James has served as a teaching assistant in humanities and has master's degrees in humanities and interdisciplinary studies.
Herman Melville, who is best known for his classic whaling novel Moby Dick, wrote his novella Benito Cereno, a story about a revolt on a slaver ship in 1855. He wrote it not just as an exciting adventure story, but also to underscore the cruelty of slavery and the hopeless desperation experienced by slaves.
Don Benito Cereno is a Spanish nobleman who is the captain of the San Dominick, a ship carrying African slaves and white passengers from Valparaiso, Chile to Callao, Peru in 1799.
Don Alexandro Aranda is a Spanish nobleman and friend of Don Benito Cereno's. He owns the slaves, but is killed by the slaves when they mutiny.
Babo is the leader of the slaves during their revolt. He is fluent in the Spanish language, so he can communicate well with Don Benito Cereno and the other Spaniards. Although he has a slight build and is small of stature, Babo is highly intelligent, resourceful, and daring.
Captain Amasa Delano is the American captain of a seal-hunting ship, the Bachelor's Delight. He is a kindly and warm-hearted person, so he offers assistance to those on board the San Dominick, not realizing that the slaves have taken command of the ship.
Led by Babo, the slaves on board the San Dominick revolt and kill many of the whites, including their owner, Don Alexandro Aranda. Babo places Don Alexandro's skeleton on the ship's prow and writes 'Follow your leader' beneath it, as a grim warning: if the whites refuse to cooperate with the Africans, they will literally 'follow their leader' by being slain as he was. The San Dominick encounters an American seal-hunting ship, the Bachelor's Delight, and Babo hatches a plan to fool the Americans and take command of their ship, so the Africans can take its provisions and have an extra ship to carry them back to Africa.
At Babo's direction, Don Benito tells the captain of the Bachelor's Delight, Amasa Delano, that the San Dominick had been struck by a storm in which all the commanding officers, except for him, were washed overboard. Don Benito is constantly accompanied by Babo, who presents himself as Don Benito's faithful servant. Captain Delano becomes wary when Don Benito, at Babo's insistence, asks how many weapons are on board the Bachelor's Delight. Captain Delano begins to suspect that Don Benito may be a pirate whose real intent is to capture the Bachelor's Delight.
When Captain Delano gets into the rowboat to return to his own ship, Don Benito jumps in after him in a desperate attempt to escape the Africans. The Africans begin throwing knives and hatchets at the rowboat, but Captain Delano and his men succeed in rowing away from them. The American and Spanish sailors then unite to hunt down the San Dominick, which they soon capture, thanks to their superior weaponry. The slaves are tried for rebellion and executed, but Don Benito never recovers from his harrowing experience, and he dies shortly after Babo's execution.
Have you ever wondered why hypnosis or magic tricks work? Sure, there's a bit of sleight of hand here or a calming voice there, but at the core of it comes from your own willingness to be deceived. This ties into the foremost theme in Benito Cereno, which is how easily human beings are deceived, and how willingly they often participate in their own deception. Although Captain Delano is skeptical of the story he's told on board the San Dominick, his suspicions rest squarely on Don Benito. Never does he suspect that the Africans may be deceiving him. Captain Delano is a kindly man who is personally opposed to slavery, but he's also a product of his place and time. Most whites in the eighteenth century believed that Africans were childlike, simple-minded, and not very intelligent. Captain Delano can accept the idea that a white man might be clever enough to deceive him, but he is unable to grasp the idea that Africans might do the same. Thus, Captain Delano is above all a victim of self-deception; this worldview that precludes him from seeing the reality of the situation in which he finds himself, and nearly costs him his life.
Slavery was one of the most controversial issues in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War, and literature was one of the foremost ways that American authors brought its inhumanity to the attention of the American public. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln referred to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the best-selling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, as 'the little lady who caused this big war.' Herman Melville brilliantly inverted readers' expectations. Captain Delano is the point-of-view character throughout the story; that is, readers experience the world through his eyes and ears, and they know only what he knows. While dropping hints about the true nature of the situation throughout Captain Delano's stay on board the San Dominick, Melville skillfully keeps readers in the dark, so they are just as surprised to learn the truth as Captain Delano is. By finally revealing how completely Captain Delano has been fooled, Melville forces readers to examine their own assumptions about race, intelligence, and reality.
While many nineteenth-century works of literature, even those by writers opposed to slavery, portrayed Africans and African-Americans as simple-minded and childlike, Melville portrays them as wily, courageous, and more than a match for whites in a complex battle of wits. The slaves are eventually recaptured by the whites, but this defeat is a result of the whites' overwhelming firepower, not due to any lack of intelligence or resourcefulness on the part of the Africans. In Benito Cereno, Melville undermined prevailing American stereotypes about Africans and African-Americans, thus paving the way for the development of other powerful, self-reliant African-American characters, such as Jim in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Benito Cereno is a compelling story about the struggle of slaves for freedom by any means necessary, including deception, deceit, cunning, and violence. Though unarmed, the slaves succeed in taking command of their slave ship. They use skill and deception to convince the Americans on board the Bachelor's Delight that Don Benito is still in control, thus lulling them into a false sense of security. The slaves are ultimately defeated by the whites, but that is a result of the whites' superior firepower, not any lack of courage or ability on the slaves' part. If anything, the initial success of the slave revolt and Captain Delano's unwillingness to accept the slaves' cunning (due to the racial assumptions of the time) plays into the novella's themes of humankind's ease at being deceived and how we're even willing participants of our own deception.
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AP English Literature: Help and Review34 chapters | 401 lessons | 1 flashcard set
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