BENITO CERENO

by Herman Melville
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 harbour of St. Maria- a small,

desert, uninhabited island towards 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 grey. 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 grey mantle. Flights of troubled grey fowl, kith and kin with
flights of troubled grey vapours 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 colours; 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 repeatedexcitement, 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 intellectualperception, 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 harbour, was drawing
too near the land, for her own safety's sake, owing to 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 vapours partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin
light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun-

by this time crescented on the rim of the horizon, and apparently,
in company with the strange ship, entering the harbour- 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 vapours, but, the longer

the stranger was watched, the more singular appeared her manoeuvres.
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 apparentuncertainty 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 day-break, 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 vapours 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 whitewashed
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. Towards 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 caulked- 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 refurbishing, 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 head-boards, 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