For the last few years the first book I’ve assigned in my classes on the history of American foreign policy is Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno. Written in 1855, and based on the memoirs of New England sea captain, the novella is set off the coast of Chile in 1799. Bachelor’s Delight, a seal hunting ship commanded by the blithe hearted and optimistic New Englander Amasa Delano encounters the drifting, ill-conditioned San Dominick off the desolate, Patagonian shore. Barnacles encrust the San Dominick’s sides; thick seaweed grows out from its hull. Seabirds perch in its ragged, ill-kept rigging; overhead, birds circle and cry ominously against the background of a gray sky. The sea itself seems motionless, like melted, wavy lead that has congealed in the smelter.
Captain Delano (the author of the memoir and the protagonist of the novella) approaches the gloomy Spanish vessel; decayed and broken down it still bears signs of its former role as a flagship of empire. Coming aboard he greets the touchy, sallow and mysterious young captain, Don Benito Cereno and notes that the ship appears to be carrying a cargo of African slaves. There are few officers or white sailors on board; Delano gradually learns the history of the ship from Cereno. Damaged by wild gales off Cape Horn, the ship was becalmed for weeks. Scurvy and fever struck the weakened crew; most of the officers and Spanish crew died — and perhaps half the slaves. Too few and too weak to control the blacks, the whites — and the ship — have only survived because the slaves have been so helpful and orderly.
The tale seems inconsistent; the narrator untrustworthy. Delano, a trusting and optimistic soul, wonders whether the Spanish captain is a pirate — if some horrible plot against his life and ship is unfolding. But common sense returns, and he shakes these fears aside:
“What, I, Amasa Delano- Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad- I, Amasa; the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the waterside to the schoolhouse made from the old hulk;- I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard?- Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is some one above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed; a child of the second childhood, old boy; you are beginning to dote and drool, I’m afraid.”
I’ll get to the denouement below (warning: the ending is a surprise; readers who don’t know how the book comes out might want to go read it first and then return to the post), but already by this point the story is shaping up as a classic of American foreign policy. The optimistic American, venturing far from home in his orderly and well managed ship, encounters a mysterious — and mysteriously ramshackle — ship abroad. Delano’s first instinct is to help: he offers technical assistance, piloting the ship toward a safe anchorage. Noting the hunger and thirst of the ship and its crew, he offers humanitarian aid: fresh water and food from his stores. That won’t be enough, he soon realizes. Development aid is also needed: sails and ropes to enable the Latin ship to make better progress on its own.
But the captain doesn’t respond as expected. Evidence of misgovernment abounds. The slaves are insubordinate; the Spanish sailors strange. The moody captain is erratic and unsuited to command: at one moment inexcusably lax as slaves seem to attack a white sailor, at others inflexibly cruel, keeping one particular slave in chains. Amasa Delano starts thinking about regime change: perhaps nothing will go well on the ship until he replaces the captain — perhaps with an officer from the Bachelor’s Delight.
For Melville’s readers, the decrepit Spanish empire was the symbol of tyranny and misgovernment. Benito Cereno constantly refers to symbols of Spanish bigotry and backwardness. The name of the ship — San Dominick — is the name of the founder of the chief order of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition. The Dominican Friars (by a Latin pun sometimes known as the hounds of God — domini canes) were, for the Anglo-Protestant audience Melville was writing for, the ultimate symbols of the cruelty and tyranny of Popish superstition. Most Americans at that time believed that by and large Catholicism was directly opposed to republican governance and that wherever Catholicism ruled, liberty and prosperity were crushed. The Latin American republics, founded with such optimism earlier in the 19th century, had mostly gone backward since then — much as Africa degenerated in the half century following independence.
Poor Amasa Delano confronting this shipwreck of hopes, this failed state, is groping for some kind of policy, some way to fix a problem that, from time to time, he dimly realizes may be beyond his ken. His philanthropy, his optimism, his quest for win-win solutions don’t seem to be getting very far. The Spanish hulk drifts on; what ails it is too deep for him to cure.
The relationships on the ship are incomprehensible to him. Don Benito enjoys the services of a favorite slave — Babo. Babo is with his master all the time, solicitously seeing to his every need. Yet when Babo shaves his master, who trembles with some kind of ague or nervous distress as he tells Delano about the ship’s misadventures and the heroism of its blacks, Babo accidentally cuts Don Benito with the straight razor. Delano goes out on deck, a few minutes later Babo appears, nursing a cut in his cheek and sighing that his master has punished him for his slip of the hand. What kind of cruel and strange man is this Spaniard, Delano wonders, who can rely so closely and so heavily on a favorite slave and then cut him in a fit of pique. What a sad thing slavery is, reflects Delano, that it degrades servant and master alike.
As Delano leaves the ship to return in the boat to his own vessel, he’s startled when Don Benito leaps over the side and into his boat — apparently in a treacherous attack. Spanish sailors jump into the waters around the San Dominick and Babo jumps after his master. The scales fall from Delano’s eyes. A successful slave revolt had occurred on the San Dominick; a few whites had been left alive to navigate the ship back to Africa. Then the ship had been becalmed and provisions grew short. When Delano’s ship appeared, Don Benito had been forced on pain of immediate death to him and to all other whites on the ship to tell him the fabricated story. The blacks were planning to seize the Bachelor’s Delight; Benito jumped off the ship as his last and only hope of warning Delano and saving himself and perhaps what remained of the crew.
As the Americans realize what is going on, they rally. As the blacks try to sail their crippled ship out of the harbor, the American sailors chase and ultimately capture it. The slave revolt is crushed, order restored, and the Americans lead the crippled ship back to Peru, and are ultimately congratulated and paid by Spanish officials for their service. The black rebels are executed; Babo’s head is mounted on a pike in the main Lima plaza.
Yet what really happened? Had order been restored, justice done? As they sail back toward civilization, Delano is surprised to find that Benito Cereno isn’t recovering his spirits. On the contrary; he falls into a deeper and deeper depression. Why so gloomy, Delano asks:
“The past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”
“Because they have no memory,” he [Benito Cereno] dejectedly replied; “because they are not human.”
“But these mild trades that now fan your cheek, Don Benito, do they not come with a human-like healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast friends are the trades.”
“With their steadfastness they but waft me to my tomb, Senor,” was the foreboding response.
“You are saved, Don Benito,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?”
“The Negro.”
Delano never realizes what Cereno was talking about, and goes on about his business, prosperous and unaffected. It will be another story to tell by the fires of Duxbury, another chapter in his memoirs.
Melville was a rarity in the nineteenth century: a white American who had something close to a non-racial view of the world. He has written a powerful anti-slavery book in the guise of a sea story — and linked America’s inability to understand the world to its imperfect knowledge of itself. The slave trade had long been a pillar of Massachusetts sea commerce; Delano’s instinctive sense that Cereno and the whites were in the rights and the revolting slaves obviously and unquestionably in the wrong was embedded so deeply in his worldview that it never occurs to him to ask questions. The gentle servant Babo, so loyal solicitous of his master that Delano wishes he could buy him, is a ringleader of the revolt.
Appearances deceive, and they keep on deceiving. That is one of the many lessons of this powerful and haunting book — which in my judgment stands with Moby Dick and Billy Budd as Melville’s greatest work. Its unforgettable portrayal of a not-so-innocent American abroad, a Mr. Magoo blundering into and out of conflicts and dangers that he never understands, is something that all Americans need to reflect on as they struggle to come to grips with our country’s engagement with the world.
But it would be a mistake to read Melville’s book as a kind of prot0-Chomsky screed, an attack on American ignorance and racism combined with a warning about the perils of blowback. After all, Bachelor’s Delight is a much better managed ship that the San Dominick: more seaworthy, more prosperous, better organized in every possible way. Amasa Delano’s benevolence, unwitting and uninformed as it may be, carries him safely through a dangerous crisis. Where Amasa seems to have gone wrong is that he has lost something his Puritan forebears had in spades: an awareness of the reality of human evil and an understanding of tragedy. Amasa is a Puritan degenerated into a Whig, the stern Calvinist belief that a transcendent God is ordering the world declining to a smug assurance that progress is inevitably and rapidly making the world a better place. Melville and his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne make this point repeatedly in their dark fictions; read Hawthorne’s mordant The Celestial Railroad, contrasting the ease and passivity of New England spirituality in his day with the world of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to see what I mean. In any case, Benito Cereno links that spiritual point about the superficiality of conventional American progressive thought with the question of America’s ability to understand the world.
That deserted cove in southern Chile with its unmoving gray sea and its haunted, drifting hulk of a Spanish treasure ship is a place we should all visit from time to time. I’m glad that my teaching duties have bring me there so often; I look forward to revisiting the Bachelor’s Delight next year.