would cite some historical character or incident of
antiquity with the same easy air that he would cite from the moderns. He seemed
unmindful of the circumstance that to his bluff company such allusions, however
pertinent they might really be, were altogether alien to men whose reading was
mainly confined to the journals. But considerateness in such matters is not easy
in natures constituted like Captain Vere's. Their honesty prescribes to them
directness, sometimes far-reaching like that of a migratory fowl that in its
flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier.
 

                                      VII

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,