secure refuge. Secure, because once enlisted aboard a King's
ship, they were as much in sanctuary as the transgressor of the Middle Ages
harbouring himself under the shadow of the altar. Such sanctioned
irregularities, which for obvious reasons the Government would hardly think to
parade at the time, and which consequently, and as affecting the least
influential class of mankind, have all but dropped into oblivion, lends colour
to something for the truth whereof I do not vouch, and hence have some scruple
in stating; something I remember having seen in print, though the book I cannot
recall; but the same thing was personally communicated to me now more than forty
years ago by an old pensioner in a cocked hat, with whom I had a most
interesting talk on the terrace at Greenwich, a Baltimore negro, a Trafalgar
man. It was to this effect: In the case of a warship short of hands, whose
speedy sailing was imperative, the deficient quota, in lack of any other way of
making it good, would be eked out by drafts called direct from the jails. For
reasons previously suggested it would not perhaps be easy at the present day
directly to prove or disprove the allegation. But allowed as a verity, how
significant would it be of England's straits at the time, confronted by these
wars which like a flight of harpies rose shrieking from the din and dust of the
fallen Bastille. That era appears measurably clear to us who look back at it,
and but read of it. But to the grandfathers of us graybeards, the thoughtful of
them, the genius of it presented an aspect like that of Camoens' »Spirit of the
Cape,« an eclipsing menace mysterious and prodigious. Not America was exempt
from apprehension. At the height of Napoleon's unexampled conquests, there were
Americans who had fought at Bunker Hill who looked forward to the possibility
that the Atlantic might prove no barrier against the ultimate schemes of this
portentous upstart from the revolutionary chaos, who seemed in act of fulfilling
judgment prefigured in the Apocalypse.
    But the less credence was to be given to the gun-deck talk touching
Claggart, seeing that no man holding his office in a man-of-war can ever hope to
be popular with the crew. Besides, in derogatory comments upon one against whom
they have a grudge, or for any reason or no reason mislike, sailors are much
like landsmen, they are apt to exaggerate or romance.
    About as much was really known to the Indomitable's tars of the
master-at-arms' career before entering the service as an astronomer