Benito Cereno

By Herman Melville

Melville's controversial 1855 novella Benito Cereno follows sea captain Amasa Delano and his crew on the Bachelor's Delight as it is approached by another, rather battered-looking ship, the San Dominick. Upon boarding the San Dominick, Captain Delano is immediately greeted by white sailors and black slaves begging for supplies. An inquisitive Delano ponders the mysterious social atmosphere aboard the badly bruised ship and notes the figurehead which is mostly concealed by a tarpaulin revealing only the inscription "Follow your leader..."

Delano soon encounters the ship's noticeably timid but polite Spanish captain, Don Benito Cereno. Delano believes Cereno's assertion that he and his crew have recently gone through a debilitating series of troubles, having been at sea now for an unsettingly long time. Cereno tells of these tribulations, including horrendous weather patterns and the fate of the slaves' master, Alexandro Aranda, who Cereno claims took fever aboard the ship and died. 

Gradually, however, Delano's suspicions increase, based on his noting Cereno's sudden waves of dizziness and anxiety, the crew's awkward movements and whisperings, and the unusual interaction of the ship's white and black residents...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enhanced Media Publishing
• Release date: Nov 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365515538

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. Following a period of financial trouble, the Melville family moved from New York City to Albany, where Allan, Herman’s father, entered the fur business. When Allan died in 1832, the family struggled to make ends meet, and Herman and his brothers were forced to leave school in order to work. A small inheritance enabled Herman to enroll in school from 1835 to 1837, during which time he studied Latin and Shakespeare. The Panic of 1837 initiated another period of financial struggle for the Melvilles, who were forced to leave Albany. After publishing several essays in 1838, Melville went to sea on a merchant ship in 1839 before enlisting on a whaling voyage in 1840. In July 1842, Melville and a friend jumped ship at the Marquesas Islands, an experience the author would fictionalize in his first novel, Typee (1845). He returned home in 1844 to embark on a career as a writer, finding success as a novelist with the semi-autobiographical novels Typee and Omoo (1847), befriending and earning the admiration of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and publishing his masterpiece Moby-Dick in 1851. Despite his early success as a novelist and writer of such short stories as “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” Melville struggled from the 1850s onward, turning to public lecturing and eventually settling into a career as a customs inspector in New York City. Towards the end of his life, Melville’s reputation as a writer had faded immensely, and most of his work remained out of print until critical reappraisal in the early twentieth century recognized him as one of America’s finest writers.

Book preview

BENITO CERENO

Herman Melville

Copyright  © 2014 by Enhanced Ebooks

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing, 2014.

Enhanced Ebooks Publishing.

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville. First serialized in Putnam’s Monthly in 1855 and later in a revised version in The Piazza Tales in 1856.

© Enhanced Ebooks edition with period illustrations 2014.

Herman Melville 1819-1891

Table of Contents

Benito Cereno

Link to free audio recording of Benito Cereno

Benito Cereno

In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor with a valuable cargo, in the harbor of St. Maria—a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. There he had touched for water.

On the second day, not long after dawn, while lying in his berth, his mate came below, informing him that a strange sail was coming into the bay. Ships were then not so plenty in those waters as now. He rose, dressed, and went on deck.

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

To Captain Delano's surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying, was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations. Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.

But whatever misgivings might have obtruded on first seeing the stranger, would almost, in any seaman's mind, have been dissipated by observing that, the ship, in navigating into the harbor, was drawing too near the land; a sunken reef making out off her bow. This seemed to prove her a stranger, indeed, not only to the sealer, but the island; consequently, she could be no wonted freebooter on that ocean. With no small interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her—a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun—by this time hemisphered on the rim of the horizon, and, apparently, in company with the strange ship entering the harbor—which, wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriguante's one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta.

It might have been but a deception of the vapors, but, the longer the stranger was watched the more singular appeared her man[oe]uvres. Ere long it seemed hard to decide whether she meant to come in or no—what she wanted, or what she was about. The wind, which had breezed up a little during the night, was now extremely light and baffling, which the more increased the apparent uncertainty of her movements. Surmising, at last, that it might be a ship in distress, Captain Delano ordered his whale-boat to be dropped, and, much to the wary opposition of his mate, prepared to board her, and, at the least, pilot her in. On the night previous, a fishing-party of the seamen had gone a long distance to some detached rocks out of sight from the sealer, and, an hour or two before daybreak, had returned, having met with no small success. Presuming that the stranger might have been long off soundings, the good captain put several baskets of the fish, for presents, into his boat, and so pulled away. From her continuing too near the sunken reef, deeming her in danger, calling to his men, he made all haste to apprise those on board of their situation. But, some time ere the boat came up, the wind, light though it was, having shifted, had headed the vessel off, as well as partly broken the vapors from about her.

Upon gaining a less remote view, the ship, when made signally visible on the verge of the leaden-hued swells, with the shreds of fog here and there raggedly furring her, appeared like a white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm, seen perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrenees. But it was no purely fanciful resemblance which now, for a moment, almost led Captain Delano to think that nothing less than a ship-load of monks was before him. Peering over the bulwarks were what really seemed, in the hazy distance, throngs of dark cowls; while, fitfully revealed through the open port-holes, other dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters.

Upon a still nigher approach, this appearance was modified, and the true character of the vessel was plain—a Spanish merchantman of the first class, carrying negro slaves, amongst other valuable freight, from one colonial port to another. A very large, and, in its time, a very fine vessel, such as in those days were at intervals encountered along that main; sometimes superseded Acapulco treasure-ships, or retired frigates of the Spanish king's navy, which, like superannuated Italian palaces, still, under a decline of masters, preserved signs of former state.

As the whale-boat drew more and more nigh, the cause of the peculiar pipe-clayed aspect of the stranger was seen in the slovenly neglect pervading her. The spars, ropes, and great part of the bulwarks, looked woolly, from long unacquaintance with the scraper, tar, and the brush. Her keel seemed laid, her ribs put together, and she launched, from Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones.

In the present business in which she was engaged, the ship's general model and rig appeared to have undergone no material change from their original warlike and Froissart pattern. However, no guns were seen.

The tops were large, and were railed about with what had once been octagonal net-work, all now in sad disrepair. These tops hung overhead like three ruinous aviaries, in one of which was seen, perched, on a ratlin, a white noddy, a strange fowl, so called from its lethargic, somnambulistic character, being frequently caught by hand at sea. Battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turret, long ago taken by assault, and then left to decay. Toward the stern, two high-raised quarter galleries—the balustrades here and there covered with dry, tindery sea-moss—opening out from the unoccupied state-cabin, whose dead-lights, for all the mild weather, were hermetically closed and calked—these tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked.

Whether the ship had a figure-head, or only a plain beak, was not quite certain, owing to canvas wrapped about that part, either to protect it while undergoing a re-furbishing, or else decently to hide its decay. Rudely painted or chalked, as in a sailor freak, along the forward side of a sort of pedestal below the canvas, was the sentence, Seguid vuestro jefe (follow your leader); while upon the tarnished headboards, near by, appeared, in stately capitals, once gilt, the ship's name, SAN DOMINICK, each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept to and fro over the name, with every hearse-like roll of the hull.

As, at last, the boat was hooked from the bow along toward the gangway amidship, its keel, while yet some inches separated from the hull, harshly grated as on a sunken coral reef. It proved a huge bunch of conglobated barnacles adhering below the water to the side like a wen—a token of baffling airs and long calms passed somewhere in those seas.

Climbing the side, the visitor was at once surrounded by a clamorous throng of whites and blacks, but the latter outnumbering the former more than could have been expected, negro transportation-ship as the stranger in port was. But, in one language, and as with one voice, all poured

Reviews for Benito Cereno

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've read both Moby Dick and Billy Budd, but of the Melville works I've read, it's this novella I find most impressive. There's none of the windy digressions in Moby Dick or the heavy-handed allegory of Billy Budd or The Confidence-man here. This is as close as I've found in Melville to taut, subtle writing. If I have any criticism it is that it comes dangerously close to the "idiot plot." (For this to work, one of the characters has to act like an idiot.) From here on end though, to explain what I did find awesome in this, I have to discuss spoilers. And they are spoilers. I had heard of this story, of what this was about. This is one of Melville's more famous works. And I wish I hadn't known--it's best I think to come at this story without knowledge, and I wouldn't read any introduction beforehand. Spoiler below:In a way, I wonder if it is a spoiler, because not only was the situation obvious to me but Melville signals from the start his point of view character, Captain Amasa Delano, is not to be trusted. Early on he describes him as "singularly undistrustful." This is set in 1797 during the Atlantic slave trade. The captain of an American ship, Delano, comes aboard a Spanish ship captained by Benito Cereno. From the first Delano notices that not only are the blacks on deck, who greatly outnumber the whites, unshackled, but that they are sharpening weapons. Huge clues keep coming that Captain Cereno is captive and that there has been a slave revolt on board, but Delano remains clueless. The whole novella is one of the most starkly unreliable narratives I've ever read. But here's what I find interesting. Throughout the narrative many racial, in fact very racist, comments are made. But not only are we signaled the narrator is, well, an idiot, but many of the events of the novella flat out contradict those racist assumptions--for instance docility and stupidity--for the black slaves not only successfully revolted, they're fooling Delano despite what's right before his eyes. So, it made me wonder. Just what does Melville believe? And what does he want us to take away from this story? Given the time this was written (1855) my assumption would have been that Melville's sympathies were with the white crew, and that he'd certainly expect that's how his readers would see things. But so much in this novella subverts that easy assumption. And that I do find awesome. Even amazing given the year this was written.

[stef7sa-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Entertaining story, well written.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is tense and tight and moody like some kind of cross between a Poe story and Das Boot, which I never would have expected from Melville, who can be story-focused and atmospheric, sire, but in a way that is effaced (blown out of the water Pequod- --or Don Benito's ship under fire by the Americans, in this one--style) by his cosmic yearnings and baggymonstrosity. (Guy sends a lot of gauges up to 11!) It starts with a mystery--what's with this ship? Why are the blacks so creepily jaunty yet so eerily subdued? Who's in charge on this boat, anyway? The setup is golden. Melville limits himself to dramatizing the source material, though, and what that means is we get a novella of slave revolt on the high seas that has cannon battles and guys getting mutilated by the cruel negro and sympathy for the devil on a human level that gets completely subsumed within a larger allegory about global realpolitik, Delano as the early ugly naive lovable American running shit without even knowing. IT's hard to let Melville of the hook for that, but I think the problem is less that he was a man of his times who saw cruelty as cruelty and slavery as a policy debate, and more that he didn't give the story time to breathe, didn't flash us back to desperate negotiations and shocking developments on a ship of poor sods that means our world entire. The thing would have been to give us the perspective of one of the Africans, and for Cereno to be the serpent and Babo to be Ahab and Delano and his men to be the brutal ex machina. And in that sense, certainly, these are just the kind of openhearted, bouncing, paranoid farmboys that went to Afghanistan. This is less about slavery per se than an metaphor for the way America's handled its involvement in foreign disputes since day one--burn the village to save the village and then get a furrow of noncomprehension when you don't turn out to be the good guy any more than the slaves or the Spaniards. But that's ignoring--Melville's ignoring--that a story like this takes place against mass murder and rape and kidnapping and human trafficking right here in the good old US of A, acting like it's a foreign issue, pretending to a fairness that is bias itself like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. It's--ha--like that awful Black Eyed Peas song "Overseas, yeah, we try to stop terrorism / but we still got terrorists here livin' in the USA / the FBI, the CIA, the Bloods, the Crips, and the KKK". TBenito Cereno simplifies like the song simplifies--the blush every time you hear those stupid lyrics analogous to the interactions racked by etiquette between the two captains, the awkwardness to death that trumps even real death all around, and the impossibility in both cases of it turning into anything other than a bloodbath of the foreigner committed again by the well-meaning and clean. The climax feels cheap because the alternative is a closer look at the psychology of it, and Melville's not up for the complete cutting loose or condemnation of his Americans that the examination would make necessary for any feeling person.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Slow, well-crafted story of evil and slavery and rebellion and deceit.

[bolgai · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have heard about this book from a friend of mine, who's read it with her book club, so I generally knew what to expect in terms of plot developments. I was however pleasantly surprised by the characters in this novella. They were all remarkable in one way or another and since they were all very distinct their differences stood out all the more. It seems that authors in the middle of the 19th century weren't afraid to make their characters full of personality, take Dickens for example, and Melville definitely followed the same tradition. I particularly enjoyed the character of the proprietor, who is the narrator of this story. He tries so hard to be on good terms with all of his employees, regardless of the trouble they cause him, and makes up excuses to not take any action that would make him look good in his own eyes. What I didn't expect is how plodding the pace is. Now that I've read Benito Cereno I think that's something that is common in Melville's work. The same type of scene seemed to repeat over and over without furthering the plot or developing the characters. The only thing this repetition seemed to accomplish was to convince me further of utter and complete spinelessness of the proprietor, but I already knew that so it wore on me. I did enjoy the ending though. It seemed somewhat abrupt because events moved along faster than the rest of the story but it was very satisfying. In a way it was the only appropriate ending, anything else wouldn't have worked quite as well. It also redeemed the proprietor in my eyes somewhat, he did have a good heart even if his will was lacking. Despite the extremely slow middle of the novella the ending saved it for me and for a few days after finishing it I kept thinking about the characters and the story. I can see why Melville is considered such an important figure in American literature and why this particular piece is still widely read. I would recommend Bartleby if you want to read a work that will inspire you to think about people, their motivations and how they relate to each other.

[krizia_lazaro_3 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This was a boring book. It was short but I feel that I was reading a 1,000-page book. Its a book that you have a slight notion of what will happen next and thus just want to reach the climax. But the climax happened to far down the book. This book made me so sleepy I almost did not want to finish it.

[ohernaes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great short story about revolting and scheming slaves. Who is controlling whom? A bit weird that everything is explained in detail in the last chapter.

[aoibhealfae · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"Benito Cereno" were never meant to be read only once. However, it took me some multiple reads into this short novel to make sense of the plot as the book need to be absorbed more than its meant to be read. Based on a true story, "Benito Cereno" was narrated by a very gullible unreliable narrator about a mysterious Spanish slave trade ship and its strange occupants. Like most thing in history about that time, the story basically centered about imperialism, slavery, white man burden, prejudices etc but its also a mystery and riddled with clues if you know where to look which made the story tolerable enough.

I guess the story would interest those who are interested in reading a very difficult writing style with complete unreliable primary POV narrator and have an interest in dominance-submissive relationship of this book. In fact, this book is riddled with all kind of power play which was simply too horrifying to dwell on it too much. Various interpretation of "rape" was the core of this novel.

I would have like it better if there are more clarity in the writing style of this book like Melville did with "Bartleby". I do think there's a way to write a rising action scene without the overuse of never-ending sentences. Besides the over comma paragraphs, I was supposed to have let Melville drag me along with his interpretation of the situation because of his familiarity with his nautical experiences. But I don't think the author nor the narrator offer us some degree of flawed humanity in the situation via the apparent ignorance prevailing until the climax of the story.

This book are meant to be read and reread. Its unavoidable to empathize with this novel to a degree considering that it shows the ugliness and flawed nature in everyone in the book. Its not meant to be likable but it is meant to be digested and its a strong novel like John Steinbeck's The Pearl but you really need a hard stomach to withstand the underlying message and various interpretations of this book.

[heidip_38 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wowza. I don't even know what to say about Benito Cereno. This is my first Melville, believe it or not. I've never read his other works, and this is quite the introduction.Melville House says, "Based on a real-life incident--the character names remain unchanged--Benito Cereno tells what happens when an American merchant ship comes upon a mysterious Spanish ship where the nearly all-black crew and their white captain are starving and yet hostile to offers of help. Melville's most focused political work, it is rife with allusions (a ship named after Santa Domingo, site of the slave revolt led by Toussaint L'Ouverture), analogies (does the good-hearted yet obtuse American captain refer to the American character itself?) and mirroring images that deepen our reflections on human oppression and its resultant depravities."I'm assuming since Melville was born in New York and his grandparents hail from Boston, that he was anti-slavery. Since this was first published in 1855, my initial thoughts are that he writes this as a warning of sorts. Human oppression can only stand so much before it rises in revenge. If I understand the allusions and analogies correctly, this story is a scathing review of the naivete of the American north regarding slavery and of the emotional dependence the south has on it's slaves.This book stirs the racially-charged pot.

[scottcholstad · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've always felt this was actually Melville's best work.

[audacity88_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At first seems like a sea story, then like a rather run-of-the-mill mystery novel, and then finally reveals itself (unless I'm overprojecting) to be a rather disturbing morality tale.spoiler:It forces us to ask to what degree Captain Delano represents ourselves, to conduct our own condemnation of the Americans but also, more importantly, of ourselves for (at least in my case) rooting for them.end spoilerAt first I was sure this wasn't a great book. Now I can see why it is, and if I read it again I think my appreciation will be twice as great the second time around.Oh, and this edition (Benito Cereno: A Text for Guided Research) is great because it has the actual memoirs of the real-life Amasa Delano, who is, incredibly, just as pigheaded as in the story, and whose story is just as bizarre.