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In chapter 18 of his Narrative of Voyages and Travels, Captain Amasa Delano describes his involvement in the aftermath of a slave uprising on the Spanish ship, Tryal, when Delano’s ship, Perseverance, encountered the Tryal, by chance, off the coast of Chile in December 1804. That Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” is a reworking of Delano’s account has been known since 1928.1 This essay identifies the long-unknown source for Melville’s most dramatic addition to Delano’s account. In turn, this discovery brings to light a cluster of related allusions that extend the frame of reference for this slave uprising back to Scotland in the late Middle Ages, as Melville knew of this from accounts that he had first read in his youth. A testimony to Melville’s extravagantly associative mind, this reading provides a new perspective on the much-debated matter of the nature of his thoughts and reflections as he chose to retell Delano’s story and to adapt it as he did.
Among the substantial changes that Melville made in his adaptation, none is as extreme as the addition of the defleshing of the corpse of the slave-owner, Alexandro Aranda, and the installing of his skeleton as a substitute figurehead for Benito Cereno’s ship. The skeletonizing of Aranda is carried out on the orders of Babo, whom Melville makes the leader of the uprising. This reading will show how this skeleton figurehead serves as a skeleton key that opens up additional significances that, until now, have remained locked away in Melville’s cryptic text. The defleshing of Aranda’s corpse and the use to which his bones are put have a precedent from the distant past—one that Melville knew well. The story’s primary racial significances are complemented by the discovery of this precedent and by the web of allusions with which Melville “fleshes out” the skeleton with expansive associations.
“Benito Cereno” is very much about what is masked. It presents this dramatically in Babo’s expertly disguised performance; symbolically in the stern-piece carving of the “dark satyr in a mask” subjugating a masked victim (Piazza Tales 49); and also obliquely, in the “canvas shroud” that hides Aranda’s skeleton. When Melville decided on this treatment of Aranda’s corpse, he masked the allusion to its medieval...