The creation of Billy Budd depended on the amalgamation of several sources. According to the dedicatory page, Melville owed much to his former sea buddy, Jack Chase, whose rugged good looks and ebullient spirit served as the model for Billy. Likewise, Melville himself was once a handsome, rebellious sailor and fathered two boys who came to unfortunate ends, one a suicide and the other a wandering seaman and ne’er-do-well.
The setting harks back to Melville’s memories of his navy years aboard the man-of-war United States. More significant to the subject matter was a scandal resulting from an abortive mutiny on the U.S. brig-of-war Somers on December 1, 1842. The captain, Alexander Mackenzie, convened a shipboard court and, at his officers’ direction, ordered the hanging of three troublemakers, one of whom was the son of Secretary of War John Spencer.
When the Somers returned to port, Mackenzie met the fury of the influential Spencer family, yet survived both a military and civil tribunal with his honor intact. However, facts revealed in public testimony cast doubt on the captain’s sanity. Melville read of these proceedings in the Albany newspapers and received eyewitness accounts of the alleged mutiny from his cousin Guert Gansevoort, a lieutenant aboard the Somers who guarded the prisoners and assisted at their executions. Gansevoort publicly condoned the captain’s actions, but privately sided with the victims.
Critics surmise that Melville, who had a brush with a shipboard uprising in Papeete, identified with the situation, which he used as the basis for his fable. Unlike his earlier sea stories, Billy Budd concentrates on the sailor’s shipboard milieu, not the sea or its creatures. His understanding of the microcosm of the ship in which the captain attains a god-like stature led him to probe the ethical and moral underpinnings of justice as seen through the eyes of a common sailor.
For a nation that had undergone the agonizing paranoia of a civil war, the short novel spoke volumes. Billy, like many people caught up in conflicting loyalties, represents two possible modes of morality. As a member of the British navy, he owes allegiance to the flag and the law-bound nation it represents. From the personal point of view, he is a civilized being who owes fidelity to order and propriety. When the public stance comes in conflict with the private, Billy must violate one to placate the other.
By accidentally killing his tormentor, Billy calls into play the earthly judge, Captain Vere, who has come to love Billy like a son. The captain, also a victim in the scenario, is forced to exercise his military authority in spite of the fact that execution will not right Billy’s wrong. The irony of this wretched impasse is that impersonal laws, when applied to Billy’s crime, call for his death. And so a public citizen and military man is hanged, thereby annihilating the private soul who quelled evil with one involuntary blow of his fist.
