I left school and got a job and everyone thought it was for the best. I suppose it was the moment when, had I been the sort of romantic hero I fantasised I was, I would have run away to sea. Alas, bleak reality ensured no such thing happened—I was frightfully prone to sea-sickness, and suffered aquaphobia. For me, swimming was only ever a matter of staying alive in the water, and I could only ever swim sufficiently to get myself to the nearest bit of dry land. Of course, back in the days when boys did tend to run away to sea, most of the seamen of the world couldn’t swim either. No one thought it worth teaching them. The Admiralty plainly considered that there was nothing quite so useless as a sailor whose ship had gone down, or whose seamanship was so poor that he fell overboard.

 

Melville’s other notable work of fiction could not have been more different nor more similar. Billy Budd is a very short book, rather like a few extra chapters of Moby Dick published independently. It tells of how a beautiful young man, Billy, joins the crew of a British warship. He is simply an angel, in his appearance as much as in his manner, and amid the cruelty, violence, corruption and vulgarity of seaboard life, simply cannot be tolerated and in the end they have to hang him. Peter Ustinov made a movie from it, unfortunately in black and white, and he played the kind-hearted but ultimately passively cruel captain, Robert Ryan went somewhat over the top as the brutal first mate, and Billy was played by a new-comer named Terence Stamp. It was a fine film but, like the book, was just too tragic.