Herman Melville

                               Billy Budd, Sailor

                            Dedicated to JACK CHASE
                                   Englishman
                                        
                      Wherever That Great Heart May Now Be
                     Here on Earth or Harboured in Paradise
                            Captain of the Main-Top
                                In the Year 1843
                              In the U.S. Frigate
                                »United States«

                                    Preface

 
The year 1797, the year of this narrative, belongs to a period which, as every
thinker now feels, involved a crisis for Christendom, not exceeded in its
undetermined momentousness at the time by any other era whereof there is record.
The opening proposition made by the Spirit of that Age, involved a rectification
of the Old World's hereditary wrongs. In France, to some extent, this was
bloodily effected. But what then? Straightway the Revolution itself became a
wrongdoer, one more oppressive than the kings. Under Napoleon it enthroned
upstart kings, and initiated that prolonged agony of continual war whose final
throe was Waterloo. During those years not the wisest could have foreseen that
the outcome of all would be what to some thinkers apparently it has since turned
out to be, a political advance along nearly the whole line for Europeans.
    Now, as elsewhere hinted, it was something caught from the Revolutionary
Spirit that at Spithead emboldened the man-of-war's men to rise against real
abuses, long-standing ones, and afterwards at the Nore to make inordinate and
aggressive demands, successful resistance to which was confirmed only when the
ringleaders were hung for an admonitory spectacle to the anchored fleet. Yet in
a way analogous to the operation of the Revolution at large, the Great Mutiny,
though by Englishmen naturally deemed monstrous at the time, doubtless gave the
first latent prompting to most important reforms in the British Navy.
 

                                       I

                             (An inside Narrative)

In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller
along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his
attention arrested by a group of bronzed marines, man-of-war's men or merchant
sailors in holiday attire ashore on liberty. In certain instances they would
flank, or, like a bodyguard, 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 offhand 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'