Chapter 7

In Benito Cereno, published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1855, Melville was again at home. It is such a tale as one might hear, with good luck, during a gam in the South Seas or at a bar in Callao; and Melville himself took it boldly from a book of voyages by Captain Amasa Delano, published in 1816.

A black, ill-kempt ship, commanded by a young Spanish captain and manned by negroes, is in distress, and calls upon Captain Amasa Delano, a bluff, frank American skipper, for aid. Delano, coming aboard with provisions and water, finds the captain almost down with a fever, and by turns confidential and queerly reserved. The Spaniard is attended by a black slave who almost smothers him with watchful endearments; and he has the air of perpetually manoeuvring, in a way that would seem sinister were his plight not so manifestly pathetic. Delano is a little troubled at heart, but he is free from intellectual suspicions. There is something wrong on the Spaniard’s ship; but it is hard for Delano to put his hand on it. Don Benito is in command: but he seems helpless, and he tolerates ugly disorder even among the black boys. Promising further aid, Delano finally leaves the vessel and is about to pull for his own ship, still powerfully disturbed by the Spanish captain’s pain, trouble, fever, churlishness, courtesy—does it mean some treachery? With a wild leap, the Spaniard throws himself in Delano’s boat, followed by his faithful black, dagger in hand; and the black aims his dagger, not at the Americans, but at his Spanish master. When the American crew finally pulls to safety a harrowing story comes out.

I will not spoil Benito Cereno for those who have not read it by revealing its mystery; it is enough to point out that the interplay of character, the cross-motives, the suspense, the central mystery, are all admirably done: in contrast to some of Melville’s more prosy sketches, there is not a feeble touch in the whole narrative. The following passage, which sets the key of the whole story, reveals Melville’s undiminished ability as an artist:

“Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roads 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.” As in The Encantadas, the writing itself was distinguished: it had a special office of its own to perform, and did not, as in Typee and Redburn, serve merely as carriage for the story. One can mark Melville’s literary powers in the complete transformation of Delano’s patent story: he adds a score of details to heighten the mystery and deepen the sinister aspect of the scene; and by sheer virtuosity he transfers the reader’s sympathies to the Spanish captain, who in the original story is far more cruel, barbarous, and unprincipled than the forces he contends against. In order to effect this change, Melville deliberately omits the last half of the story, in which the Spanish captain ignobly turns upon his benefactor and seeks to deprive him of the rights of salvage. The moral of the original tale is that ingratitude, stirred by cupidity, may follow the most generous act, and that American captains had better beware of befriending too whole-heartedly a foreign vessel. In Benito Cereno the point is that noble conduct and good will, like that Don Benito felt when his whole inner impulse was to save Delano and his crew, may seem sheer guile; and, further, that there is an inscrutable evil that makes the passage of fine souls through the world an endless Calvary. “Even the best men err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted.” The world is mortified for Don Benito by the remembrance of the human treachery he has encountered: no later benefaction, no radiance of sun and sky, can make him forget it.

Man should offset the malice and evil circumstance one finds in the constitution of the universe: instead, he aggravates it. One does not need to heighten the parallels between Benito Cereno’s fate and Melville’s own life to catch the semblance to his own dilemma and his own bowed and wounded spirit. “Never,” says one of the characters in his next book, “has it been my lot to have been wronged, though but in the smallest degree. Cheating, backbiting, superciliousness, disdain, hard-heartedness, and all that brood, I know but by report. Cold regards tossed over the sinister shoulder of a former friend, ingratitude in a beneficiary, treachery in a confidant—such things may be; but I must take somebody’s word for it.” The irony of that declaration is obvious: Melville had met these things, and, like a splinter of steel in the eye, they tormented him and during these harassed years the memory of them, the anticipation of them, the helpless attempt to guard against them or remove them, directed his whole life towards this single point of exacerbation. The mighty whale aroused Melville’s utmost powers: there was that in man that steaded him manfully for such an encounter: but, like Timon, the spectacle of fair-weather friends and worldly sycophants, turning away from him during his moment of greatest need, unmanned him completely. Moby-Dick might slay one: but the torments of black flies and gnats made life ignoble without bringing death any nearer. Melville did not need to exaggerate these wrongs. It was their very smallness, their unassailableness, that made him desperate.