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