Benito Cereno

(1855)

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.

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 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, 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.

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.

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