Everything is for a season remarkable in navies. Any tangible object
associated with some striking incident of the service, is converted into
a monument. The spar from which the foretopman was suspended, was for
some few years kept trace of by the blue-jackets. Then knowledge
followed it from ship to dockyard and again from dockyard to ship, still
pursuing it even when at last reduced to a mere dockyard boom. To them a
chip of it was as a piece of the Cross. Ignorant though they were of the
real facts of the happening, and not thinking but that the penalty was
unavoidably inflicted from the naval point of view, for all that they
instinctively felt that Billy was a sort of man as incapable of mutiny
as of wilful murder. They recalled the fresh young image of the Handsome
Sailor, that face never deformed by a sneer or subtler vile freak of the
heart within! This impression of him was doubtless deepened by the fact
that he was gone, and in a measure mysteriously gone. On the gun-decks
of the _Indomitable_ the general estimate of his nature and its
unconscious simplicity eventually found rude utterance from another
foretopman, one of his own watch, gifted as some sailors are, with an
artless poetic temperament. The tarry hands made some lines, which,
after circulating among the shipboard crew for a while, finally got
rudely printed at Portsmouth as a ballad. The title given to it was the
sailor’s.