DARBIES
Good of the chaplain to enter Lone Bay
And down on his
marrowbones here and pray
For the likes just o' me, Billy
Budd. -- But, look:
Through the port comes the moonshine
astray!
It tips the guard's cutlass and silvers this
nook;
But 'twill die in the dawning of Billy's last day.
A
jewel-block they'll make of me tomorrow,
Pendant pearl from
the yardarm-end
Like the eardrop I gave to Bristol Molly
--
O, 'tis me, not the sentence they'll suspend.
Ay, ay,
all is up; and I must up too,
Early in the morning, aloft from
alow.
On an empty stomach now never it would do.
They'll
give me a nibble -- bit o' biscuit ere I go.
Sure, a messmate
will reach me the last parting cup;
But, turning heads away
from the hoist and the belay,
Heaven knows who will have the
running of me up!
No pipe to those halyards. -- But aren't it all a sham?
A
blur's in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.
A hatchet to my
hawser? All adrift to go?
The drum roll to grog, and Billy
never know?
But Donald he has promised to stand by the
plank;
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
But -- no!
It is dead then I'll be, come to think.
I remember Taff the
Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding
pink.
But me they'll lash in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms
down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it
stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease these darbies
at the wrist,
And roll me over fair!
I am sleepy, and the
oozy weeds about me twist.
--Chapter 30
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