Herman Melville's long story "Benito Cereno," which first appeared serially in the numbers of Putnam's Monthly Magazine for October, November, and December 1855 and which reappeared in Melville's The Piazza Tales (1856), has come to be regarded not only as one of the author's most important works but as one of the most important American fictional works of the nineteenth century. The plot of the story is based on a real-life incident described in the published recollections of an American ship captain: Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). In 1805 Delano encountered a Spanish slave ship, the Tryal, at the island of St. Maria, off the coast of Chile. Observing that the vessel was in a state of disrepair and that blacks onboard far outnumbered whites, Delano boarded the Tryal and conferred with its captain, Benito Cereno, who informed him that...