BILLY BUDD

Herman Melville

Jan 2001 · YouHui Culture Publishing Company

About this ebook

BILLY BUDD

by Herman Melville

CHAPTER 1

IN THE time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a

stroller along the docks of any considerable sea-port would

occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed

mariners, man-of-war's men or merchant-sailors in holiday attire

ashore on liberty. In certain instances they would flank, or, like a

body-guard quite surround some superior figure of their own class,

moving along with them like Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his

constellation. That signal object was the "Handsome Sailor" of the

less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies. With no

perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the

off-hand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the

spontaneous homage of his shipmates. A somewhat remarkable instance

recurs to me. In Liverpool, now half a century ago, I saw under the

shadow of the great dingy street-wall of Prince's Dock (an obstruction

long since removed) a common sailor, so intensely black that he must

needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham. A

symmetric figure much above the average height. The two ends of a

gay silk handkerchief thrown loose about the neck danced upon the

displayed ebony of his chest; in his ears were big hoops of gold,

and a Scotch Highland bonnet with a tartan band set off his shapely

head.

It was a hot noon in July; and his face, lustrous with

perspiration, beamed with barbaric good humor. In jovial sallies right

and left, his white teeth flashing into he rollicked along, the centre

of a company of his shipmates. These were made up of such an

assortment of tribes and complexions as would have well fitted them to

be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first

French Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race. At each

spontaneous tribute rendered by the wayfarers to this black pagod of a

fellow- the tribute of a pause and stare, and less frequent an

exclamation,- the motley retinue showed that they took that sort of

pride in the evoker of it which the Assyrian priests doubtless

showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful prostrated

themselves.

To return.

If in some cases a bit of a nautical Murat in setting forth his

person ashore, the Handsome Sailor of the period in question evinced

nothing of the dandified Billy-be-Damn, an amusing character all but

extinct now, but occasionally to be encountered, and in a form yet

more amusing than the original, at the tiller of the boats on the

tempestuous Erie Canal or, more likely, vaporing in the groggeries

along the tow-path. Invariably a proficient in his perilous calling,

he was also more or less of a mighty boxer or wrestler. It was

strength and beauty. Tales of his prowess were recited. Ashore he

was the champion; afloat the spokesman; on every suitable occasion

always foremost. Close-reefing top-sails in a gale, there he was,

astride the weather yard-arm-end, foot in the Flemish horse as

"stirrup," both hands tugging at the "earring" as at a bridle, in very

much the attitude of young Alexander curbing the fiery Bucephalus. A

superb figure, tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against the

thunderous sky, cheerily hallooing to the strenuous file along the

spar.

The moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make.

Indeed, except as toned by the former, the comeliness and power,

always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn

the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor in some examples

received from his less gifted associates.

About the author

Melville was born into a seemingly secure, prosperous world, a descendant of prominent Dutch and English families long established in New York State. That security vanished when first, the family business failed, and then, two years later, in young Melville's thirteenth year, his father died. Without enough money to gain the formal education that professions required, Melville was thrown on his own resources and in 1841 sailed off on a whaling ship bound for the South Seas. His experiences at sea during the next four years were to form in part the basis of his best fiction. Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were partly romance and partly autobiographical travel books set in the South Seas. Both were popular successes, particularly Typee, which included a stay among cannibals and a romance with a South Sea maiden. During the next several years, Melville published three more romances that drew upon his experiences at sea: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both fairly realistic accounts of the sailor's life and depicting the loss of innocence of central characters; and Mardi (1849), which, like the other two books, began as a romance of adventure but turned into an allegorical critique of contemporary American civilization. Moby Dick (1851) also began as an adventure story, based on Melville's experiences aboard the whaling ship. However, in the writing of it inspired in part by conversations with his friend and neighbor Hawthorne and partly by his own irrepressible imagination and reading of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists Melville turned the book into something so strange that, when it appeared in print, many of his readers and critics were dumbfounded, even outraged. Their misgivings were in no way resolved by the publication in 1852 of his next novel, Pierre; or, the Ambiguities Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, a deeply personal, desperately pessimistic work that tells of the moral ruination of an innocent young man. By the mid-1850s, Melville's literary reputation was all but destroyed, and he was obliged to live the rest of his life taking whatever jobs he could find and borrowing money from relatives, who fortunately were always in a position to help him. He continued to write, however, and published some marvelous short fiction pieces Benito Cereno" (1855) and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) are the best. He also published several volumes of poetry, the most important of which was Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), poems of occasionally great power that were written in response to the moral challenge of the Civil War. His posthumously published work, Billy Budd (1924), on which he worked up until the time of his death, is Melville's last significant literary work, a brilliant short novel that movingly describes a young sailor's imprisonment and death. Melville's reputation, however, rests most solidly on his great epic romance, Moby Dick. It is a difficult as well as a brilliant book, and many critics have offered interpretations of its complicated ambiguous symbolism. Darrel Abel briefly summed up Moby Dick as "the story of an attempt to search the unsearchable ways of God," although the book has historical, political, and moral implications as well.