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Volume 31, No. 4 (October 2000) Reprinted from "Admiralty Law in Popular Culture", a special issue published in 2000 by the Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce, a quarterly devoted to maritime law, with the permission of the Journal and the Jefferson Law Book Company. Fated Boy: Billy Budd and the Laws of War EDWIN M. YODER JR.* I INTRODUCTION HERMAN MELVILLE AND THE WRITING OF BILLY BUDD When he began writing Billy Budd, Melville was in his late 60s, an old man for his day and an ailing one as well, exhausted by two decades of labor as a customs inspector in New York harbor. Like Abraham's son Isaac (cited in the story as an analogue of Billy Budd's relationship to his commander, the fatherly Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, who becomes his executioner), the novella was the child of Melville's age, written over a three year period before his death in 1891. Its textual history is famously tangled--and that tangle famously contributory to the continuing, often fierce, debate over its meaning. The manuscript's 30-year repose, a literary near-death experience, in a japanned breadbox, is itself a saga only recently made familiar to readers and admirers of the tale. The story evolved from a prose headnote to "Billy in the Darbies," a ballad Melville had written some years earlier about a young sailor facing execution for mutiny. Melville at first planned to publish the ballad in a privately printed book of miscellany. His thoughts about death and mutiny were to some extent presumably stirred by a naval incident on the high seas of almost half a century earlier in which his admired first cousin, Guert Gansevoort, then a U.S. Naval officer, had been intimately involved.1 As he tinkered with fugitive odds and ends of poetry and narrative, Melville began to see larger possibilities in the lengthening headnote to "Billy in the Darbies." Gradually, by an involved process of accretion and revision (whose tracing is not eased by Melville's difficult handwriting and his quaint habit of using the verso of discarded drafts for revised copies), the story as we now know it took shape. But the tale unfolded for Melville by a process so fitful and disorderly as to lead the earliest editors of the text into a number of errors and wanderings from his authorial intentions. These early editors included matter which he intended to cut, or had cut; they mistook a passage about the European political situation in 1797 (the year of two Royal Naval mutinies and the story's action) as a "preface"; and they misread many words in Melville's disorderly manuscript, sometimes with mystifying and even ludicrous results. It was a young scholar named Raymond Weaver who recovered the manuscript, three decades after Melville's death, from the breadbox in which the author's family had preserved his unpublished manuscripts. Weaver worked up the text for the first edition in 1924. Both this and a 1948 Harvard University Press edition perpetuated similar editorial misjudgments, in part because the later editor used Weaver's edition as copy text rather than analyzing the manuscript from scratch. Earlier editors and critics of Billy Budd often lamented that Melville had, so they thought, written a dramatic narrative and then misguidedly decorated it with convoluted philosophic musings, and attributed what they deemed incoherences to that practice. In fact, as was at last shown by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr., it was exactly the other way around. Melville often created characters to embody dialectic; so that (apparently imaginary) working method was not to blame for textual puzzles, real or imagined. Even the now authoritative "Chicago" text meticulously edited and published in the early 1960s by Hayford and Sealts includes a chapter of debatable standing in praise of the great Admiral, Lord Nelson, which may be read as casting invidious light on Captain Vere. Because Melville had removed that chapter from his developing draft and placed it in a separate folder, he presumably had lingering doubts about it and may eventually have eliminated it. Nonetheless, readers may now be reasonably sure that they are reading the text that Melville intended them to read--at least at the time of his death. He had never reached the point of preparing a final fair copy for the printers. Hayford and Sealts say that the tale is "most accurately described as a semi-final draft, not a final fair copy ready for publication." But that is hardly the limit of the trouble. What, after all, were Melville's intentions? A generation and more of contentious political readings hang like the smoke of pitched battle over the contested text of Billy Budd; and the resulting murk is of the greatest interest to anyone seeking to draw out the legal lessons that Melville expected his readers to carry away from the story. What the critic Harold Bloom has called "the Party of Resentment" seized upon Billy Budd in the troubled 1960s, and after, as a paradigm tale of overbearing, tyrannical authority brutally exercised without any plausible excuse. It is in that light--Melville's contrary indications notwithstanding--that latter generations of readers have often understood Billy Budd's unhappy fate. Rebelliousness against authority generated by the Vietnam War, the rise of feminist consciousness, and other extraneous influences have contributed to a number of questionable but popular readings, and even outright misreadings. THE TALE OF BILLY BUDD Claggart's mysterious enmity, he lacks the worldly experience to discern gratuitous malice. Billy first suspects something is amiss when his personal gear is mysteriously tampered with in a way that could expose him to disciplinary reprimand. Soon afterward, he is awakened while sleeping on deck and summoned to a secluded part of the ship. There, another impressed crewman tempts him with two gold guineas to confess his resentment and rebelliousness as an impressed man and to make himself available for some unspecified mutiny. Because no ordinary seaman is likely to have had that kind of money, this clue as well points to Claggart as the inspiration of this agent provocateur, whom Billy summarily rebuffs. But Billy fails to report the incident; and that failure, born of a naive but honorable distaste for the informer's role, becomes a trap for him after he kills Claggart. (He cannot truthfully deny, in response to Captain Vere's questions, that he has been approached by the disaffected.) The climax comes one day when the Bellipotent, on detached patrol, pursues a French frigate for several hours before it escapes. Just after the pursuit is abandoned, Claggart approaches Captain Vere and accuses Billy of disloyalty. He is "a dangerous character," Claggart tells the captain, gingering up his shocking charge (and irritating the captain) by alluding to the recent Naval mutiny at the Nore. Vere is astonished. He too has noticed the grace and appeal of the young sailor and has marked him for promotion. Vere orders his trusted cabin boy to bring Billy quietly and confidentially to his quarters and demands that Claggart confront Billy and repeat his charge to the young sailor's face. Claggart does so; and the narrator pointedly notes the opacity of his accusing eyes in their contrast with the transparent blue of Billy's. Dumbfounded at Claggart's perjured charge, unable to speak in his rage, Billy impulsively strikes the scheming master-at-arms a lethal blow to the head and Claggart falls lifeless to the deck. Vere clearly believes from the first that Claggart is lying and indeed has warned him as the bearer of this "foggy tale" that the penalty for false witness is hanging. He has little doubt that he has witnessed an act of divine justice; for like Ananias in the biblical story, Claggart has been killed for lying and Billy is a vessel of divine retribution. "Struck dead by an angel of God!," Vere exclaims to the saturnine ship's surgeon, "Yet the angel must hang!" Captain Vere immediately convenes a drumhead court-martial and acts in three roles--as sole witness to Claggart's death, as presiding officer of the tribunal, and at times as prosecutor. By superior force of intellect and character, he overrides the doubts of the three officers he has appointed to the court and secures Billy's conviction. His paramount consideration, the narrator tells us, is to prevent a resurgence of the Nore mutiny, which was suppressed only with great difficulty and harshness.2 The captain proceeds with haste, even though he is persuaded of Billy's loyalty to the king and of his moral innocence; and as we have already noted, he suspects both natural and divine justice in Billy's impulsive act. This is the legal issue as Melville's narrator poses it; and again the voice of the narrator seems throughout interchangeable with Melville's own. The point could hardly be more emphatically stressed. Vere knows his country to be at war against a dangerous and resourceful enemy (the danger augmented by Britain's isolation). The nation is wholly dependent on the Royal Navy to shield it against the threatened French invasion. Any outbreak of insubordination, however motivated, must be unsentimentally crushed. JUDGING BILLY BUDD Few observers of the familiar imperfections of positive law and justice can fail to notice here the lines of the usual dilemma. Whatever claims may be made for primal moral innocence of the kind Billy Budd exemplifies, his entanglement in the fortunes of war during a grim period, though involuntary on his part, entails dire consequences when he commits a rash act; and in all but the most exceptional cases, it is the act and the letter of the law that customarily prevail. Inevitably, discrepancies and tensions emerge between the abstract "rights of man" and the more circumscribed and limited "rights" of a seaman caught up in the web of war, nowhere more so than on a warship in wartime. Captain Vere is hardly ignorant of those cross-purposes; his keen consciousness of them is obviously a part of the tragedy. His argument to the court reveals profound sympathy with his officers' instinct to spare Billy, or at least to delay their judgment for another day. Yet command authority requires his lucid recognition that larger "justice" for the many requires a more severe, indeed pitiless, brand of literal justice to the solitary defendant. Sacrifice is integral to warfare and the severest penalties for insubordination part of "the price of admiralty"; and for countless generations, in many societies, such has been the considered judgment of the necessities of military law. And so Billy Budd is hanged at sunrise the morning after Claggart's death. Magnanimous to the last, he dies with the cry, "God bless Captain Vere!" on his lips; and this stirring valedictory is echoed by the crew. And by way of suggesting that Billy's selfless submission to the court's verdict may carry larger meaning, Melville embellishes the hanging with strokes of imagery drawn from the biblical Revelation of St. John: "At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended and, ascending, took the full rose of dawn." The mournful requiem of seabirds over Billy's watery grave is far from the least, or least interesting, of those incidents in a tale in which some pointed identification of his fate with a violation of the order of Nature is intimated. This intimation is entirely congruent with the narrator's identification of Billy--as well as Captain Vere--as among the members of "great Nature's nobler order." It is also consistent with the text, as we have it to see in Billy Budd's execution a sort of epiphany of the fate of innocence in this world. What is flatly inconsistent with the text is to read Melville's representation of a tragic but defensible act of military justice as an act of gratuitous cosmic cruelty. CONCLUSION though an actual mutinous plot was involved. But Melville's testimony appears to be lacking on the point; and to impute that purpose to the author, conscious or not, would at best be idle if interesting speculation. We may be sure that the 1842 incident was unforgotten because it is explicitly mentioned and compared with the events aboard the Bellipotent.3 But as for Billy Budd, we must take the story as we have it and make the best effort we can, under traditional rules of textual interpretation, to decipher its legal and moral point. In this writer's view, the ambiguities of Billy Budd have been exaggerated--unsurprisingly in view of the state of the manuscript. But of one thing we may be reasonably confident: Melville, in the end, was on Captain Vere's side. 1. In an incident aboard the U.S. brig Somers in 1842, the ship's commander, Captain Mackenzie, hanged three members of the crew, including a son of the secretary of war, on charges of plotting mutiny. He was supported in this summary judgment by Lieutenant Gansevoort, a subordinate officer. In the ensuing controversy, the critical question was whether the plot had been serious and thus whether the captain's summary action was essential to the ship's safety when it was only a few days' sail from harbor. In that inquiry, the action of Captain Mackenzie was vindicated. 2. The tumultuous context in which the Nore mutiny occurred has been summarized as follows: The year 1797 has sometimes been described as the darkest hour in our history. On land, France was everywhere victorious. The British Army had been driven off the continent, leaving the great ports of the Scheldt and Rhine in enemy hands. The British Navy had been obliged to abandon Corsica and the Mediterranean. Austria, the last of our allies, was about to lay down her arms. . . . A formidable army of invasion was encamped by the Texel ready to be ferried across to the British Isles under convoy of the Dutch fleet. . . . Ireland, smoldering with rebellion, could scarcely be held if ever the enemy landed in force. . . . Once again the harvest had failed. . . . The bank of England had recently suspended payment in gold. British shipping losses this year reached the alarming total of 949 vessels--more than 11 per cent of our foreign-going shipping . . . the invasion alarm had occasioned a run on the banks. And on the morning of 17 April the news reached London that the whole Channel fleet had mutinied. G. Marcus, The Age of Nelson: The Royal Navy in the Age of Its Greatest Power and Glory, 1793-1815, 82 (1971). 3. In a long chapter detailing the procedures of Captain Vere's court-martial, Melville writes: Not unlikely they [the three members of the court] were brought to something more or less akin to that harassed frame of mind which in the year 1842 actuated the commander of the U.S. Brig-of-war Somers to resolve . . . upon the execution at sea of a midshipman and two sailors as mutineers designing the seizure of the brig. . . . An act vindicated by a naval court of inquiry subsequently convened ashore. . . . True, the circumstances on board the Somers were different from those on board the Bellipotent. But the urgency felt, well warranted or otherwise, was much the same. |
