34. Seal blubber is tendinous, so superb steel was used in the blades of skinning knives, like the kind used to disembowel and flay the Tryal rebels. Delano said that his were “always kept exceedingly sharp and as bright as a gentleman’s sword.” This knife, found in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, is five inches wide and forty-eight inches long. Note the knot work, which was needed to keep hands from sliding down the oily handle onto the double-edged blade.
35. Talcahuano viewed from the sea in 1793.
36. Concepción’s finest families would have turned out to view the hanging of the leaders of the Tryal’s rebellion wearing their best dress.
37. Another engraving by Palmer. In Melville’s retelling of events on the Tryal, Babo survives the retaking of the ship but then is condemned and executed in Lima, his head displayed on a pike: “Dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites.”
38. “Death grim and grasping.”
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND OTHER MATTERS
BENITO CERENO
Benito Cereno is a true story but not in the way Moby-Dick is a true story. Melville’s whale book is based as much on King Lear and Paradise Lost as it is on the stoving of the Essex. Benito Cereno, in contrast, is taken almost entirely from chapter 18 of Amasa Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands. The historian Sterling Stuckey argues that Melville drew on the travel writings of Mungo Park to develop an appreciation of West African culture, and Robert Wallace believes that Melville borrowed imagery from Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist orator, including for the famous scene in which Melville has Babo terrorize Cereno under the pretense of shaving him. But Benito Cereno’s primary source is nearly wholly Delano’s memoir, A Narrative of Voyages. In his book, Delano reproduces a series of translated Spanish court documents to bolster his claims against Benito Cerreño (whom Delano refers to as Don Bonito throughout). Melville likewise reproduces these documents in his fictional account, with important alterations to support his narrative. The originals are in Chile’s Archivo Nacional and Biblioteca Nacional.
Commentary on Benito Cereno is extensive. The best interpretations approach the story from opposing perspectives, including Sterling Stuckey, African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; Carolyn Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980; Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985; Hershel Parker, “Melville and Politics: A Scrutiny of the Political Milieux of Herman Melville’s Life and Works,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1963; Parker’s Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 2: 1851–1891, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 237–42; C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, 1953, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1978; Andrew Delbanco, Herman Melville: His World and Work, New York: Knopf, 2005; Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999; Robert Wallace, Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style, New Bedford: Spinner Publications, 2005; and Clare Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001. See also Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, chapter three, and Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” ed. Robert E. Burkholder, New York: G. K. Hall Co., 1992.
MARGINALIA
Over the last hundred years, Melville scholars have doggedly identified not just the sources of his inspiration but the actual copies of books he held in his hands, volumes that he owned, borrowed, or found in public libraries or the collections of family members. One book that has yet to be located is Melville’s copy of Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels. The memoir was widely available shortly after it was published, found as far away as libraries in Canton, China, and the Caribbean, and Melville might have come across it in a ship’s library. Or he might have been given a copy by his father-in-law, Justice Lemuel Shaw, who early in his legal career was Delano’s lawyer. In the hope of identifying the copy Melville used, I checked a number of first editions (including a second printing in 1818) in libraries and private collections. Melville wrote copious marginalia, annotating Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, Wordsworth, Arnold, Homer, and others with check marks, underlines, exclamation points, and comments. (For example, alongside the section of the Gospel of Saint John that reads, “And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Melville wrote: “This leading question seems evaded in the following verses.” It is unclear whether the comment refers to the assumption that sin was committed or that blindness is the result of sin.) I imagine, then, that his copy of A Narrative was heavily marked up, considering how much detail he took from it to write Benito Cereno. Using Worldcat, the old National Union Catalog (with help from Jessica Pigza at the New York Public Library), and online used-book catalogs (like Abebooks and eBay), I’ve identified about 150 extant first editions in over a hundred libraries and private collections and checked about 75 of them. Alas, no volume indicating that it was owned or used by Melville has yet revealed itself. I’d be happy to share the checklist with anyone who wants to continue the hunt. Contact me at [email protected].
Doctoral dissertations have been written on Melville’s marginalia (for example, Walker Cowen, “Melville’s Marginalia,” Harvard, 1965) and there exists a small library of books and articles on Melville’s sources, Melville’s readings, Melville’s Bibles, Melville’s Milton, Melville’s boredom, and so on. Also, Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis Marnon edit an extremely useful internet project called “Melville’s Marginalia,” available at http://melvillesmarginalia.org/front.php.
MELVILLE AND AFRICA
Melville didn’t know the origins of the slaves on the Tryal, other than that some of them were identified as being from Senegal and West Africa. Through the writings of Alexander Falconbridge and Mungo Park, however, he had access to information concerning not just Africa and slavery in general but the region and even the port from which some of the slavers were embarked. Melville’s maternal grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, owned a copy of Falconbridge’s Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London: J. Phillips, 1788), which is now located in the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection at the New York Public Library. Hershel Parker, in an e-mail communication, says that the Falconbridge book probably passed on to the library of Melville’s uncle Peter, where, during the summer of 1832, Herman had been “given free rein to wander.” An Account was meant as an exposé, written to stir outrage at the slave trade. As Melville later does, Falconbridge emphasizes similarities between the way black slaves and white sailors were treated, describing in detail the tortures inflicted on both with “brutal severity” by deck officers. In Benito Cereno, Melville writes that, “like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically but genially, just as other men took to Newfoundland dogs.” It is true that, as a breed, Newfoundland dogs had a reputation of being good-natured and loyal. But, interestingly, Falconbridge writes that they were also used on slave ships to terrorize: “Whenever any of the crew were beaten, the Newfoundland dog … would generally leap upon them, tear their cloths, and bite them.”
We know that Melville read the traveler Mungo Park, citing him in Moby-Dick, Mardi, and the serialized original version of Benito Cereno. Sterling Stuc
key writes that “Melville found in Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa revelations of African humanity so at odds with conceptions of Africa held by whites and free blacks in America that a dramatic shift in his thinking about Africa occurred. However favorably disposed toward Africans he may have been before reading Interior Districts, what is revealed there concerning their work skills must have startled him, for the thought that Africans brought any skills into slavery clashed violently with the prevailing thesis that, as a people, they were by nature ignorant, hopelessly inferior to whites” (“The Tambourine in Glory: African Culture and Melville’s Art,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 43). Park’s account of his travels through Africa was first published in 1799. See also Seymour Gross, “Mungo Park and Ledyard in Melville’s Benito Cereno,” English Language Notes 3 (December 1965): 122–23.
SLAVERY AND FREEDOM
The literature on the way the conditions of slavery and freedom defined, and depended on, one another is vast and includes nearly all of David Brion Davis’s indispensable scholarship. As Davis writes of the gap that existed between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of slavery: “Demands for consistency between principles and practice, no matter how sincere, were rather beside the point. Practice was what made the principles possible” (The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Slavery, and Human Progress, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 262). The intellectual, philosophical, and religious roots of what we think of as freedom can be traced back to well before the first slave ship sailed for America from West Africa in the early 1500s, or even before the first black-skinned African was sold as a slave in Iberia. But, to borrow from Melville’s remarks on Liverpool’s Nelson statue, the prosperity of the Atlantic world was indissolubly linked to the prosecution of the slave trade, wealth that in turn helped generalize ideas of freedom, allowing more and more people to understand themselves as free.
In addition to producing the material wealth that made American independence movements possible, there are many ways the idea and practice of slavery shaped the economic and political experience of modern freedom. First, living alongside, and presiding over, black slaves gave white people concrete examples of unfreedom. Second, slavery stood not just as a negative example but as a positive quality of a free man: according to some traditions of political thought, “one of the characteristics of the free man was to have slaves in his control” (Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 300). Third, for slave-owning gentry, treating Africans and African-descended people as commodities helped them escape the commodification of daily life, letting them rise above the grubbing of the marketplace and “cultivate some of the higher and more ennobling traits of humanity” (Shain, Myth of American Individualism, p. 300). Fourth, slaves produced the items of conspicuous consumption, the gold, silver, and leather (and, through sexual reproduction, other slaves) that allowed successful individuals to showcase their “ennobling traits.” Fifth, the commercialization of society made possible by slavery, and the wealth that came with it, helped democratize these “ennobling traits,” letting more and more people imagine themselves autonomous and free. Finally, at least as far as this summary is concerned, sentimental depictions of the violence, arbitrariness, and wild abandon of cruel and sensuous passions under slavery helped sharpen the ideal of interiority and self-discipline that stood at the center of republican and liberal ideals of the self.
See David Brion Davis, Problem of Slavery, and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006; Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. Morgan J. Koussar and James McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) and “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May–June 1990): 95–118; Shain, Myth of American Individualism, especially pp. 288–319; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982, and Freedom: The Making of Western Culture, New York: Basic Books, 1991; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, New York: Norton, 1999; Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; Joan Baum, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets, North Haven: Archon, 1994; Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850, Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008; Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; Jeanne Elders de Waard, “‘The Shadow of Law’: Sentimental Interiority, Gothic Terror, and the Legal Subject,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 62 (Winter 2006): 1–30; Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Viking, 1985, and “Slavery and Emergent Capitalism,” in Slavery in the New World, ed. Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969. For comprehensive treatments of slavery in the Americas that I’ve relied on throughout this work, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800, London: Verso, 1997, and The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights, London: Verso, 2011; Herb Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, and The Atlantic Slave Trade, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999; and David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. In Buenos Aires, the work of Alex Borucki and Lyman Johnson, cited throughout, give texture to how the dynamic of freedom and slavery played out on the ground.
MELVILLE AND SLAVERY
Melville’s position on slavery has been the subject of much discussion. In considering the question as it relates to Benito Cereno, I’ve drawn from the authors cited below, among others, even though many of them hold opposing opinions, ranging from Hershel Parker, who downplays the importance of slavery and race, to Sterling Stuckey, who insists on the centrality of African and African American culture in Melville’s thought and art. Stuckey hears the early notes of jazz in Melville’s prose, for instance, speculating that Melville might have picked it up listening to slaves play music on the street corners and in the markets of New York and Albany.
Benito Cereno scrambled the core conceits of both opponents and advocates of slavery. Unlike those religious abolitionists, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who portrayed blacks as Christ-like innocents, Melville’s Babo unapologetically terrorizes his white captives. To those who defended slavery, like the Virginian George Fitzhugh, by saying that it was founded on “domestic affection,” that the intellectual feebleness of blacks helps their owners achieve their best selves, that slavery civilizes slave and master alike, Melville’s troupe of slave-actors turned such assumptions into a show, using their intellect to perform their expected lack of intellect (see Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, Richmond: Morris, 1984, pp. 37–40, 201). Thus they revealed what southerners said was natural to be artificial, since by definition acting is artifice. It was Babo’s “brain, not body” that “had schemed and led the revolt.” And for those who believed that the crisis caused by slavery could be solved peacefully, Melville wrote a story that ended in near total destruction (see Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, p. 213, for an elaboration of this line of argument).
Melville had read Homer’s Odyssey, a work that revolves around a character, Odysseus, whom many scholars think of as representing the first “modern” self, a character not only with interiority but with the cunning to manipulate interiority, to creat
e a schism between what is seen on the outside and what exists on the inside. And while the Odyssey is not about slavery, political philosophers, including many around the time Melville was writing, often used chattel slavery, particularly the power masters had over slaves, as a metaphor to represent exactly the kind of ability Odysseus possessed, to use reason and will to master passions and vices. In any case, the deception played out on the Tryal is equal to the ruse Odysseus stages to escape Polyphemous in Homer’s Odyssey. “I am nobody,” Odysseus says, playing with the subtleties of language to trick the Cyclops, and that’s exactly what Mori, Babo, and the rest of the slave-rebel troupe do, act as if they are inconsequential slaves, nobodies hardly worth noticing. Whatever Melville meant Benito Cereno to say about slavery, the story is fundamentally about blindness, an inability to see, a persistent theme in Melville’s writings. If one compares the story, for example, to Ishmael’s discussion in Moby-Dick about the “peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes,” one realizes that the author had been thinking about the problem Amasa Delano represents for some time.
See Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land; Hershel Parker, “Melville and Politics”; Eleanor E. Simpson, “Melville and the Negro: From Typee to ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 41 (March 1969): 19–38; Rogin, Subversive Genealogy; Stuckey, African Culture and Melville’s Art; and Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab, especially pp. 102–7. See also Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. For Melville’s complex engagement with the Civil War, see Stanton Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993; Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War, New York: Knopf, 1973, pp. 75–90; and Parker, Melville: A Biography, vol. 2, pp. 606–25.
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