[In the following essay, Emery examines Melville's critique of American expansionism in “Benito Cereno.”]

Like most authors of the first rank, Herman Melville has commonly been considered a devotee of the timeless, one who, especially in Moby-Dick (1851), sought ultimate answers to life's eternal questions. Only during the past two decades has Melville's “topicality” come to be recognized, as critics have underlined with increasing frequency his timely interest in racial prejudice and technological progress, in English slums and American naval abuses, in the Somers mutiny and the Civil War. Melville's “politics” have received particular attention. Alan Heimert was among the first to suggest that even Moby-Dick has its political side—its “symbolic” debt to the Compromise of 1850.¹ Lately, too, Michael Paul Rogin and James Duban have independently read the novel as an elaborate treatment of slavery and Manifest Destiny.² All three critics challenge the popular image of Melville as an author so enamored of cosmic generalities as to be essentially unconcerned with political issues. All place Melville's political involvement among his highest literary virtues.

By stressing this involvement, Heimert, Rogin, and Duban provide a valuable corrective to a venerable scholarly overemphasis. Yet one is led, I think, to question their primary piece of evidence—Moby-Dick—a work which does perhaps make some political statement, but only in the midst of numerous other statements on non-political subjects ranging from metaphysics to marine biology, from Manichaeanism to monomania. Though unarguably “symbolic,” Moby-Dick is not, in fact, particularly political: the Pequod may be the “Ship of State”³—but surely not often, and never for long. Moreover, if Melville's eclectic novel hints at his interest in slavery and Manifest Destiny, it more regularly reveals his preoccupation with nature and human nature and God. Even reinterpreted, then, with its “politics” laid bare, Moby-Dick merely reconfirms the stereotype, documenting Melville's relative disregard for politics and his liking for the “large.”

The argument for Melville's politicalness should not be abandoned, however; it should simply rest on firmer ground: on “I and My Chimney” (1856), for example, a tale with both a powerful political point and a uniform political thrust,⁴ and on “Benito Cereno” (1855), a story which not only comments (if rather generally) on the slavery question but also underlines, far more clearly than any other Melville work, the author's serious engagement with Manifest Destiny. If in Mardi (1849) and Moby-Dick he occasionally alluded to this subject with the air of a promising dabbler in politics,⁵ in “Benito Cereno” he became a mature political analyst, devoting much of his authorial energy to portraying the mind-set of those many Americans who fancied themselves citizens of an “elect” nation, destined by Providence to govern the globe. If in Mardi and Moby-Dick he occasionally descended from the universal masthead to the political deck, in “Benito Cereno” he firmly conjoined the two, producing in his treatment of Manifest Destiny, not, as before, a timeless tale with political asides, but a political tale with timeless implications.

Many critics have read “Benito Cereno” “politically,” of course—as an attack, that is, on American slavery.⁶ Yet despite the presence of slaves in Melville's story, slavery seems not to have been his primary political concern: he was apparently more interested in American expansionism.⁷ The 1850s were years in which the slavery debate loomed large in America, but they were also active years for America's annexationists, who were either too busy glancing abroad to notice local friction or who sensed that a grandly patriotic foreign policy might lure Americans out of their separatist camps. During the 1850s national expansion was, in fact, as “topical” an issue as slavery—or so Melville appears to have believed. For if his tale examines the problem of slavery, it also examines—with considerably more care—the false claims and confidences of Manifest Destiny.⁸

Evidently Melville was particularly concerned by mid-century arguments for American intervention in Latin America, arguments contrasting the “energy,” “libertarianism,” and “efficiency” of Americans with the “weakness,” “despotism,” and “disorderliness” of the Spanish. Such arguments were available to Melville in a number of American periodicals, including Putnam's Monthly Magazine, to which he probably subscribed and in which “Benito Cereno” eventually appeared.⁹ “Cuba,” the lead article in the first number of Putnam's (January 1853), characterized the sole Spanish dependency left in the New World as suffering under a “despotic and even brutal” administration; annexation would allow America's liberty-loving “Saxons” to “assert political, religious, and commercial freedom” in the island. And though Cuba's recent economic progress seemed a sign of Spanish potency, it had actually stemmed from American “enterprise and energy,” Americans being “an enlightened, progressive race; the Spaniards the extreme reverse.” Indeed, America was a powerful and prosperous country, while Spain was “a weak nation, tottering toward ruin.”¹⁰ One year later another Putnam's article preached a similar message. The author of “Annexation” (February 1854) noted that the “weak Mexican and Spanish races” of Latin America were “a prey to anarchy and misrule” and suggested that America could offer these misérables the “advantages of stable government, of equal laws, of a flourishing and refined social life.” Speaking for all Americans, he declared:

As the inheritors of whatever is best in modern civilization, possessed of a political and social polity which we deem superior to every other, carrying with us wherever we go the living seeds of freedom, of intelligence, of religion; our advent every where, but particularly among the savage and stationary tribes who are nearest to us, must be a redemption and a blessing. South America and the islands of the sea ought to rise up to meet us at our coming, and the desert and the solitary places be glad that the hour for breaking their fatal enchantments, the hour of their emancipation, had arrived.¹¹

Among many similar defenses of American expansion, the two Putnam's articles were perhaps the most accessible to Melville. Yet, whatever his particular sources may have been, “Benito Cereno” readily reveals his familiarity with the case for Latin American “emancipation.” Consider first this textual fact: whereas the original Amasa Delano described Cereno's Tryal as merely a “Spanish ship,” making no mention of her prior history or physical appearance,¹² Melville immediately assigns the San Dominick to the class of “superseded Acapulco treasure-ships, or retired frigates of the Spanish king's navy, which, like superannuated Italian palaces, still, under a decline of masters, preserved signs of former state.”¹³ With its tattered tops, moldering forecastle, and “shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon” (pp. 114-15), the San Dominick might well symbolize a “tottering” Spain.¹⁴ Moreover, “the Spanish king's officers” and “Lima viceroy's daughters” once trod the deck of the San Dominick, a vessel whose “proper figure-head” is “the image of Cristopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World” (pp. 176, 254). Thus perhaps that vessel stands, most particularly, for Spain's Western empire, an empire about to dissolve at the time of Delano's adventure (1799).¹⁵

If this be true, then Amasa Delano's “American” response to the San Dominick becomes equally significant. Reminiscent, for example, of American expansionist rhetoric are Delano's complaints regarding the disorderliness of Cereno's vessel—a “noisy confusion” (p. 128) recalling the “anarchy” found by expansionists in Latin America. Moreover, Delano takes a second expansionist tack when he attributes the confusion on the San Dominick to Cereno's impotence, his strengthless style of command.¹⁶ Though no mention is made of such impotence in Melville's source, Melville's Delano observes at one point: “Had Benito Cereno been a man of greater energy, misrule would hardly have come to the present pass” (p. 122). Yet Delano's response to Cereno is rather complex, for while decrying the weakness of the Spanish captain, he also notes Cereno's tough treatment of Atufal and declares: “Ah, Don Benito, … for all the license you permit in some things, I fear lest, at bottom, you are a bitter hard master” (p. 224). Aboard Melville's floating symbol of Spanish empire, Delano finds, then, precisely what his expansionist descendants found in Latin America: a simultaneous pandemonium, enervation, and tyranny.

Incidentally, Delano also experiences “enchantment” aboard the San Dominick (pp. 118, 161, 178), a state of dreamy unreality unexperienced by the original Delano—and yet said by the author of “Annexation” to be characteristic of Latin America. Importantly, too, Delano plots to break this enchantment by taking firm control of Cereno's vessel, thus anticipating the interventionism of mid-century Americans. Straying again from his source, Melville unveils Delano's plan to provide Cereno with “three of his best seamen for temporary deck officers,” a project that later blossoms into a presumptuous scheme to withdraw command from Cereno (pp. 138, 165). And even after this scheme subsides, Delano jauntily resolves, without being asked, to “remain on board” the San Dominick and “play the pilot” (p. 193), a role Melville repeatedly assigns to Delano (pp. 220-22, 228) as the American adjoins the San Dominick to the Bachelor's Delight, achieving a kind of annexation. “I will get his ship in for him,” Delano boldly asserts beforehand, and Melville elaborates: “[Delano] urged his host to remain quietly where he was, since he (Captain Delano) would with pleasure take upon himself the responsibility of making the best use of the wind” (p. 219).¹⁷ The historical reason for Melville's inclusion of such details (all missing from his source) begins to be plain. “With pleasure” would Melville's confident countrymen have similarly taken upon themselves the responsibility for a “spellbound” Spanish America.

Considerable textual evidence exists, then, of Melville's desire to explore the subject of American expansionism in “Benito Cereno.” Moreover, other evidence testifies to his negative views on this subject. Near the end of “Benito Cereno,” we learn, for example, that the climactic American invasion of the San Dominick is prompted not by any wish to “redeem” the oppressed but by a simple desire for material gain: “To encourage the sailors, they were told, that the Spanish captain considered his ship good as lost; that she and her cargo, including some gold and silver, were worth more than a thousand doubloons. Take her, and no small part should be theirs. The sailors replied with a shout.” Interestingly, too, the leader of the American expeditionary force, Delano's first mate, is said to have once been “a privateer's-man” (p. 241), a fact unmentioned by Melville's source.¹⁸ Nor should we overlook Melville's renaming of Delano's ship (originally the Perseverance) after the ship of an English buccaneer—or his allusion, by way of Delano's boat Rover (pp. 184-89), to certain “rovers” of the high seas.¹⁹ The author of “Cuba” insisted that the majority of American expansionists felt merely an “honest, earnest sympathy” for the Cuban people; relatively few had “mercenary motives, than which nothing can be more utterly wicked and contemptible.”²⁰ Aware, however, of America's chief reason for eyeing Cuba (and other lands of agricultural promise), Melville seemingly sought to depict Manifest Destiny as the rhetorical camouflage for a largely “piratical” enterprise.

Delano's embarrassing attempt to buy Babo (p. 168) points rather obviously to another authorial aim. As we have seen, supporters of Manifest Destiny cast America in the role of freedom's standard-bearer: for the prophets of Putnam's, America's mission was to “extend” democracy throughout the Western Hemisphere, to spread the “living seeds of freedom” among the subject peoples of the world.²¹ Yet as prospective slaveowner, Delano scarcely extends democracy to blacks; indeed, when parrying Babo's final thrust, he physically “[grinds] the prostrate negro” (p. 236). Melville appears to suggest that the continuing allegiance of “emancipating” Americans to a Constitution condoning the ownership of persons was a bit incongruous.²² Nor is it accidental that when Cereno and Delano finally cement their friendship in the presence of Babo, they do so by clasping hands “across the black's body” (p. 233).²³ Apparently Melville agreed with many abolitionists that the transfer of Cuba from Spanish into American hands would mean only a changing of the guard for Cuban slaves.

Melville's characterization of American expansionism as “mercenary” and nonlibertarian also serves a broader purpose: it invalidates the distinction, recurrent in the periodical literature of Melville's day, between American expansionism and the “corrupt” colonialism of European nations. Sensitive to the charge of imperialism, the author of “Cuba” carefully distinguished America's traditional practice of annexation from “the extension of empire by Conquest”; the author of “Annexation” met English objections to American meddling in the Caribbean by pointing to the predatory behavior of England herself and by contrasting the “open, generous, equitable international policy” of the United States with the “overreaching intrigue and secret diplomacy,” the “sinister and iniquitous proceedings” of European states.²⁴ Yet the grim forcefulness of Delano's victorious seamen (pp. 242-46), combined with their rather ignoble motives, suggests that Melville found good reason to doubt the “special” ethics of American expansionism. Likewise troublesome is the imperiousness of Delano himself, who can cheerfully plot to remove Cereno from command of the San Dominick because he believes there is a significant “difference” between “the idea of Don Benito's darkly pre-ordaining Captain Delano's fate, and Captain Delano's lightly arranging Don Benito's” (p. 166). In fact, Delano's distinction is suspect. Certainly his own interventionism implies that Melville saw no great “difference” between the blithe scheming of well-meaning Americans and the “dark” machinations of old-style imperialists. To “assert political, religious, and commercial freedom” was still, after all, to assert.

The details of “Benito Cereno” suggest, however, that if Melville discovered similarities between American imperialism and imperialism in general, he was most conscious of America's mimicry of Spain. Though American expansionists emphasized their dissimilarity from the Spanish colonizers they intended to replace in Latin America, they were, of course, taking up precisely where the Spanish had left off, since the colonial ventures of Charles V and Philip II had marked the last serious attempt to impose a moral and political order upon the western hemisphere.²⁵ Yet another, more complex reason may also exist for Melville's underscoring of the Spanish-American parallel: in 1855 Protestant Americans would have been appalled by any comparison between themselves and a nation of “diabolical” Catholics. In fact, anti-Catholic sentiment peaked in America during the 1850s in conjunction with a rising Anglo-Saxonism and a “nativist” dislike for all things “foreign.” Catholicism was condemned for its “totalitarian” church structure, its “authoritarian” methods, its popularity among the “Celtic” races of Southern Europe, and its “imperialistic” commitment to worldwide evangelism. Moreover, Spanish Catholicism, with its famous Inquisition, drew especially heavy fire, since it seemed best to exemplify the “wicked” principles and practices of Popery.²⁶ Nor were such views limited to the lunatic fringe. Anti-Catholicism demonstrated its fashionableness in 1854 and 1855, when the Know-Nothing Party won a number of state and local elections, including important elections in Melville's home state of Massachusetts.²⁷

Melville's awareness of mid-century America's preoccupation with Catholicism is suggested by Amasa Delano's repeated reference to abbots and friars, monks and monasteries—a reference significantly missing from Melville's source.²⁸ When Delano first approaches the San Dominick (a vessel whose name Melville changed, I think, partly in order to invoke a Spanish Inquisition founded by St. Domingo de Guzman and directed by his “Dominican” Order), the spectral ship looms “like a white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm, seen perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrenees”; meanwhile, those on board recall “monks” in “dark cowls” and “Black Friars pacing the cloisters” (p. 113). Later, too, Cereno becomes for Delano a “hypochondriac abbot,” while Babo is said to “look something like a begging friar of St. Francis” (pp. 123, 136). And later still, during Melville's shaving scene, the furnishings of Babo's barber shop also take on a religious significance as Delano's “Catholic” obsession again colors Melville's description:

On one side was a claw-footed old table lashed to the deck; a thumbed missal on it, and over it a small, meagre crucifix attached to the bulk-head. Under the table lay a dented cutlass or two, with a hacked harpoon, among some melancholy old rigging, like a heap of poor friars' girdles. There were also two long, sharp-ribbed settees of Malacca cane, black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors' racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber's crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment.

(pp. 197-98)

Neither Melville's shaving scene—nor his inquisitorial similes—appeared in his source. Apparently they too represent a “topical” allusion to Catholicism as envisioned by anxious Americans in 1855.

Yet, to grasp the ironic point of this allusion, we must consider Melville's shaving scene more closely. That scene is puzzling, partly, I suspect, because our stereotypes have gone awry: while Melville's figurative language suggests that an “Inquisition” of sorts is occurring, the Spaniard Cereno is not so much the sponsor as the victim of this inquisition. More importantly, though Babo is a capable torturer, one leading inquisitorial “part” remains to be filled. Where, we might ask, are the inquisitors? I quote from Melville's account of the episode:

“And now, Don Amasa,” [said Babo,] “please go on with your talk about the gale, and all that; master can hear, and, between times, master can answer.”

“Ah yes, these gales,” said Captain Delano; “but the more I think of your voyage, Don Benito, the more I wonder, not at the gales … but at the disastrous interval following them. For here, by your account, have you been these two months and more getting from Cape Horn to St. Maria, a distance which I myself, with a good wind, have sailed in a few days. True, you had calms, and long ones, but to be becalmed for two months, that is, at least, unusual. Why, Don Benito, had almost any other gentleman told me such a story, I should have been half disposed to a little incredulity.”

Here an involuntary expression came over the Spaniard, … and whether it was the start he gave, or a sudden gawky roll of the hull in the calm, or a momentary unsteadiness of the servant's hand, however it was, just then the razor drew blood.

(pp. 204-5)

Babo's sadism may obscure the fact that there is but one questioner, one examiner, one true “inquisitor” on hand during Melville's shaving scene—and that is Amasa Delano. Indeed, Delano has been busily “inquiring” all day long, questioning Cereno as to “the particulars of the ship's misfortunes” (pp. 129-35, 142-45), pondering the captain's story (pp. 163-66), and double-checking details, first with a “Barcelona tar” (pp. 172-73), and later with Cereno himself (pp. 194-95). Indefatigably curious, Delano pumps Cereno even after his shave is complete (p. 215). The original Delano asked no questions of his host; Melville's protagonist persists in an interrogation which greatly aggravates the anguish of the Spanish captain. After seeing the painful effect of one of his obtuse queries, Delano remarks, “[Cereno] is like one flayed alive … ; where may one touch him without causing a shrink?” (p. 224).

As Melville's inquisitor, Delano wants more, however, than historical “particulars”: he hopes to discover moral truth.²⁹ Who on the San Dominick is guilty and who is innocent? Who is evil and who is good? Those are Delano's real questions. Yet during his investigation, Delano learns a basic inquisitorial lesson—namely, that moral “answers” are exceedingly difficult to determine. As many critics have observed, Melville places an early emphasis on the ambiguity of the San Dominick, describing the “vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough,” and noting both the “apparent uncertainty of her movements” and the natural grayness surrounding her arrival in Santa Maria bay (pp. 111, 112, 109-10). Later, too, Melville interprets his own symbolism, underlining the moral grayness of the San Dominick. A diligent inquisitor, Amasa Delano continually strives to hit moral bedrock. But baffled by contradictory evidences, he quickly loses all track of friend and foe, coming to wonder finally if Cereno, or Cereno's Spaniards, or Cereno and Babo, or Babo and Atufal, or Babo's Ashantees, or the whole amazing mass of humanity on board is most likely to murder him.³⁰

To be sure, Delano occasionally abandons his indecision and draws moral conclusions, but then he is badly mistaken, not only in the case of Babo and Cereno (see below) but in other instances as well. Consecutive episodes depict his encounters with a Spanish sailor of haggard face, whose hand is “black with continually thrusting it into [a] tar-pot,” and the aforementioned Barcelona tar, whose “weather-beaten visage” ill accords with his “furtive, diffident air.”³¹ Delano instantly assumes that the tainted hands of the first must be symbolic of vice: “If, indeed, there be any wickedness on board this ship,” he thinks, “be sure that man there has fouled his hand in it” (pp. 171-72). And after badgering the Barcelonan, who is nervously unwilling to answer his questions, Delano decides that this man too must be ridden with guilt. Turning away, he declares, “How plainly … did that old whiskerando yonder betray a consciousness of ill desert” (pp. 173-74). Later we learn, however, that Delano's confidence was no proof of his perspicacity. Don Joaquin's hands were tarred strictly at the behest of Babo (p. 262); he was wholly innocent of wrongdoing. Moreover, the Barcelonan, subsequently seen at the tiller, was required to alter his expression before Delano in an effort to stay alive (p. 262). When that expression later changes, he is very nearly killed (pp. 221-22, 262).

Why does Delano, as inquisitor, go wrong so often? In part because of misery's effect on the examined. When first speaking of Don Joaquin, Melville, unlike Delano, refuses to make a moral judgment, saying, “Whether [Joaquin's] haggardness had aught to do with criminality, could not be determined; since, as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt …, through casual association with mental pain, … use one seal—a hacked one” (p. 171). In other words, signs of “mental pain” mask all evidence of virtue or depravity. This Delano does not realize; hence he is “operated upon,” in the cases of Joaquin and the Barcelonan, “by certain general notions which, while disconnecting pain and abashment from virtue, invariably link them with vice” (p. 171). Problem number one, then: for an erring Delano, “haggardness” and “furtiveness” are always manifestations of guilt.

Yet Delano also has a second, more troubling perceptual difficulty: a tendency to let racial prejudice distort his vision of moral reality. Most obviously, white racism wrongly persuades him that Babo's blacks are too docile (pp. 149, 200, 220) to pose a threat; in addition, a subtle Anglo-Saxonism makes him foolishly suspect Cereno. In Melville's source the latter is everywhere dubbed “the Spanish captain”;³² in “Benito Cereno” he becomes merely “the Spaniard” (pp. 120, 121, 122, et passim), the type for Delano of a dangerous and disagreeable race. Upon boarding the San Dominick, the American is quick to note Cereno's “national formality,” his “sour and gloomy disdain” (pp. 121, 125). And later he comes to fear “the secret vindictiveness of the morbidly sensitive Spaniard” (p. 150)—that is, not so much a rancor peculiar to Cereno as a nastiness typical of a nation. Diverging widely from his source,³³ Melville planted in Delano's mind the false fear that he is about to be victimized not by Babo and company but by an exemplary “dark Spaniard” (p. 165), a character drawn no less directly than the “affectionate African” from Delano's capacious bag of moral stereotypes.

Moreover, like many of the elements of “Benito Cereno,” Delano's prejudices are historically significant. If his image of blacks recalls the image promoted by certain white liberals during the 1850s,³⁴ his distrust of Cereno invokes a more traditional bias: Melville's mention of Guy Fawkes (p. 188) reminds us that Delanovian fears of “the Spaniard” had tenanted the minds of Anglo-Saxons since the days of the Gunpowder Plot. Melville may also have had more contemporary precedents in mind when prejudicing his protagonist against Cereno, for he likens Delano's first impression of the San Dominick to “that produced by … entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land,” and later records Delano's complaints regarding Cereno's “clumsy seamanship and faulty navigation” (pp. 117, 137-38). In 1854 Putnam's printed extracts from a travelogue entitled Cosas de España, whose author continually criticized the ways of Spain, objecting, for example, to Spanish rules for courtship, the Spanish custom of pig killing, Spanish stagecoaches, even the Spanish taste for garlic.³⁵ Like Delano, he found fault too with Spanish seamanship and navigation, citing “the thousand causes of delay incident to all Spanish expeditions,” and complaining when his own Spanish vessel sailed eastward toward Italy after leaving Marseilles, while on its way to Barcelona (due west).³⁶ Most importantly, the author glossed his title as follows: “An explanatory word, at the outset, respecting the cosas de España. They are the strange things of Spain, which being utterly incomprehensible by foreigners, are never even attempted to be explained to them by the natives.”³⁷ This remark might account for Melville's emphasis on the “strangeness” of the San Dominick, an emphasis heightened by a second adjectival barrage: “This is a strange craft; a strange history, too, and strange folks on board,” says Delano at one point. “As a nation,” he adds, “these Spaniards are all an odd set” (pp. 187, 188).

Yet such allusions, interesting as they are, remain tangential to “Benito Cereno.” For whatever specific prejudices Delano may display and whatever prevailing attitudes he may demonstrate, he has the same general failings as moral observer: an overeagerness to condemn the crestfallen and a bigotry that blunts his perception of truth. Nor do these failings lack “larger” significance, being faults as well of a Spanish Inquisition famous for prejudging the innocent and the abashed. Indeed, the fundamental reason for Melville's Catholic imagery, “inquisitorial” plot, and fallible protagonist is now revealed. If Delano is the author's masterful symbol of an American expansionism modeled upon Spain's, he is also Melville's ingenious way of suggesting that at a time when Protestant Americans viewed Spanish Catholicism as an extreme example of dogmatic imperialism, they were becoming involved in a close-minded crusade of their own. While priding themselves on their moral superiority and historical uniqueness, Delano's descendants were taking “immoral” cues from their own worst enemy.

This point leads to another, however, for by recognizing the unoriginality of American expansionism, Melville was not only able to identify its unattractive features but also to predict its nonsuccess. On one occasion Delano encounters a sailor resembling “an Egyptian priest, making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon”; this individual throws an elaborate knot to Delano, demanding that he “undo it, cut it, quick” (pp. 181, 182).³⁸ Intricate and perplexing, the knot surely symbolizes the moral tangle of the San Dominick, that tangle which defeats a dim-witted Delano. Yet the knot also reminds us that Alexander the Great visited the temple of Ammon at the beginning of his military career, and finding there the Gordian knot, believed to be unravelable only by one who would conquer Asia, simply cut it with his sword and marched off to his first series of conquests. Offered to Delano, Melville's knot, then, symbolizes more than moral complexity. It suggests that Delano's mid-century successors were commencing not merely a species of “inquisition” but also an “Alexandrian” quest for world dominion. More importantly, it also suggests that this quest was likely to fail, for rather than unraveling or cutting his own Gordian knot, a befuddled Delano simply hands it to an elderly Negro who drops it overboard (p. 183). Delano is obviously no Alexander; nor was America's imperialist future particularly bright.

And why not? Proponents of Manifest Destiny were confident, of course, that Anglo-Saxon “energy” would inevitably triumph where Celtic “feebleness” had failed. So does the “dynamic” Delano patronize the “weak” Cereno. Yet Melville subverts the Anglo-Saxon cause by comparing the Spanish captain to both “an invalid courtier tottering about London streets in the time of the plague” and “that timid King,” James the First of England (pp. 137, 206). These similes imply that Anglo-Saxons are as capable of “weakness” as anyone else—simply because weakness is a matter of individual personality and situation rather than a matter of race. Delano eventually learns, for example, that Cereno's “impotence” resulted not from his race but from his life-threatening predicament and the stresses he had undergone for a period of many weeks. Moreover, Delano's discovery is historically important: Melville's reference to the “retiring” Charles V (p. 126) extends his analysis of Cereno to a “decrepit” Spain, suffering, by 1855, not from racial enervation but from a profound fatigue caused by her protracted and ultimately futile attempt to conquer the world for Catholicism. In other words, if Spain, like Cereno, was “tottering” in 1855, that was chiefly because of her historical situation, one that might have “weakened” any nation, and one that might yet “tire” America herself.

For though mid-century Americans felt competent to end the “anarchy and misrule” prevalent in Cuba, Mexico, and other neighboring states, they failed to appreciate the moral and managerial difficulties involved—those very difficulties which had finally “exhausted” Spain. One obstacle to the establishment of “order” was human depravity, a general tendency to wrongdoing that Spanish Catholicism (and the Inquisition in particular) had sought in vain to subdue. Delano assumes that Cereno's ineffectualness has produced the confusion aboard his ship, but from reading Cereno's deposition, we conclude that the barbarity of man was more to blame: an evil (slavery) having been perpetrated on Babo's blacks, they brutally responded in kind. Melville apparently believed that any nation which presumed itself able to “govern” large segments of an unregenerate mankind was hopelessly naive. Apparently he also believed that Americans overlooked certain socioeconomic obstacles standing in the way of Latin American “redemption,” for he informs us that physical conditions on the San Dominick were another cause of the chaos on board, as thirst, for instance, heightened the restlessness of Babo's blacks (p. 251). Earlier Melville explained that “in armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery” (p. 122), a truth to be pondered by an America happily planning to “arrange” the affairs of Latin America's “miserable” masses. Summarizing his own case, Cereno eventually insists that “events have not been favorable to much order in my arrangements” (p. 199): the disarray of his vessel is to be blamed, that is, not on his failings as a commander but on the history of that vessel, a direful scenario of savagery and suffering. The related message for Melville's readers? Spain could not be held primarily responsible for the deteriorating condition of her empire. Moreover, a blithe America, determined to “stabilize” the western hemisphere, might be in for a surprise.

American expansionists, however, would have raised one final objection to Melville's dismal forecast, feeling sure that “elect” Americans, whether “energetic” or not, would surely outperform the disciples of the Antichrist. For just as Delano assumes that he is under the protection of “some one above” (p. 184), so did many nineteenth-century Americans feel themselves chosen by a God that had befriended their Puritan forefathers to exert a moral and political hegemony over the other peoples of the earth. Explaining America's election racially, the author of “Annexation” declared that “an instinct in the human soul, deeper than the wisdom of politics, more powerful than the sceptres of states, impels the [Teutonic] people on, to the accomplishment of that high destiny which Providence has plainly reserved for our race.”³⁹

Yet in “Benito Cereno” Melville challenges the truth of such assertions by again invoking the example of Spain. In particular, he asks his compatriots to recall that Spanish Catholics once had an exceptionally firm faith in their heavenly commission—yet that faith was evidently misplaced. Cereno's deposition describes a jewel, unmentioned in Melville's source, which is said to have been found on the body of Don Joaquin after his death at the hands of Delano's myopic Americans. Joaquin intended this jewel “for the shrine of our Lady of Mercy in Lima; a votive offering, beforehand prepared and guarded, to attest his gratitude, when he should have landed in Peru, his last destination, for the safe conclusion of his entire voyage from Spain” (p. 263). However, like the drowned Juan Robles, who dies “making acts of contrition” (p. 254), Joaquin seems a man whose “Popish” divinities have deserted him—in the same way as they seemed to desert those Spanish Catholics who were forced to watch their mighty moral and political edifice crumble into fragments during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, Melville suggests that what happened once might well happen again—this time to an overly assured America. As the author's final dialogue reveals, Delano's heirs had substituted a favorable “Providence” for Joaquin's “Lady of Mercy” and Cereno's “Prince of Heaven” (p. 266), but the facile assumption of divine patronage was the same; and however blessed Americans might feel in 1855, there would likely come a day when all blessings would end.

While a complacent America saw herself, then, as specially selected to succeed a weak nation cursed with an inferior religion, Melville viewed Spain's troubled history as eminently predictive of America's own. And while Americans saw themselves as riding the wave of history toward a moral and political millennium, Melville noted only their deplorable tendency to reduplicate the past. The author of “Cuba” closed by celebrating “the essential progress of mankind” and America's exemplary role in furthering that progress:

The extension of empire by Conquest will soon be superseded by the irrepressible desire of states to become united to each other by the New Law of Annexation. This is already inspiring no inconsiderable proportion of the inhabitants of every nation on this continent to become an integral part of our own great Republic. The history of the future will be, in a continually increasing degree, a detail of the rapid operation of this principle [of Annexation], until the world shall be completely united and bound together by the tracks of its intercommunication, the combination of its interests, the sympathies of its intelligence, and the unity and oneness of its hopes; and the last triumph which is ordered by Providence, has realization in the dawn of that period when all the nations of the earth shall be as One People.⁴⁰

For this author, American expansion into the Caribbean was but a phase in man's ineluctable movement toward the establishment of a political utopia; he illustrates the forward-looking optimism of Melville's contemporaries, who chose, with Amasa Delano, to “forget” (p. 267) a problematical past, viewing it as irrelevant to their own glorious future. To Melville, however, the course of human history seemed less pleasantly “progressive,” more grimly repetitious; to him, “past, present, and future seemed one” (p. 236). “Follow your leader,” whisper Aranda's bleached bones to the American invader (p. 239). “Follow your leader!” shouts Delano's mate in reply (p. 244). Melville's countrymen might assert their moral superiority to the Spanish, but to Melville, eyeing American motives and methods, the imperialistic resemblance was clear. And Americans might also propose to evade the Spanish fate; but Melville saw a single destiny as “manifest” for America, and that was to follow the Spanish lead—to join at last the nonselect company of nations gone by.

Six years earlier, in Mardi, Melville had likewise lectured an overconfident America, disguising his views as those of an anonymous pamphleteer:

“In these boisterous days, the lessons of history are almost discarded, as superseded by present experiences. And that while all Mardi's Present has grown out of its Past, it is becoming obsolete to refer to what has been. Yet, peradventure, the Past is an apostle.

“The grand error of this age, sovereign-kings! is the general supposition, that the very special Diabolus is abroad; whereas, the very special Diabolus has been abroad ever since Mardi began.

“And the grand error of your nation, sovereign-kings! seems this:—The conceit that Mardi is now in the last scene of the last act of her drama; and that all preceding events were ordained, to bring about the catastrophe you believe to be at hand,—a universal and permanent Republic.

“May it please you, those who hold to these things are fools, and not wise.

“Time is made up of various ages; and each thinks its own a novelty. But imbedded in the walls of the pyramids, which outrun all chronologies, sculptured stones are found, belonging to yet older fabrics.”⁴¹

At the considerable expense of Amasa Delano, “Benito Cereno” advances a similar thesis, eschewing all manner of millennial optimism while exposing both the “grand errors” of the contemporary American mind and the “diabolic” permanences of human history. Intensely topical and deeply political, the tale launches a powerful assault on the principal assumptions of Manifest Destiny. Yet in its profound awareness of past, present, and future, it also shares with the “largest” of Melville's works the merit of tragic timelessness.

Notes

1. See “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism,” American Quarterly, 15 (1963), 498-534.

2. See Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), pp. 102-51; and Duban, Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination (De Kalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 82-148.

3. See Heimert, “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism,” pp. 499-502.

4. See Allan Moore Emery, “The Political Significance of Melville's Chimney,” New England Quarterly, 55 (1982), 201-28.

5. For treatments of politics in Mardi, see Merrell R. Davis, Melville's “Mardi”: A Chartless Voyage, Yale Studies in English, Vol. 119 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 156-59; and Duban, Melville's Major Fiction, pp. 11-30.

6. For example, see Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, pp. 208-20.

7. The subject of slavery arises “secondarily” in “Benito Cereno” as a result of Melville's concern with expansionism (see pp. 54-55) and his interest in human depravity. See also Allan Moore Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature, 55 (1983), 316-31.

8. Among the many critics of “Benito Cereno,” only Marvin Fisher has noted this emphasis; see his Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 111-13. See also Robert Lowell's stage version of “Benito Cereno” in The Old Glory, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, 1968), pp. 139-214; though Lowell appreciates only a part of Melville's anti-expansionist message, his overall “reading” of “Benito Cereno” is admirably on target.

9. See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 87.

10. See “Cuba,” Putnam's Monthly Magazine, Jan. 1853, pp. 5, 10, 13-16. The author of “What Impression Do We, and Should We, Make Abroad?” Putnam's, Oct. 1853, pp. 345-54, similarly contrasted a “young, fresh, and surpassingly vigorous” United States with such “exhausted” nations as Spain (p. 350).

11. “Annexation,” Putnam's, Feb. 1854, p. 191.

12. See Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery, in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands (1817; rpt. New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 318, 322-23.

13. “Benito Cereno,” in The Piazza Tales (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856), pp. 113-14; hereafter citations in my text are to this edition. Melville's tale originally appeared in the numbers of Putnam's for October, November, and December of 1855.

14. For discussion of the San Dominick as symbolic of Spain, see Stanley T. Williams, “‘Follow Your Leader’: Melville's ‘Benito Cereno,’” Virginia Quarterly Review, 23 (1947), 61-76; Richard Harter Fogle, “The Monk and the Bachelor: Melville's Benito Cereno,” Tulane Studies in English, 3 (1952), 155-78, rpt. in Fogle's Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960), pp. 116-47; H. Bruce Franklin, “‘Apparent Symbol of Despotic Command’: Melville's Benito Cereno,” New England Quarterly, 34 (1961), 462-77, rpt. in Franklin's The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 136-50; and Fisher, Going Under.

15. Melville's use of Lima to typify this empire may have been encouraged by the author of “Lima and the Limanians,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Oct. 1851, pp. 598-609, who viewed Lima's decline as symptomatic of Spain's (p. 598), and who wistfully recalled the glorious days of the viceroys (pp. 599, 608). Melville's early allusion in “Benito Cereno” to “a Lima intriguante's one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta” (p. 111) and his later mention of Lima's “Plaza” and “Rimac bridge” (p. 270) further suggest he may have seen the “Lima” article, which contained accounts of both the saya and Lima's architectural features (pp. 602-5, 606-8). Melville's first mention of the saya (by name) occurs in Pierre (1852), which he was writing at the time the “Lima” article appeared; see Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, Vol. 7 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and Newberry Library, 1970), p. 149. Moreover, Melville's own “Town-Ho's Story” appeared in the same number of Harper's as the “Lima” article, making his familiarity with that number more likely. For Melville's acquaintance with Harper's (to which he subscribed), see Sealts, Melville's Reading, p. 64.

16. Delano's view may owe something to the author of “Lima and the Limanians,” who described Lima's Spanish Creoles as evincing “a look of premature age; as though the powers of nature were exhausted, and insufficient to develop a vigorous manhood” (p. 601). The nearby drawing of an “indolent” Peruvian (p. 600) might almost be a snapshot of Cereno.

17. Melville was at times a careful stylist. The parenthesis in this sentence slyly underlines Delano's “takeover” of the San Dominick while seeming only to clarify pronoun reference.

18. See Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, pp. 326-27.

19. The pirate Ambrose Cowley, cited as a Galapagos authority in Melville's “The Encantadas” (1854), was captain of the Bachelor's Delight. See The Piazza Tales, p. 329; and Robert Albrecht, “The Thematic Unity of Melville's ‘The Encantadas,’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (1972), 465n. In A Narrative of Voyages and Travels Delano's boat had no name (see pp. 323-25). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “rover” was the standard euphemism for pirate throughout the nineteenth century. See, for example, the use of the term in Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover (1828), which Melville reviewed for the Literary World in 1850 (Sealts, Melville's Reading, p. 53). The original Delano was accused of being a pirate by an ungrateful Cereno (A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, p. 329); this detail may have helped to inspire Melville's christenings.

20. “Cuba,” p. 13.

21. See “Cuba,” p. 15; and “Annexation,” p. 191. See also “What Impression Do We, and Should We, Make Abroad?” p. 345.

22. This suggestion also appears in Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, Vol. 3 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and Newberry Library, 1970), where hieroglyphics on the archway of Vivenza (an isle representing America) proclaim: “In this republican land all men are born free and equal. … except the tribe of Hamo” (pp. 512, 513).

23. Melville's source reports merely that Cereno gave Delano's hand “a hearty squeeze” (p. 324), no reference being made to Babo.

24. See “Cuba,” p. 16; and “Annexation,” pp. 184, 187, 191.

25. Many critics have opposed Delano as representative of the New World to Cereno as representative of the Old; yet only a handful have sensed that Melville meant an aspiring America and declining Spain to be compared as well as contrasted. See Margaret M. Vanderhaar, “A Re-Examination of ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature, 40 (1968), 179-91; Ray B. Browne, Melville's Drive to Humanism (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ. Studies, 1971), pp. 168-88; Joyce Adler, “Melville's Benito Cereno: Slavery and Violence in the Americas,” Science and Society, 38 (1974), 19-48, rpt. in Joyce Sparer Adler's War in Melville's Imagination (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 88-110; Paul D. Johnson, “American Innocence and Guilt: Black-White Destiny in ‘Benito Cereno,’” Phylon, 36 (1975), 426-34; and Kermit Vanderbilt, “‘Benito Cereno’: Melville's Fable of Black Complicity,” Southern Review, 12 (1976), 311-22. According to these critics, Melville believed America was following the lead of Spain in refusing to extirpate slavery from the New World. Edgar A. Dryden and Marvin Fisher alone appreciate Melville's emphasis on the more general similarities between American and Spanish imperialism. See Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), pp. 199-209; and Fisher, Going Under, pp. 111-13.

26. The author of “Lima and the Limanians” made special mention of the Inquisition, lamenting the former use made in Lima of “racks, pillories, scourges, gags, thumbscrews, and other instruments of torture” (p. 608). The excesses of the Inquisition were also described in Giacinto Achilli's Dealings with the Inquisition; or, Papal Rome, her Priests, and her Jesuits, with Important Disclosures (New York: Harper, 1851), a work briefly reviewed in the Literary World, 24 May 1851, p. 417; and in Harper's, June 1851, p. 139. Sealts describes Melville's acquaintance with the Literary World in Melville's Reading, p. 75. For other evidence of American anti-Catholic feeling, see the jaundiced account of “The Holy Week at Rome” in Harper's, June, July, August 1854, pp. 20-32, 158-71, 317-27. See also “Should We Fear the Pope?” Putnam's, June 1855, pp. 650-59, though this article could not have influenced “Benito Cereno,” since it appeared after Melville's tale was composed; see Sealts, “The Chronology of Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856,” in Pursuing Melville, 1940-1980 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 231.

27. See Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 380-436. Billington notes that the Massachusetts legislature elected in the fall of 1854 was “almost entirely” composed of Know-Nothings; the governor of the state was also a Party member (pp. 412-15). Melville's familiarity with the Know-Nothings is implied by his reference in “Benito Cereno” to the “silent signs, of some Freemason sort,” which pass at one point between Cereno and a Spanish sailor (p. 158); a Putnam's article of January 1855 had portrayed the Know-Nothings as the “secretive” heirs of Freemasonry. See “Secret Societies—The Know Nothings,” Putnam's, Jan. 1855, pp. 88-97.

28. For discussions of this allusive pattern, see Williams, “‘Follow Your Leader’”; Fogle, “The Monk and the Bachelor”; William Bysshe Stein, “The Moral Axis of ‘Benito Cereno,’” Accent, 15 (1955), 221-33; Franklin, “‘Apparent Symbol of Despotic Command’”; John Bernstein, “Benito Cereno and the Spanish Inquisition,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (1962), 345-50; William T. Pilkington, “‘Benito Cereno’ and the American National Character,” Discourse, 8 (1965), 49-63; David D. Galloway, “Herman Melville's Benito Cereno: An Anatomy,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 9 (1967), 239-52; Kingsley Widmer, “The Perplexity of Melville: Benito Cereno,” Studies in Short Fiction, 5 (1968), 225-38, rpt. in Widmer's The Ways of Nihilism: A Study of Herman Melville's Short Novels (Los Angeles: California State Colleges, 1970), pp. 59-90; Charles Nicol, “The Iconography of Evil and Ideal in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 7 (1970), pp. 25-31; Charles R. Metzger, “Melville's Saints: Allusion in Benito Cereno,” ESQ, 58 (1970), 88-90; Mason I. Lowance, Jr., “Veils and Illusion in Benito Cereno,” Arizona Quarterly, 26 (1970), 113-26; Bernard Rosenthal, “Melville's Island,” Studies in Short Fiction, 11 (1974), 1-9; R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., The Method of Melville's Short Fiction (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 100-108; William B. Dillingham, Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1977), pp. 227-70; Thomas D. Zlatic, “‘Benito Cereno’: Melville's ‘Back-Handed-Well-Knot,’” Arizona Quarterly, 34 (1978), 327-43; and Gloria Horsley-Meacham, “The Monastic Slaver: Images and Meaning in ‘Benito Cereno,’” New England Quarterly, 56 (1983), 261-66. While offering provocative interpretations of Melville's imagery, these critics fail to consider the “topical” reasons for Melville's concern with Catholicism.

29. An exercise in the “inquisitorial” mode, “Benito Cereno” begins, in fact, with a moral investigation and ends with sworn testimonies, judicial findings, sentencing, and the administering of punishment.

30. For discussions of Melville's emphasis on moral ambiguity, see Rosalie Feltenstein, “Melville's ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature, 19 (1947), 245-55; Fogle, “The Monk and the Bachelor”; Guy A. Cardwell, “Melville's Gray Story: Symbols and Meaning in ‘Benito Cereno,’” Bucknell Review, 8 (1959), 154-67; Galloway, “Herman Melville's Benito Cereno: An Anatomy”; Lowance, “Veils and Illusion in Benito Cereno”; Ruth B. Mandel, “The Two Mystery Stories in Benito Cereno,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (1973), 631-42; and Zlatic, “‘Benito Cereno’: Melville's ‘Back-Handed-Well-Knot.’”

31. Neither episode appears in Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels.

32. See Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels, pp. 318, 319, 320, 323, et passim.

33. The original Delano was merely shocked by the Spaniard's lack of authority and miffed at his coldness; see A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, pp. 323-24.

34. See Emery's discussion of this subject in “The Topicality of Depravity in ‘Benito Cereno,’” pp. 318-19.

35. See Cosas de España; or, Going to Madrid via Barcelona (New York: Redfield, 1855); and “Cosas de España,” Putnam's, May 1854, pp. 482-93; June 1854, pp. 583-93; July 1854, pp. 14-21; and Nov. 1854, pp. 518-24. The author of both the articles and the book was John Milton Mackie, who remained anonymous to his readers. The first Putnam's excerpt appeared in a number of the magazine containing a portion of Melville's “Encantadas”; the final two excerpts shared Putnam's numbers with segments of Israel Potter. In his “Chronology of Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856,” Sealts suggests that “Benito Cereno” was “probably composed during the winter of 1854-1855” (p. 401); thus Melville could have seen the Putnam's articles, but not Mackie's book, prior to the writing of his tale.

36. See “Cosas de España,” Putnam's, May 1854, pp. 482-84.

37. “Cosas de España,” Putnam's, May 1854, p. 483; the italics are Mackie's own.

38. The episode does not appear in Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels.

39. “Annexation,” p. 191.

40. “Cuba,” p. 16.

41. Mardi, pp. 524-25. In White-Jacket (1850), on the other hand, Melville attacked the American navy's practice of flogging by insisting that a depraved past need furnish no precedent for an elect America. “The Past is dead,” he wrote, “and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. … We Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past, seeing that, ere long, the van of the nations must, of right, belong to ourselves.” Melville then waxed Hebraic: “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall; and, besides our first birth-right—embracing one continent of earth—God has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” See White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War, Vol. 5 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and Newberry Library, 1970), pp. 150-51. Apparently, however, such views—eminently characteristic of Delano and his expansionist heirs—were a passing product of Melville's polemical urge, his revulsion at flogging and fervent desire for its abolition, rather than a symptom of his continuing confidence in American “specialness”; for both Mardi and Benito Cereno carefully contradict the thesis of the White-Jacket passage.