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 repeated excitement, 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 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 sunby

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 apparent uncertainty of her

movements.