The Innocent Sailor

Billy Budd, Sailor wasn’t published until 1924, more than thirty years after Herman Melville’s death. Melville had achieved success with his first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which had been based on his adventures as a sailor in the South Seas. By his death in 1891, however, he was all but forgotten—the work he had thought was his highest literary achievement, Moby Dick (1851), had not sold well or received good reviews, and even though he kept writing stories, novels, and poems throughout the rest of his life, nobody seems to have noticed.

His reputation underwent a revival in the 1920s, when scholars began to recognize that someone who had previously been considered a minor figure who wrote sea stories was instead a major literary talent. Today, he’s considered one of the most important figures in American literary history, and Billy Budd, Sailor is considered one of his most significant works.

Melville sets his novel in 1797, in the years after the French Revolution, when the British are at war with the French and revolutionary fervor seems to be everywhere. One of the practices of the British Navy during this time was impressment—naval vessels had the authority to board any British ship and impress any sailor aboard that ship into service in the Navy. As you might imagine, the sailors who were impressed into the Navy weren’t particularly thrilled about the situation—if you had signed up to be a sailor on a merchant ship and then were forced to serve aboard a military vessel, sailing into naval battles where ships were shooting cannonballs at you, focusing all their efforts into making your ship sink, you might not be especially enthusiastic about your enforced career choice. At the beginning of the novel, Billy Budd, a sailor aboard the merchant ship Rights of Man, is impressed aboard the naval vessel the Bellipotent. Melville stresses that this action take place in an atmosphere in which naval officers are afraid of mutiny—there’s been a mutiny recently at the Nore, and Melville writes

“Reasonable discontent growing out of practical grievances in the fleet had been ignited into irrational combustion as by live cinders blown across the Channel from France in flames” (1002),

The officers of the ship are on alert for signs of mutiny:

“At sea, precautionary vigilance was strained against relapse. At short notice an engagement might come on. When it did, the lieutenants assigned to the batteries felt it incumbent on them, in some instances, to stand with drawn swords behind the men working the guns” (1005).

In other words, the officers are so worried about mutiny that the watch the sailors during battles, afraid that the sailors will use the guns to take over their ships. This atmosphere of worry and paranoia affects everything that follows in the story; fear of an uprising is essential to the plot and probably even the themes, of Billy Budd, Sailor.

There are three main characters in the novel. Billy, the title character, is good-hearted and hard-working, a cheerful person whom virtually everyone on the ship appreciates. Melville describes him as knowing little about his ancestry—he was a foundling, a child abandoned at birth. He’s also very innocent—Melville describes him this way:

“with little or no sharpness of faculty or any trace of the wisdom of the serpent, not quite yet a dove, he possessed that kind and degree of intelligence going along with the unconventional rectitude of a sound human creature, one to whom not yet has been proffered the questionable apple of knowledge” (1000),

and a few sentences later goes on to say:

“Billy in many respects was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company” (1000).

It’s interesting, and probably important, that in the space of just a few sentences, Melville throws in two references to serpents, Adam, and the apple of knowledge—in the very next paragraph, he goes on to mention “the doctrine of man’s Fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored” (1001). If this seems like a lot of talk of the Genesis account of the fall of humanity to you, you’re probably on to something. You might also be interested in noting that for all Melville’s comparisons to Billy being like Adam before the fall, he doesn’t seem to be overly impressed by him: he writes, “Of self-consciousness he seemed to have little or none, or a bout as much as we may reasonably impute to a dog of Saint Bernard’s breed” (1000). An author like Walt Whitman might have been impressed by Billy's freedom from history, his innocence, his openness to experience—Melville, by contrast, says he has the self-consciousness of a Saint Bernard.

John Claggart, the ship’s master-at-arms, the person who administers discipline to the ship’s crew, is rather different from Billy: Melville describes him as displaying intelligence on a number of occasions, and when Melville raises the question of why Claggart dislikes Billy, he eventually begins to talk about natural depravity, saying, “Now something such a one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of an evil nature, no engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short ‘a depravity according to nature’” (1015). One reason Claggart hates Billy, Melville writes, is that he sees Billy’s ignorance, understands that Billy’s spirit “had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent” (1016). Ultimately Melville seems to say that Claggart undertakes his plan to frame Billy Budd for mutiny because he is naturally depraved and hates Billy’s innocence.

The third character of the story, Captain Vere, is unusual in that he’s not merely a naval officer but also a sort of intellectual. He’s well read, with a number of well-developed political opinions. Melville presents him as the sort of person who believes in settled institutions—he resists the fashion for revolutionary thinking that’s common in his time. “While other members of that aristocracy to which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators mainly because their theories were inimical to the privileged classes Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them not alone because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind” (1007). From these sorts of descriptions, the character comes across as practical, interested in stability, and objective, the sort of person who wants what’s best for the majority of people, whether it benefits him personally or not.

The story is fairly simple—after setting some groundwork framing Billy, Claggart goes to Captain Vere and accuses Billy Budd of plotting a mutiny. When confronted with the charge in Captain Vere’s cabin, Billy struggles to speak and then, as was foreshadowed early in the narrative, lashes out with his arm, striking Claggart in the forehead, probably unintentionally, and killing him.

Many readers and critics of Billy Budd, Sailor make a case for interpreting Billy as a Christ figure. Like Billy, Jesus was innocent of sin; like Billy, Jesus was accused of a crime he didn’t commit. In Chapter 25, as Billy is about to be executed, his last words are, “God bless Captain Vere” (1043), a message of forgiveness for the person responsible for his death, just as Jesus asked his father to forgive the people who put him to death out of ignorance. As Billy is hanged from one of the arms of the ship, his execution is accompanied by what seem to be signs and wonders: “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 the dawn” (1043-44). Not only is Billy’s death described in Biblical terms, but it turns out that the sailors make Billy a kind of religious figure after his death, keeping track of the spar from which he was hanged and making it into a kind of relic: “To them a chip of it was a piece of the Cross” (1048). In this reading, Claggart can be seen as the devil, because his death recalls God’s warning to the serpent in Genesis that Adam’s seed (Christ) would crush his head. And Captain Vere is sometimes seen as a kind of God the Father figure, having kindly feelings for Billy but sacrificing him in order to fulfill the demands of the law.

Another possibility that many critics offer, however, is that Melville is criticizing what I brought up a few days ago as the idea of the American Adam, the thought that Americans are like Adam before the fall, free from history. Melville criticizes this view, according to this theory, by presenting Billy Budd as ignorant and illiterate, someone who is about as self-conscious as a Saint Bernard. Billy Budd, Sailor presents a picture of what innocence looks like in a world in which natural depravity exists—despite his innocence, Billy is no match for Claggart, and even though he is able to defeat his enemy, he can claim no victory. Captain Vere argues before the other officers of the ship that even though Billy is innocent of plotting mutiny and premeditating Claggart’s murder, he still must be put to death. Captain Vere acknowledges that Billy will be found innocent at the last judgment in heaven, but he says the purpose of martial law is to keep order. He argues that the sailors know the penalty for killing an officer, and if they see Billy acquitted, they will be more likely to mutiny. “They would think that we flinch, that we are afraid of them—afraid of practicing a lawful rigor singularly demanded at this juncture. lest it should provoke new troubles. What shame to us such a conjecture on their part, and how deadly to discipline” (1037). Billy Budd may be innocent in the eyes of heaven, but the purpose of earthly law is to keep order on earth, and focusing on Billy’s innocence will ultimately prevent the law from doing the good that it’s intended to do.

Melville may not actually be attacking Whitman’s ideas in this short novel, but at a number of points in the story he does seem to be saying that it’s foolish to forget about such notions as original sin and natural depravity. Failure to believe in such things can have tragic consequences—it can make us easy prey to people like Claggart, and it cause us to overlook the necessary functions of our earthly laws.

For discussion:

- Billy Budd, Sailor presents many parallels with Biblical stories and characters. What are some that you can find, and what meaning do they give to Melville’s story?