Benito Cereno

In 1799, while harbored in the island of St. Maria near Chile, Captain Amasa Delano, Massachusetts-born skipper of the Bachelor's Delight, spots an odd vessel and decides to investigate. Upon approaching the ship, Delano notices that it is in very bad condition, that the figurehead has been covered up as though for repairs, and that the boat is being manned erratically. A closer look only increases the oddness: the majority of people on the boat, which is called the San Dominick, are black.

Delano boards the San Dominick to find abundant disarray. The whites and blacks mill together aimlessly, and there is only the slightest hint of order. Four "grizzled" elderly black men, perched at each of the four corners of the deck, watch over the throng while picking oakum. Also, six black men sit together on the stairwell leading to the poop and sharpen hatchets. Perturbed by the appearance of things, Delano seeks out the captain of the San Dominick, the pale and distracted Benito Cereno.

After Delano has sent his whaleboat back to the Bachelor's Delight to retrieve provisions and riggings for the floundering San Dominick, he and Cereno begin to talk about the events that led to the San Dominick's obvious misfortune. Cereno tells Delano of a cruel combination of violent storms followed by disease-filled calms, which carried away a great proportion of his crew over the course of nine months or so. He says that the blacks Delano sees are slaves, once the property of Don Alexandro Aranda, who died in the course of the San Dominick's misfortunes. All the while, Cereno is attended upon by an extremely officious slave named Babo.

While Cereno tells Delano his miserable history, Delano notices several mysterious events on board the San Dominick. He witnesses the blacks on board the boat taking great liberties with the whites, and when he brings this up to Cereno, his concerns are flippantly dismissed. Cereno's apparent lack of concern for the behavior of his slaves is...