ABSTRACT
His defence, he says, will merely consist in explaining how things happened. We are surprised to find that he does not provide a lineal explanation based on an anecdote, as he seems to anticipate. Instead, he presents a rule (‘rule 42’), postulating:‘No one shall speak to the Man of the Helm’, which the Bellman, chief of the Snark-hunting expedition, completes with a reciprocal rule: ‘And the Man of the Helm shall speak to no one’.
