Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville, a fictionalized account about the revolt on a Spanish slave ship captained by Don Benito Cereno, first published in three installments in Putnam's Monthly in 1855. The tale, slightly revised, was included in his short story collection The Piazza Tales that appeared in May 1856. According to scholar Merton M. Sealts Jr., the story is "an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South".Sealts (1988), 94 Over time, Melville's story has been "increasingly recognized as among his greatest achievements".
In 1799 off the coast of Chile, captain Amasa Delano of the American sealer and merchant ship Bachelor's Delight visits the San Dominick, a Spanish slave ship apparently in distress. After learning from its captain Benito CerenoBenito Cerreño is the Spanish spelling: Son's baptismal certificateGazeta de México del sábado 17 de octubre de 1801 "La Fragata Tres Marías, su Capitán y Maestre Don Benito Cerreño" that a storm has taken many crewmembers and provisions, Delano offers to assist. He notices that Cereno is awkwardly passive for a captain and the slaves display remarkably inappropriate behavior, and though this piques his suspicion he ultimately decides he is being paranoid. When he leaves the San Dominick and captain Cereno jumps after him, he finally discovers that the slaves have revolted and forced the surviving crew to maintain a false narrative. Employing a third-person narrator who reports Delano's point of view without any correction, the story has become a famous example of unreliable narration.
Much critical study has gone into the story's relation to the Toussaint Louverture-led slave rebellion of the 1790s in Saint-Domingue, as well as to Melville's use of one chapter from the historical Amasa Delano's Voyages of 1817, a source of such importance that "he must have written 'Benito Cereno' with Chapter 18 constantly open before him."Hayford, MacDougall, and Tanselle (1987), 582 The novella's "unreliable, even deceptive, narration" continues to cause misunderstanding.Bergmann (1986), 265 Many reviewers of The Piazza Tales cited the novella as one of the highlights in the collection. Melville biographer Hershel Parker calls it "an intensely controlled work, formally one of the most nearly perfect things Melville ever did."Parker (2002), 242
Plot summary
In 1799, the captain of a sealing ship Bachelor’s Delight, Captain Amasa Delano from Duxbury, Massachusetts, spots another ship drifting towards the bay of Santa Maria. Wondering if the ship is in distress, Delano boards his whale-boat and sets sail towards the suspicious ship. He learns that the ship is called the San Dominick, captained by Don Benito Cereno. Upon arrival, Delano is greeted by Spaniards and black men and women who beg him for water and supplies. Delano is troubled by the number of black people on board since they greatly outnumber the Spaniards. This disparity is explained by the collective cries of those on-board, claiming that they had been hit by a fever that killed more of the Spaniard crew than of the slaves. Assuming the standard roles of the races, Delano ignores many troubling signs.
The ship is actually filled with rebel slaves who killed their owner, Alexandro Aranda, and are in control of the Spaniards and Captain Benito. Captain Benito is constantly served by Babo, the leader of the rebellion, and Delano does not suspect anything despite the fact that Benito is never left alone. Under Babo's control, Cereno claims he headed toward the Bolivian coast in order to acquire more hands on deck. Due to all of the aforementioned conditions, the ship has doubled its path several times. When Delano asks about the slaves' master, Alexandro Aranda, Benito states that he took fever aboard the ship and died.
Delano is disturbed by the incidents he observes, such as when a black boy slashes the head of a white boy with a knife. Surprisingly, Cereno does not acknowledge or even seem to care about this behavior. The whispered conversations between Cereno and Babo make Delano feel uncomfortable. Gradually, his suspicions increase as he notes Cereno's sudden waves of dizziness and anxiety, the crew's awkward movements and hushed talks, and the unusual interaction of the slaves and the crew. Yet Delano answers Cereno’s questions about the crew, cargo, and arms aboard the Bachelor’s Delight without reserve, reasoning that the innocent are protected by the truth. When the dinghy arrives with supplies, Delano sends the dinghy back for more water while he continues to observe curious incidents.
Babo reminds Cereno that it is time for his shave and suggests that Delano join them. Their suspicious behavior continues when Babo searches "for the sharpest" razor and Cereno "nervously shuddered" at the "sight of gleaming steel." Just when Delano asks Cereno how he spent over two months crossing a distance Delano himself would have sailed within a few days, Babo nicks Cereno's neck and draws blood. It is unclear whether the nick is caused by a sudden wave on the sea, or "a momentary unsteadiness of the servant’s hand." Delano feels that slavery fosters ugly passions and invites Cereno for coffee aboard the Bachelor’s Delight. Cereno declines the offer, offending Delano, who is increasingly irritated by the lack of opportunity to have a private conversation without Babo within hearing distance.
When the American steps into the dinghy and takes off, Don Benito jumps into the boat, falling at the feet of Captain Delano. Three Spanish sailors dive after him along with Babo, who is holding a dagger. Delano fears Babo wants to attack him, but he loses the dagger when he falls into the boat. With a second dagger, Babo attempts to stab Don Benito. Delano’s men prevent him from achieving his purpose. Delano finally realizes that a slave revolt has been going on aboard the San Dominick. The remaining sailors taking flight into the masts to escape the blacks who are after them. The canvas falls off the ship's figurehead, revealing the strung-up skeleton of Alexandro Aranda. Delano secures Babo; Delano's men attack the Spanish ship to claim booty by defeating the revolting slaves.
Eventually, legal depositions taken at Lima explain the matter. Instead of storm and epidemics, a bloody slave revolt under Babo’s command caused the mortalities among the crew, including Aranda. As Delano approached, the revolting slaves set up the illusion that the surviving whites are still in charge. Delano asks the sad Benito: "’you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?'" To which Cereno replies: "The negro."
Some months after the trial, Babo is executed never having said a word to defend himself. His body is burned but his head is fixed on a pole in the Plaza. Babo's head looks in the direction of St. Bartholomew’s church, where "the recovered bones of Aranda" lay, and further across the bridge "towards the monastery on Mount Agonia without: where, three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader."
Background In the 1850s, a revolt on a slave ship was not a far-fetched topic for a literary work. The historian Greg Grandin explores the historical background of the novel and relates it to the larger questions of slavery and empire in American history. In 1839, the Spanish schooner La Amistad with fifty slaves became the site of slave revolt between two Cuban ports, and two crew members were killed. An American naval vessel seized the Amistad when the ship had wandered off course near Long Island. Then followed a legal battle which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams succeeded in setting the slaves free in the 1841 U.S. Supreme Court ruling United States v. The Amistad. In 1841 the American Creole moved slaves from Virginia to New Orleans when nineteen slaves killed a white sailor and took command of the ship, which then set sail to the British Bahamas. In the Creole case, the slaves were set free under the 1833 British Act of Emancipation. Madison Washington, the leader of the revolt, became the hero of a novel a decade later, in March 1853, when Frederick Douglass published the short novel The Heroic Slave in his anti-slavery newspaper North Star.
Composition Melville's main source for the novella was the 1817 memoir of Captain Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery, in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands.Scudder (1928), 503 Through this memoir, Delano recounts what happens after his vessel, the Perseverance, encounters the Spanish slave ship, the Tryal, on February 20, 1805, in a deserted bay at the island of Santa Maria. Delano's account of this encounter follows his thoughts and actions before, during, and after he realizes that the Tryal has been overtaken by the slaves aboard, thus allowing Melville to build his narrative for Benito Cereno.
Harold H. Scudder, who discovered the link between 'Benito Cereno' and Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, writes that Melville "found his story ready made. He merely rewrote this Chapter including a portion of the legal documents there appended, suppressing a few items, and making some small additions."Scudder (1928), 502 Besides changing the date to 1799, Melville made three more notable additions:
First, while Delano does not describe the Spanish ship, Melville provides a description of a "Spanish merchantman of the first class," that had seen better days: "The tops were large, and were railed about with what had once been octagonal net-work, all now in sad disrepair... Battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turrot, long ago taken by assault, and then left to decay."
Second, Melville replaces the names Perseverance and Tryal by names of his own literary invention, Bachelor's Delight and San Dominick, respectively.
Third, while the real Delano was accompanied by his midshipman Luther, Melville's Delano visits the Spanish ship alone.Scudder (1928), 530 Melville introduces incidents of his own invention, chief among them the shaving of Don Benito, the giant Atufal in chains, and the lunch aboard the Spanish ship. Though the names of the captains remain unchanged, Melville changes the name of the confidential servant from Muri to Babo.
Other additions include the two slaves attacking the Spanish seaman, the glimpse of the jewel, and the sailor presenting the Gordian knot. Melville elaborates on Cereno's leap into Delano's boat after Babo's attempt to stab Cereno as well as the revelation of the skeleton-shaped figurehead. Final inventions are Cereno's deposition at the beginning and his death in a monastery.Scudder (1928), 531
Scholar Rosalie Feltenstein finds it "far from accurate" to say that he found his story ready-made in his source, a statement not just contradicted by Scudder's own inventory of alterations, but instead of suppressing only "a few items," Melville in fact "omits the whole second half of the narrative." Melville meant to both elevate the Cereno character, making him "as heartless and savage as the slaves," and to turn Babo into "a manifestation of pure evil." For instance, in the source Cereno himself tries to stab one of the slaves with a hidden dirk: "Transferred entirely to Babo, this action provides the crisis of the story and adds a final touch to the portrait of the slave's malignity." Some of the "apparently trifling alterations" of his source can be explained by the artistic purpose of establishing a web of imagery pertaining to monks and monasteries.