3 8 7 160 170 ——//—— Yes, despite the Dansker's pithy
insistence as to the Master-at-arms
being at the bottom of these strange experiences
of Billy on board the Indomitable , the
young sailor was ready to ascribe them
to almost anybody but the man who, to
use Billy's own word expression, "always
had a pleasant word for him." Well
may this This ^ is to be wondered at. Yet not so much
to be wondered at. In certain matters, some
some sailors even in mature life remain
unsophisticated enough. But a young
seafarer of the disposition of the our ^ athletic
foretopman Foretopman , is much of a child-man.
And yet a child's ^ for the child its utter innocence is
but its blank utter ignorance, and the innocence former
38 1 24 2 161 171 naturally more or less inevitably ^ wanes as intelligence waxes.
But in Billy Budd intelligence, such
as it was, had advanced , while yet
his simplicity simplemindedness ^ remained for the most
part unaffected unaffected . Experi Experience is a
teacher indeed; yet did Billy's years make
his experience small; Insert
the HeHS Besides / He had
none of that intuitive knowledge
of the bad which in natures not good ^ or incompletely so
foreruns experience, and therefore
may pertain, as in some instances
it too clearly does pertains pertain , even to youth.
38 2 162 172 And what could Billy know of
man except of man as a ^ mere sailor?
And the old-fashioned sailor, the veritable
man-before-the-mast, the sailor from
boyhood up, he, tho' indeed of the same
species as ^ a landsmen landsman is in some respects
almost as ^ very singularly distinct from him as a man
is from a woman . The sailor is frank ness,
force, the landsman is finesse. Life
is not a game with the sailor, demanding
the long head; no ^ intricate game of chess where
seldom is anything nothing is ^ to be achieved by ^ few moves are made in straightforwardness,
and ends are attained but more often ^ by indirection; an oblique,
tedious, intricate ^ barren game hardly worth
that poor candle burnt out in playing it.
38 3 163 173 38 3 Yes, As a class, the property of sailors are in
character a juvenile race. And ^ Even their
deviations are marked by juvenility.
And this more especially holding true

with the sailors of Billy's time. Then, too,
certain things which apply to all
sailors, do more pointedly apply operate
here & there, upon to the on younger junior one. He has been is
39 1 164 174 he He ^ Every sailor, too is accustomed to obey orders
without debating them; his life afloat
is externally ruled for him; he is
not brought into that promiscuous
commerce with mankind where
unobstructed free agency on ^ equal terms—equal superficially, at
least—soon ^ teaches teach teaches one that unless
upon occasion he exercise a distrust
keen in proportion to the fairness of
the appearance, some foul turn may
be served him. A ruled undemonstrative
distrustfulness is so ab xxHS habitual, not
with business-men so much , as with
men who know their kind in less
shallow relations than business,
namely, ^ certain men-of-the-world, that they
39 2 165 175 come at last to employ it all but
unconsciously; and some of them
would very likely feel real
surprise at being charged with it
as one of their general characteristics.