第 七 章 · 第7章

The lieutenants and other commissioned gentlemen forming Captain Vere’s

staff it is not necessary here to particularise, nor needs it to make

mention of any of the warrant-officers. But among the petty officers was

one who, having much to do with the story, may as well be forthwith

introduced. This portrait I essay, but shall never hit it.

This was John Claggart, the master-at-arms. But that sea-title may to

landsmen seem somewhat equivocal. Originally, doubtless, that petty

officer’s function was the instruction of the men in the use of arms,

sword, or cutlass. But very long ago, owing to the advance in gunnery

making hand-to-hand encounters less frequent, and giving to nitre and

sulphur the pre-eminence over steel, that function ceased; the

master-at-arms of a great warship becoming a sort of chief of police

charged among other matters with the duty of preserving order on the

populous lower gun-decks.

Claggart was a man of about five-and-thirty, somewhat spare and tall,

yet of no ill figure upon the whole. His hand was too small and shapely

to have been accustomed to hard toil. The face was a notable one; the

features, all except the chin, cleanly cut as those on a Greek

medallion; yet the chin, beardless as Tecumseh’s, had something of the

strange protuberant heaviness in its make that recalled the prints of

the Rev. Dr. Titus Oates, the historical deponent with the clerical

drawl in the time of Charles II., and the fraud of the alleged Popish

Plot. It served Claggart in his office that his eye could cast a

tutoring glance. His brow was of the sort phrenologically associated

with more than average intellect; silken jet curls partly clustering

over it, making a foil to the pallor below, a pallor tinged with a faint

shade of amber akin to the hue of time-tinted marbles of old.

This complexion singularly contrasting with the red or deeply bronzed

visages of the sailors, and in part the result of his official seclusion

from the sunlight, though it was not exactly displeasing, nevertheless

seemed to hint of something defective or abnormal in the constitution

and blood. But his general aspect and manner were so suggestive of an

education and career incongruous with his naval function, that when not

actively engaged in it he looked like a man of high quality, social and

moral, who for reasons of his own was keeping incognito. Nothing was

known of his former life. It might be that he was an Englishman; and yet

there lurked a bit of accent in his speech suggesting that possibly he

was not such by birth, but through naturalisation in early childhood.

Among certain grizzled sea-gossips of the gun-decks and forecastle went

a rumour perdue that the master-at-arms was a chevalier who had

volunteered into the King’s Navy by way of compounding for some

mysterious swindle whereof he had been arraigned at the King’s Bench.

The fact that nobody could substantiate this report was, of course,

nothing against its secret currency. Such a rumour once started on the

gun-decks in reference to almost anyone below the rank of a commissioned

officer would, during the period assigned to this narrative, have seemed

not altogether wanting in credibility to the tarry old wiseacres of a

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.

About as much was really known to the _Indomitable’s_ tars of the

master-at-arms’ career before entering the service as an astronomer

knows about a comet’s travels prior to its first observable appearance

in the sky. The verdict of the sea-quidnuncs has been cited only by way

of showing what sort of moral impression the man made upon rude

uncultivated natures, whose conceptions of human wickedness were

necessarily of the narrowest, limited to ideas of vulgar rascality--a

thief among the swinging hammocks during a night-watch, or the

man-brokers and land-sharks of the seaports.

It was no gossip, however, but fact, that though, as before hinted,

Claggart upon his entrance into the navy was, as a novice, assigned to

the least honourable section of a man-of-war’s crew, embracing the

drudges, he did not long remain there.

The superior capacity he immediately evinced, his constitutional

sobriety, ingratiating deference to superiors, together with a peculiar

ferreting genius manifested on a singular occasion, all this capped by a

certain austere patriotism, abruptly advanced him to the position of

master-at-arms.

Of this maritime chief of police the ship’s corporals, so called, were

the immediate subordinates, and compliant ones; and this, as is to be

noted in some business departments ashore, almost to a degree

inconsistent with entire moral volition. His place put various

converging wires of underground influence under the chief’s control,

capable when astutely worked through his understrappers of operating to

the mysterious discomfort, if nothing worse, of any of the

sea-commonalty.

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