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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2010
Pictor.
“The Origin of Melville's ‘Benito Cereno.’”
New York Evening Post, 9 October 1855.
I suppose that “Benito Cereno,” in the last number of Putnam, is by Melville. He is taking the same liberty with Captain Amasa Delano that he did with my old acquaintance, Israel Potter. The story is founded on an incident, the particulars of which are given in Captain Delano's “Voyages and Travels,” a work published here [in Boston] nearly forty years ago, in 1817. The captain and author was one of those adventurous mariners who laid the foundation of the American commercial marine after the war of the Revolution had been closed. He made three voyages round the world, which was not so easy a matter then as it is in this age of steamers and clippers. The Indian and Pacific Oceans and other remote waters were familiar to him as “the banks” to a fisherman. One of his voyages was commenced in 1799, when he sailed from Boston in the ship Perseverance, as master, and it was then that he had the little affair at St. Maria which Mr. Melville has turned into a romance. The Spanish ship had sailed from Valparaiso for Lima, but when only a week out the slaves on board, seventy in number, with that perverse stupidity which has often been manifested by men deprived of their freedom, rose on the crew, and captured the vessel, putting 25 white men to death, and ordering the captain to take them to Senegal.
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