Billy Budd: A handsome, innocent aboard H.M.S. Indomitable. Recently impressed into the King's service from the merchantman, Rights of Man, where he had been the favorite of the crew and Captain Graveling's "Jewel," twenty-one year old Billy is a superb specimen of Anglo-Saxon manhood, tanned, healthy, and freehearted. He is, we are told, as innocent of evil as Adam before the fall, and is compared to Hercules, Apollo, and Alexander the Great. Billy is, however, cursed with a single blemish, a fatal flaw. When under the stress of strong emotion, "he has a tendency to stutter and sometimes even worse" (he cannot speak at all).