Amasa Delano (1763-1823) was an American sea captain from Duxbury, Massachusetts. after serving in the American revolution as a teenager he embarked on several sea voyages. He is known most commonly for his book, Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, Comprising Three Voyages Round the World (1817).
Michellefi, Author:. "The Real Amasa Delano (1763-1823)." Melville's "Benito Cereno". Wordpress, 07 May 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2017.
Bernstein, John. "Benito Cereno and the Spanish Inquisition." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.4 (1962): 345-50. Print.
: “This paper develops a new interpretation of Benito Cereno by showing that the underlying structure and symbolism of the novel are based upon the Spanish Inquisition. A discussion of the differences between Captain Delano's story and Melville's finished work of art is essential in understanding the role played by the Spanish Inquisition in Benito Cereno. As Captain Delano's Voyages stood, it was tailor-made for Melville, for it contains three of the themes prevalent in his works-the discrepancy between appearance and reality, the struggle between the white "civilized" and the colored "primitive" races of the world, and the issue of freedom and slavery...."
Melville was very aware of Washington Irving’s The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. According to Irving, Columbus sailed to the New World with three ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Upon arriving, Columbus became governor of the Spanish colony of San Domingo. Gradually, this colony descended into anarchy and violence, with frequent revolts from the enslaved natives. Columbus was held prisoner, falsely accused by a judge sent from Spain, Francisco de Bobadilla, where he was returned to Spain. Cleared of all wrong-doing, Columbus never recovered from the incident and suffered ill-health and bitterness as a result.
In “Benito Cereno,” a Spaniard in the New World, captain of the San Dominick, is held captive by the Negro slaves aboard that ship. Throughout the story, set near the island of Santa Maria, Captain Amasa Delano passes various judgements about Cereno. After discovery of the slave revolt, Cereno is cleared of all wrong-doing, but is unable to recover from the shock of the ordeal.
In this sense, “Beneito Cereno” is a retelling of the history of Christopher Columbus as described by Washington Irving.
Irving, Washington. A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. 1828. Web https://archive.org/stream/lifevoyagesofchr97irvi/lifevoyagesofchr97irvi_djvu.txt 25 April 2017.
“The first clue that Benito Cereno is structured upon the Inquisition is found in the "monk symbolism." Critics have pointed out that the word Benito can mean Benedictine Friar, that the name of the Spanish ship, the San Dominick, suggests San Dominican Monk, and that the San Dominicans were known as the Black Friars in England.' When Captain Delano first sees the Spanish ship.”
Bernstein, John. "Benito Cereno and the Spanish Inquisition." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.4 (1962): 345-50. Print.
The description of San Dominick include “a white-washed monastery… perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrness,” once “fine” but now dilapidated by “slovenly neglect.” The forecastle of the San Dominick is described as “some ancient turret…left to decay.”
In an appendix to his history, Washinton Irving describes what remains of the Franciscan friars when he visited the remains of the colony of Santo Domingo: “a white-washed building, standing in a bleak and solitary situation, on the brow of a rocky height or promontory.” He describes it as a ruin, suffering from “neglect and dilapidation” (Irving 150). Irving describes portions of Santo Domingo as “the ruins of an ancient watch-tower.” With the similarity between the two descriptions, Meliville appears to set the ruin of the San Dominick as a representation of the current state of Santo Domingo, with both places destroyed by the actions of slavers such as Columbus and the aftermath of a slave revolt.
Later in the text, “And overhanging all was the balustrade by his arm, which, partly stained with pitch and partly embossed with moss, seemed the charred ruin of some summer-house in a grand garden long running to waste.”
In Irving’s description of Santo Domingo, he describes leaning over a balustrade to look at “what once had been a garden” (Irving 151). All these scenes, and descriptions of the San Dominick describe the decline of Spanish sea power, as well as the after-effects of a slave revolt. This is also emphasized with the writing along side of the ship, "follow your leader," emphasizing that the practice of slavery in the United States is following the lead of their Spanish predecessors.
This imagery suggests America is following in the footsteps of the collapsing Spanish empire.
See footnote 5
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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. (1)
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. (2)
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, [pg 110] 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. (3)
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. [pg 111]
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 [pg 112] 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. [pg 113]
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 (4) 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 cloister. (5)
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 [pg 114] 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 [pg 115] 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 [pg 116] 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. (6)
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 out a common tale of [pg 117] suffering; in which the negresses, of whom there were not a few, exceeded the others in their dolorous vehemence. The scurvy, together with the fever, had swept off a great part of their number, more especially the Spaniards. Off Cape Horn they had narrowly escaped shipwreck; then, for days together, they had lain tranced without wind; their provisions were low; their water next to none; their lips that moment were baked.
While Captain Delano was thus made the mark of all eager tongues, his one eager glance took in all faces, with every other object about him.
Always upon first boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially a foreign one, with a nondescript crew such as Lascars or Manilla men, the impression varies in a peculiar way from that produced by first entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land. Both house and ship—the one by its walls and blinds, the other by its high bulwarks like ramparts—hoard from view their interiors till the last moment: but in the case of the ship there is this addition; that the living spectacle [pg 118] it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave.
pgs 109-118