The boarding officer, Lieutenant Ratcliffe, chooses Billy immediately, and does not take any other men. The narrator describes the scene of impressment. To fill gaps in their crews, British military vessels would board civilian ships and force men into the King's service. He had set out to sea aboard an English merchant ship called The Rights of Man, but in those dies the British fleet was severely undermanned. Toward the end of the eighteenth century not long before the start of our story, he was impressed, or forced, into military service. He was a twenty-one-year-old foretopman on the H.M.S. And the Handsome Sailor was also an ethical and upright being strength and beauty alone would not have been enough to make him into a hero among his shipmates.īilly Budd, the narrator tells us, was in some respects an example of this kind of man. The narrator goes on to explain that the Handsome Sailor was no dandy invariably, he was also a physically powerful man, often skilled at fighting. Melville dubs this central figure the "Handsome Sailor." The other sailors would surround him "like a bodyguard," and the Handsome Sailor would accept the other men's adoration "with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality" (291). Often in seaports, bands of sailors walking about town would consist of any number of normal sailors and, at the center of their group, one superior specimen. The narrator begins by speaking of a phenomenon known more frequently in the days before steam ships.
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