ABSTRACT
Writing shortly before his death in 1891, Herman Melville placed his last novel in the 1790s, during a period of political and ideological upheaval. Billy Budd is a story of impressment and harsh naval justice. But like much of Melville’s work there is a strain of sardonic humour and a playfulness with the meaning of words. Billy Budd is taken off a merchant ship whose owner, inspired by Thomas Paine, christened the vessel Rights-of-Man. Billy joins a British warship named ominously the HMS Bellipotent. As the longboat carrying Billy to the British navy passed under the stern of the merchantman, the ‘officer and oarsmen were noting-some bitterly and others with a grin-the name emblazoned there’. At this moment ‘the new recruit jumped up from the bow’ of the boat, and silently and sorrowfully waved his hat to his ex shipmates. ‘Then, making a salutation as to the ship herself’, Billy declared ‘And good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man’. Melville exonerates Billy of any satirical intent, stating that to this honest tar, ‘To deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature’. But Melville’s pen leaves no doubt that the boat’s crew and the officer understood the double meaning. Would the sailors have gotten the joke? Is Billy’s gesture unlikely and just the invention of Herman Melville, or had ideas from the Enlightenment, including the rights of man, seeped into the forecastle?1
