Why Voltaire and his Ideas are Critical to the Development of Major Themes in Billy Budd.
In describing Billy Budd's transfer to the Indomitable from the Rights of Man, Melville writes in regards to the latter vessel:.
That was the merchant ship's name; tho' by her master and crew abbreviated in sailor fashion into The Rights. The hardheaded Dundee owner was a staunch admirer of Thomas Paine whose books in rejoinder to Burke's arrangement of the French Revolution had then been published for some time and had gone everywhere. In christening the vessel after the title of Paine's volume the man of Dundee was something like the contemporary ship owner, Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, whose sympathies alike with his native land and its liberal philosophers, he evinced by naming his ships after Voltaire, Diderot, and so forth (Stafford, p. 7).
The significance of Voltaire in this regard lies; first, in the fact that, like the other thinkers mentioned in this passage, he was an exponent of Enlightenment ideals of human perfectibility and of the importance of reason. Yet, more so than his contemporaries, Voltaire was the very epitome of the ideology against which the Royal Navy was pitted, not only in its struggle against revolutionary France, but also in its efforts to quell mutinous conspiracies among its men. "To the British Empire the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade would be to London threatened by general arson," writes Melville, in regard to the uprising at the Nore, and he continues:.
[in] a fleet, the right arm of a Power then all but the sole conservative one of the Old World, the blue-jackets, to be numbered by thousands, ran up with huzzas the British colors with the union and cross wiped out; by that cancellation transmuting the flag of founded law and freedom defined, into the enemy's red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt. Reasonable discontent growing out of practical grievances in the fleet had been ignited into irrational combustion as by live cinders blown across the Channel from France in flames (Stafford, pp.
