SOURCE: “Bull of the Nile: Symbol, History, and Racial Myth in ‘Benito Cereno,’” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. LXIV, No. 2, June, 1991, pp. 225-42.

[In the following essay, Horsley-Meacham argues that while “Benito Cereno” ostensibly upholds racial myths, it contains a subversively “egalitarian and humane” element.]

Herman Melville seems an astute observer of African sensibilities when, in Moby Dick, his sharp-witted Daggoo inveighs against conventional associations with his color, declaring: “Who's afraid of black's afraid of me!”¹ Yet, in a later work, “Benito Cereno,” a setting perfectly designed to explore Black ethos, Melville buries insight under layers of stereotypic symbol. As he “satanizes” his bondsmen, obscuring virtually every worthy trait ascribed to them in his source, Amasa Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, blackness becomes ever more fearsome. Though the tale examines, as Allan Moore Emery has recently asserted, “the malign potential in every man,” the San Dominick Africans carry the weight of the burden.² They represent, in words Daggoo's foe applied to the race, “the undeniable dark side of mankind [and] devilish dark at that.”³

Readers of Melville's works have learned to question such ostensible conformity to conventional beliefs. While Melville was, indeed, bound by the temper and caught up in the turbulence of his times, he was nonetheless an unorthodox thinker and an ingenious master of complexity who considered subterfuge the hallmark of “the great Art of Telling the Truth” in “this world of lies.”⁴ We do well, then, to search “Benito Cereno” thoroughly for any signs of hidden dissent.

Melville was writing at a time when history was being falsified to suit the ideological imperatives of the slavocracy. It was the epoch of the Africans' disinheritance, when earlier views of them as the progenitors of human civilization were discredited and the ancient splendor of the Nile Valley was attributed exclusively to Whites. In this context, we find Melville offering, “covertly, and by snatches,” symbols of African grandeur, like the “bull of the Nile,” a venerable god of Nilotic antiquity, to recover that stolen legacy and thereby address a highly inflammatory contemporary debate: the ethnic roots of Western civilization. Such boldness and breadth of vision in “Benito Cereno” have yet to be fully appreciated, even though critics have long argued over the story's racial stance.⁵ Seen only “by cunning glimpses” and eclipsed by the familiar stereotypes, the Nilotic motif exemplifies the finest in Melville's truth-telling, for it signals not only what is clearly egalitarian and humane in an otherwise equivocal tale but also what is patently subversive. However much the tale conforms to racial myths, then, their subversion is ultimately the focus of Melville's penetrating exploration of the modern and most ancient relations between the Black world and the White.

I

In the 1850s, the spectre of widespread slave revolts loomed large for Melville and his countrymen. American expansionists were fueling fears that Spain was preparing to emancipate her slaves in Cuba.⁶ The prospect of a sizeable free African population in close proximity to the American South precipitated the Africanization Scare,⁷ which, during the fall of 1854 (probably only a few months before Melville began composing his tale),⁸ culminated in the Ostend Manifesto. Co-authored by James Buchanan (then minister to Great Britain), the manifesto defended annexing Cuba to subdue the mounting threat of servile retribution. Under Spanish rule, the manifesto declared, the Africans would make Cuba a second San Domingo, “with all its attendant horrors to the white race”; ultimately “the flames would extend to … endanger or actually consume the fair fabric of our Union.”⁹

Such events may have been uppermost in Melville's thoughts as he imagined the “Africanization” of the San Dominick, where, revealingly, the removal of the slaves' fetters by the Spanish master, Alexandro Aranda, endangers the unsuspecting American, Captain Amasa Delano. When Delano boards the Spanish slaver, he does not discern that the Africans have subdued their captors, in part because the former have staged an elaborate masquerade in which the obedient Babo acts as the ever devoted servant and the unyielding Atufal appears bound in chains. Even signs of slave disorder and the spectre of the ominous hatchet polishers, while troubling to Delano, do not alert him to the true state of affairs, for he is, above all, deluded by his own notion of Africans as genial inferiors. Only after the dramatic escape of Benito Cereno, the San Dominick's captain, does the American finally see the fiendish Africans unmasked and the Whites engulfed in a torrent of horrors.

To be sure, there are no freedom fighters in “Benito Cereno.” True to his source, Melville reveals that docility is not a trait natural to Africans but a mask devised to “put on ol’ Massa”; however, at the same time, he suppresses the spirit and sensibility that Amasa Delano describes in his account of the rebels' strike for liberty and instead advances sinister stereotypes that evoke repressed racial fears. Melville's contrarieties—Sambo and savage—are the very polarities James Baldwin identifies in popular racial myth: there was no one more “pious” or “loyal” than Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom (hence the docile Sambo), but “there was, at the same time, no one … more faithless, or more vicious, and certainly no one more immoral.”¹⁰ It is this malevolent type that Melville uses to refashion the original account, specifically the Ashantee hatchet polisher, the quintessential savage brute. Amasa Delano's twelve mutineers “all raw and born on the coast of Senegal” (p. 828) are replaced in “Benito Cereno” by six rebel slaves “born among the Ashantees” (p. 104).¹¹ This alteration of national origin is the vehicle for Melville's exploitation of the popular image of the Coromantyne, a term applied to Gold Coast dwellers, particularly the allegedly barbaric and warlike Ashantees.

An account of eighteenth-century slave uprisings in Edward Long's History of Jamaica singled out “the dangerous tempers” of the Coromantyne as the “root of the evil.” Long enumerated efforts to curb the import of Gold Coast slaves, including a proposal in the Jamaica House of Assembly “laying an additional higher duty upon all Fatin, Akim, and Ashantee Negroes, and all others commonly called Coromantins.”¹² The essence of this British view was evident more than fifty years later when American pro-slavery apologist Thomas Dew characterized the Coromantyne as “the most ferocious of the Africans in war,” the instigators of slave insurgency, who possessed “all the savage ferocity of the North American Indian.”¹³

This imagery informs Melville's portrayal of the Africans who “Indian-like” “hurtled their hatchets” (p. 101). By substituting hatchets for the daggers carried by the rebels in A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, Melville intensifies the horror of the Africans' acts. Surely a weapon more dreadful than a knife, the hatchet that strikes terror in Delano's heart brands the Ashantees as savages and, as such, the chief perpetrators of Babo's ruthless orders. In Melville's altered document, they assume the gruesome task of stripping Don Alexandro and preparing his skeleton “in a way … the deponent [Cereno] … so long as reason is left him, can never divulge” (p. 112). This unspeakable experience is perhaps the most sinister scene Melville devises to illustrate the Africans' brutish propensities, for he implies that Cereno, as one critic puts it, “in a diabolical communion with the Negro,” unwittingly devoured his fellow Spaniard's flesh.¹⁴

Savagery is not, however, solely the province of the Ashantees; it defines the Black women as well. Likewise vicious tormentors, they are recast to invert Delano's romantic view of them as noble “Negresses.” While the original account reports succinctly the influence the women exercised in effecting the master's death, Melville's deposition barbarizes them by stressing that they “would have tortured to death, instead of simply killing.” Whereas Delano's noble “Negresses” sang melancholy songs “to excite the courage of the Negroes” (p. 835), Melville's diabolic females chant songs that are wildly “inflaming” (p. 112).

Babo's cruelty, of course, dominates “Benito Cereno,” but the African valet stands apart, a seeming deviation from the savage stereotype. His malevolence, while inspiring bestial deeds, emanates largely from his intellect. As Melville concludes, Babo's “brain, not body, had schemed and led the revolt” (p. 116). Although he is the ringleader of the uprising in Delano's historical account, Babo remains a minor figure. Melville, however, recasts him as the central strategist and a master of psychological torture: “Babo asked him [Cereno] whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's”; and again, “Babo, coming close, said … ‘Keep faith with the blacks … or you shall … follow your leader’” (p. 107). The exceedingly clever Babo nonetheless in no sense undermines, as many have argued, Delano's judgment that the Black mind is limited, for movements and strategies attributed to any number of “the Negroes” in the source are transferred exclusively to “the Negro Babo” in Melville's deposition. Babo is the dictator of every course of action and inventor of every detail of the plot. Indeed, the “slight frame[d]” (p. 116) leader's distinction as the only Senegalese evokes another myth suggested by Long: “The [“delicate framed”] Negroes brought from Senegal are of better understanding than the rest, and fitter for … menial domestic services. They are good commanders over other Negroes.”¹⁵

As the epitome of the rebellion, Babo transforms its historical objective. His declaration of purpose, consistent with the factual one—that he must kill his master because “he and his companions could not otherwise be sure of their liberty” (p. 106)—is overshadowed by references to his sinister character. Babo is a serpent which Delano perceives “writhing up from the boat's bottom”; his intelligence resides in a “hive of subtlety” (p. 116); he is full of “malign machinations and deceptions” (p. 115). Clearly, the human ingenuity demonstrated by the historical Babo—who, along with Atufal, acquired writing skills “though they were new” captives from Africa—is supplanted in “Benito Cereno” by demonic power. The original rebel's noble dream to be liberated from the ravages of enslavement is transformed into but another manifestation of the conventional association of blackness with evil.

Although in the past some critics have argued that Melville's emblems of iniquity represent a retreat from his earlier egalitarianism, today most scholars draw upon the tale's ambiguities to prove that in truth it is an indictment of slavery and racism.¹⁶ These “cunning glimpses” do not, however, diminish the overwhelming impression that Melville gives substance to his readers' worst racialist phantoms as they witness Cereno's nightmare. Factual materials in the source are painstakingly modified to substantiate the observations of Cereno—whom Melville features as a far more trustworthy figure than the original¹⁷—and no doubt is ever cast upon the Spanish captain's “accuracy of intellectual perception.” No view—not even that of the Africans—discredits their presentation as depraved beings.

So vivid is this spectre of Black malevolence that the tale inspires neither a moral imperative for abolition nor any serious consideration of Black aspirations. In fact, pro-slavery prejudices—which distinguish the “noble” cause of freedom fighters in Poland and revolutionary France from the Black insurgents' “hellish plots and massacres”¹⁸—are reinforced in “Benito Cereno,” while alternative views are suppressed. It may be that Melville had lost the hope that he expressed in Mardi that Africans would “find a way to loose their bonds without one drop of blood” and was now constrained by fear. Joyce Sparer Adler, in her discussion of Melville's apparent indifference towards the plight of Black people, his “neglect” of them “as human beings,” asserts that “fear alone proves a constricting and inhibiting pressure” and acts as a “rein” on the creative imagination.¹⁹ Certainly, Melville stops short of delving into the African psyche; instead, he treats the slave only as a dreadful figment of White men's fantasies.

Yet, if “Benito Cereno” is a window into Melville's deepest concerns about servile rebellion and the possible artistic and ethical problems they posed, it is likewise a smoke screen. Melville did not believe that Africans were an inherently depraved or lesser people, and he had too broad a vision of the Black world and too great a commitment to “Telling the Truth” to remain mute in the face of a strident ethnocentrism. Indeed, drawing upon an ample fund of learned opinion about the African past, Melville devised a stratagem to challenge prevalent racist dogma—particularly what Toni Morrison calls the idea of whiteness as a “privileged place on the evolutionary ladder.” Only a few may have appreciated Melville's thrust, but it was nonetheless “dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now.”²⁰

II

It was most characteristic of Herman Melville to look back to the old world and, says Harry Levin, “embellish his human material with the patina of historic tradition.”²¹ Melville's treatment of the African experience was no exception. In “Benito Cereno,” this looking back is, in fact, the stratagem used to subvert popular myths surrounding the pivotal issue of African identity. By adroitly selecting and arraying historical symbols, Melville ever so subtly reveals the “dark satyr” during the eras of his ascendancy. Clearly, Melville understood that the Europeans' “mastership over every dusky tribe” was not a constant in the course of human affairs. In “Benito Cereno” the figure “uppermost” upon the Castilian stern-piece points to the legacy of Moorish dominion in Spain.²² This legacy, reinforced by Islamic references, enlarges and redefines the African, disclosing why Atufal, Babo's “right hand man,” “seemed a sentry and more.” Melville's symbolic allusions to Nile Valley resplendence also hint at the Africans' former “mastership” and, further, emphasize an intellectual capacity otherwise unacknowledged in the tale. In contrast to the demeaning stereotypes amassed in the story, these images of antiquity exalt the African as a vital force in Western culture.

An avid reader with an intense interest in the ancient world, Melville drew upon varied sources for his fictional reconstructions, but he displayed a marked preference for travel literature. “Stay-at-homes say travelers lie,” he wrote in defense of James Bruce's claim that the Abyssinians slice “live steak” from their cattle, “yet a voyage to Ethiopia would cure stay-at-homes of that; for few skeptics are travelers; fewer travelers liars.”²³ In Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), the “Negro wooly-headed Cushites” of ancient Ethiopia, builders of “that first seminary of learning,” are described as “the most cultivated and instructed people in the world,” who reigned “in the utmost luxury, liberty, and splendor.”²⁴

Other eighteenth-century travelers who perceived the Egyptians to be, like the Ethiopians, Negroid peoples must also have left their stamp on Melville. John Ledyard, cited in the second printing of “Benito Cereno” (The Piazza Tales [1856]), reported from Egypt that he believed the Copts (descendants of the ancient Egyptians) “to have been the origin of the Negro race.”²⁵ The celebrated travelers Vivant Denon²⁶ and C. F. Volney called attention to the Negroid appearance not only of the “old Egyptian stock” but also of the ancient monuments. Volney explains that the features of the Sphinx, “precisely those of the Negro,” led him to conclude that the Egyptians were “of the same species with all the natives of Africa.” What the “pilgrim deist from the Seine” (as Melville called him in Clarel) proclaimed in Travels Through Egypt and Syria (1798) was ultimately to have a profound impact upon subsequent generations: “How are we astonished,” Volney marveled, “when we reflect that to the race of Negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech.”²⁷

By the nineteenth century claims for the Africans' former superiority were echoed by a number of intellectuals and scholars.²⁸ James Cowles Prichard, the most influential British ethnologist during the first half of the century, suggested in Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813) that both ancient and modern testimony construed the “national configuration” of the Egyptians to be “nearly the Negro form, with wooly hair.”²⁹ John Stuart Mill's bold reply to Thomas Carlyle's racist argument (both appearing in Fraser's Magazine, 1849-50) averred that “it was from Negroes [the original Egyptians] … that the Greeks learnt their first lesson in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these Negroes did the Greek philosophers … resort as a treasury of mysterious wisdom.”³⁰ Alexander Hill Everett, editor of the North American Review (1830-35), was equally iconoclastic: “While Greece and Rome were yet barbarous, we find the light of learning … emanating … out of the midst of this very wooly haired, flat nosed, thick lipped, coal black race.”³¹ This view of the African as cultural progenitor was not always so enthusiastically espoused but was, nonetheless, so widely disseminated that it fueled the fierce debate raging in nineteenth-century America.

To counteract Volney's long-standing influence, which grew as abolitionists added his and other similar testimony to their arsenal of arguments, White supremacists in antebellum America mounted a sweeping campaign in defense of the slavocracy and the racist ideology that sustained it. A new ethnology was launched to repudiate the early Africans' attainments by proving “scientifically” that even then they were but servants of the sovereign Caucasians. Disputing Volney, the ethnologist Samuel G. Morton postulated in Crania Americana (1839) that the Sphinx was not an Egyptian deity but rather the “shrine” of a servile Negro population. In his next major work, Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), Morton, basing his argument on purportedly valuable archeological findings, including six hundred human crania, argued that the original Egyptians and Nubians were Caucasians.³² Popular Egyptologist George Gliddon, who supplied Morton with the mummies for this second study, later collaborated with Josiah C. Nott to produce the highly dogmatic Types of Mankind (1854). In this massive tome, which sold 3,500 copies in four months, pro-slavery Americans found exactly what they had been looking for: “History … when subjected to a strictly impartial examination … will not support that superannuated, but untenable, doctrine, that civilization originated in Ethiopia, and consequently among an African people, by whom it was brought down the Nile, to enlighten the less polished, therefore inferior, Caucasian … or, that we, who trace back to Egypt the origin of every art and science … have to thank the sable Negro.”³³

By mid-century, Volney's “Nigritian hypothesis” had fallen into disrepute after having been, as one writer for the North American Review reported, “seized upon with avidity in more recent times.”³⁴ Of course, others, particularly strident abolitionists, continued to defend the Africans' primacy, but Morton and Gliddon's “American School of Ethnology” was destined to prevail.³⁵ In an uneasy slaveholding nation, the African Sphinx, like Herodotus' and Aeschylus' black-skinned Egyptians, Virgil's “swart Memnon,” and Jonson's regal Black Ethiopians—“the first form’d dames of earth” and inventors of that “original doctrine of sculpture” (hieroglyphics)—were profoundly disturbing images. The new ethnology, which sought to take “the whole question [of Nilotic ethnicity] out of the hands of the Greeks” and “unscientific tourists,”³⁶ would obscure, indeed efface, the meanings embedded within those images.

This astounding effort to transform history into a testimonial to White supremacy is contested in “Benito Cereno.” Its rich tapestry of historical allusions restores a legacy that has been consigned to oblivion and subtly conveys the African and European's equal potential for greatness—and for degradation. Unlike his optimistic countryman Delano, Melville, as D. H. Lawrence avers, was convinced that his race and “his great white epoch” were “doomed”;³⁷ more like Cereno, he saw that the fallen African was—as both reflection and premonition—his “shadow.” In “venerable contrast” to the tumultuous savages, four aged Africans, oakum pickers, “their heads like black, doddered willow tops” (p. 50), are stoically “couched, sphinx-like,” clearly figural representations of the once revered but now decayed Nilotic civilization. These oakum pickers—“relics” of a prior “faded grandeur”—are fitting harbingers of the demise of the West as they chant the “funeral march” while the “hearse-like” vessel—emblematic of the European world—“follows” its “leader.”

A vivid image of Africa's cultural primacy surfaces as counterpoint to the new ethnology in the episode in which Delano dismisses what he had momentarily perceived as a possible conspiracy between Cereno and the slaves. Delano's reasoning—that the Blacks “were too stupid” and that a White would hardly “apostatize from his very species” (p. 75)—points directly, as Allan Emery has shown, to the doctrine of inherent Black inferiority and separate human origins (polygenesis) advanced in such works as Types of Mankind.³⁸ But the allusion to Greco-African cultural kinship immediately following reveals Melville's opposition to that view and his affirmation of the fundamental oneness of humankind. An aged sailor, looking “like an Egyptian priest, making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon” (p. 76), invokes Alexander's sovereignty in Egypt. This reference, no doubt, had ethnological significance for Melville's contemporaries. Alexander's pilgrimage to the Egyptian god's shrine bore witness to what nineteenth-century defenders of Black potential so often claimed, that the Greeks' veneration for Egyptian and Ethiopian divinities was indisputable proof that the African was a major source of enlightenment in the Hellenic world. Lydia Maria Child, for one, had asserted, “The condition of this people in ancient times is very far from indicating intellectual or moral inferiority. … Even the proud Grecians evinced respect for Ethiopia, almost amounting to reverence, and derived from thence … their mythology,” including the belief, expressed in the Iliad, that in deference, “all the gods made an annual visit to the Ethiopians.”³⁹ For Melville, Alexander's visit to the oracle of Ammon, deemed “infallible” among the Greeks, was no less revealing. The Egyptian oracle, in fact, figured prominently in the mid-century ethnological debate. The assertion by the Greek historian Herodotus that the mythic doves that established the oracles of Ammon (in Africa) and of Dodona (in Greece) had been characterized as black to “signify … that the woman [founder] was an Egyptian” was widely cited—and hotly contested—as evidence of the stature of Black peoples in antiquity.”⁴⁰

This Greco-African background is key to unraveling the Gordian knot of the “ancient” sailor, whose mysterious preoccupation with the hemp links him with the “old knitting women,” the oakum pickers. When Delano is enjoined to “undo it, cut it, quick” (p. 76) and, like Alexander, gain ascendancy as the oracle at Gordium prophesied, only the “ancients” comprehend the knot's significance, prompting “an elderly Negro,” with a “knowing wink,” to retrieve it. That this action is closely connected with the aged oakum pickers' preoccupation with the undoing of ropes—the undoing of White dominion—never occurs to Delano. Atufal creates a “slight stir” behind Delano, who, standing “knot in hand, knot in head,” turns, looking back at the African's quiet, colossal presence. Delano relinquishes the object, grasping neither its legacy nor its hidden link with Atufal. Oblivious of the past and his own fixed racial concepts, Delano is unable to disentangle not only the elaborate slave plot but also the historic links between Africa and Greece the knot exemplifies as well. To “undo it,” the American must fathom a definition of the Africans that accounts for their intellectual and cultural attributes, which Atufal, as another symbolic ancient, so majestically embodies.

Through “cunning glimpses” Atufal's kinship with the Nilotic world soon becomes as manifest as the Greek lineage of the Whites. Just as Delano, recipient of the Gordian knot, and Alexandro, namesake of the conqueror, are symbolic heirs of Alexander, Atufal, “monumentally fixed … like one of those sculptured porters of black marble guarding the porches of Egyptian tombs” (p. 92), epitomizes his ancestry. Moreover, the identification of Atufal with Egypt's sacred bull, Apis, another god to whom Alexander paid homage,⁴¹ also raises the issue of African preeminence: “as if a child [the culturally neophyte White] should lead a bull of the Nile.” Thus, Melville disentangles the Gordian knot and opens the padlock on a “subjugated” Atufal; the captive African legacy is released to mock Cereno's dominion and the ideology of White supremacy. That the African is the cultural parent—the leader Cereno follows—is later stressed in the image of Babo as the Nubian sculptor, “finishing off a white statue-head” (p. 87), in effect giving shape to European civilization.

III

These divinities and demons, illustrious ancients and savage brutes, are the stuff of Melville's clever subterfuge. What seems to have aided his deception—what made his truth-telling so long inaccessible, his point of view so elusive—was his unarticulated ambivalence. Discordant feelings are evident in his treatment of Africans as the enlightened progenitors he believed they were and, under slavery, as the embittered avengers he feared they would become. Towards the fallen progenitor he showed little of the sympathy he lavished upon the tale's decadent European. For all his democratic ideals and his philosophical concerns about slavery, Melville, confronted with escalating threats of slave revolts at home and abroad, represented the captive African of his day as a menacing presence. Yet, Melville's apprehensions about that very real “power of blackness” did not arrest his pursuit of the white doe of truth, “forced to fly”⁴² when menaced by a virulent, popular ethnocentrism.

Perhaps Melville saw in the ingeniously calculated destruction committed by the avenging “Hamans” the same intelligence and creative forces that, unfettered, enabled their forebears to fashion the ancient Nilotic splendor, the world of Ammon.⁴³ Certainly, it is these forebears in “Benito Cereno,” briefly shown entering upon the stage of history as inherent equals, who ultimately reveal Melville's egalitarianism and his artful defiance of the racial mythology that would disinherit them. As the Africans were ever more relentlessly portrayed as permanent inferiors, as they were being categorically denied every role they were ever said to have played in the grand drama of human achievement, Melville—master of the equivoque in his deference to popular taste—countered with a subterranean network of allusions to the age of African grandeur to make his readers aware, if only subliminally, that indeed “even blackness has its brilliancy.”⁴⁴

Notes

1. Herman Melville, Moby Dick or the Whale, ed. Wayne C. Booth (New York: Holt, 1957), p. 172.

2. Allan Moore Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 55 (October 1983): 316-31.

3. Melville, Moby Dick, p. 172.

4. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Portable Melville, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Viking, 1952), p. 408.

5. For an overview, see Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Herman Melville (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), pp. 130-36. Among the many critics of “Benito Cereno,” only Carolyn L. Karcher has discussed Melville's allusions to Africans' ancient heritage (Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980], pp. 140-41).

6. See Allan Moore Emery, “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39 (June 1984): 48-68; Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1853-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), pp. 32-36; and Basil Rauch, American Interest in Cuba: 1848-1855 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), pp. 44-45, 262-94.

7. Reforms in Cuba's labor system instituted in 1853 by Captain General Juan M. de la Pezuela, an opponent of the slave traffic, prompted speculations that Africans would be emancipated and, because of their numerical predominance, Cuba would be “Africanized.” See C. Stanley Urban, “The Africanization of Cuba Scare, 1853-1855,” Hispanic American Historical Review 37 (February 1957): 29-45.

8. See “Notes on ‘Benito Cereno,’” in “The Piazza Tales” and Other Prose Pieces (1839-1860), ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987).

9. Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents of American History (New York: Appleton, 1934), p. 335. Concern with large-scale slave uprisings was also voiced by opponents of annexation. In the House of Representatives, abolitionist Congressman Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio argued that the introduction of the “more enlightened” Southern slaves to Cuba (an anticipated outcome of annexation) would bring about Caribbean revolts followed by the eruption of the “suppressed volcanoes” in the Southern states, which would become “devastated by servile war.” See Frederick Douglass' Paper, 7 January 1853.

10. James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 28.

11. Parenthetical citations to “Benito Cereno” and also to chapter 18 of Amaso Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels (Boston, 1817) are from The Piazza Tales.

12. Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (1774; reprinted, New York: Arno, 1972), 2:445-71.

13. Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew, The Pro-Slavery Argument (Charleston: Walker, Richards and Co., 1852), pp. 331, 464.

14. Barbara J. Baines, “Ritualized Cannibalism in ‘Benito Cereno’: Melville's ‘Black-Letter’ Texts,” ESQ 30 (3d Quarter 1984): 166.

15. Long, Jamaica, 2:404.

16. Among those censuring Melville are Sidney Kaplan, “Herman Melville and the American National Sin,” in Images of the Negro in American Literature, ed. Seymour L. Gross and John Edward Hardy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 151-62; F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 508; and Margaret Y. Jackson, “Melville's Use of a Real Slave Mutiny in ‘Benito Cereno,’” CLA Journal 4 (December 1960): 79-93. For an interesting response to Kaplan, see Allen Guttmann, “The Enduring Innocence of Captain Amasa Delano,” in Melville's “Benito Cereno”: A Text for Guided Research, ed. John P. Runden (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1965), pp. 179-88. Those arguing that Melville was indicting slavery are Joyce Sparer Adler, War in Melville's Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1981), pp. 88-110; Joshua Leslie and Sterling Stuckey, “The Death of Benito Cereno: A Reading of Herman Melville on Slavery,” Journal of Negro History 67 (Winter 1982): 287-301; Jean Fagan Yellin, The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (New York: New York University Press, 1972), p. 222; Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity,” pp. 316-31; and Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land, pp. 127-43.

17. In the source, Don Benito is dishonest in his financial dealings with Delano. See “Melville's Source for ‘Benito Cereno,’” in The Piazza Tales, p. 823.

18. Dew, Pro-Slavery Argument, p. 448.

19. Joyce Sparer Adler, “Melville and the Civil War,” New Letters 40 (Winter 1973): 112. Adler maintains that Melville was fearful that an embittered South might renew hostilities.

20. Toni Morrison discusses Melville's interests in White racial ideology in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 1989): 14-18.

21. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (London: Faber, 1958), p. 206.

22. See my “Melville's Dark Satyr Unmasked,” English Language Notes 23 (March 1986): 43-47.

23. Melville, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, ed. Raymond M. Weaver (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), p. 245.

24. James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1790), 1:379, 386.

25. Jared Sparks, The Life of John Ledyard, the American Traveller; Comprising Selections from his Journals and Correspondence (Cambridge: Hilliard & Brown, 1828), p. 312.

26. Vivant Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt … During the Campaigns of General Bonaparte, 3 vols. (1803; reprinted, New York: Arno, 1973), 1:206, 269-70. Denon's work is considered a source for Mardi and Moby Dick. See Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein, Melville's Orienda (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 129.

27. C. F. Volney, Travels Through Egypt and Syria, 2 vols. (New York: John Tiebout, 1798), 1:53-55. It may be that Melville encountered Volney's argument in Thomas Maurice's Indian Antiquities, 7 vols. (London, 1794), 2:352-53. Melville's use of this work is discussed in Howard P. Vincent's The Trying-Out of Moby Dick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 278-80, and H. Bruce Franklin's The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963). In James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. John Wilson Crocker, 5 vols. (London: John Murray, 1831), 4:233, Melville must have also read about “Lord Monboddo's notion that the ancient Egyptians, with all their learning and all their arts, were not only black, but wooly-haired.”

28. Nineteenth-century travelers continued to comment upon the African character of the Egyptian monuments. For contemporary accounts that Melville may well have read, see W. H. Bartlett, The Nile Boat; or, Glimpses of the Land of Egypt (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), pp. 43-44, and other remarks in his Forty Days in the Desert, on the Track of the Israelites (London: Arthur Hall & Co., 1848); also Thomas Legh, Narrative of a Journey in Egypt (London: J. Murray, 1817), pp. 209-10. On Legh's consideration of Egyptian ethnicity, see “Legh's Voyage Up the Nile,” Edinburgh Review, December 1816, p. 435. For a recent discussion of the ethnic identity of Egyptians as perceived throughout the ages, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 240-46.

29. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (1813; reprinted, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 376-88.

30. Eugene R. August, ed., Thomas Carlyle: The Nigger Question; John Stuart Mill: The Negro Question (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), p. 47.

31. Alexander Hill Everett, America: or a General Survey of the Political Situation of the Several Powers of the Western Continent (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & Lea, 1827), p. 213. For an extensive discussion of African primacy, see Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis, An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis; or, an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations, and Religions, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1836). Widely used as a literary source book, this work has been found useful in explicating various aspects of Melville's fiction. See, e.g., John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 297; Franklin, Wake of the Gods, pp. 94-95.

32. Samuel G. Morton, Crania Americana; or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America, to which is Prefixed an Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839), and Crania Aegyptiaca; or Observations on Egyptian Ethnography (Philadelphia: John Pennington, 1844).

33. Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind; or Ethnological Researches, based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1854), p. 213.

34. “Morton's Crania Americana,” North American Review, July 1840, pp. 173-74. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The World and Africa (1946; rev. and enl. ed., New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 118, points out that Volney, confronted with “such a barrage of denial from later men,” subsequently recanted his position on Egyptian ethnicity.

35. On African antiquity in antislavery writings, see Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., “Ancient Africa and the Early Black American Historians, 1883-1915,” American Quarterly 36 (Winter 1984): 691-92. On the American School of Ethnology, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper, 1971), pp. 74-75; and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origin of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 129.

36. Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. 218. And further: “Did archeological science now solely rely … upon the concurrent testimony of the early Greek writer, we should be compelled to conclude that the Egyptians … were literally Negroes” (p. 215).

37. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; New York: Viking, 1961), p. 160.

38. Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity,” p. 328.

39. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (New York: John S. Taylor, 1836), p. 149.

40. See Prichard, Physical History of Man, p. 377; Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. 216; Higgins, Anacalypsis, 1:137, 434; Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered: An Address Before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College at Commencement (Rochester: Lee, Mann & Co., 1854), p. 24; and Frederick Freeman, Africa's Redemption: The Salvation of our Country (1852; reprinted, Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970), p. 28.

41. See “Anabasis of Alexander,” in Arrian, trans. Iliff Robson (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1929), 3.225.

42. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” p. 408.

43. In Melville's “Bell Tower,” Haman, who like the African in “Benito Cereno” plots revenge while he serves, clearly suggests the biblical Ham, whose posterity was said to have been condemned to servitude, and its derivative Hamo, Melville's name in Mardi for the American slave (see Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850s [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977], pp. 98-99). Ham was thought to have been deified in Egypt under the name Jupiter Hammon (Ammon) (see Pierre Bayle, An Historical and Critical Dictionary, 4 vols. [London: C. Harper, 1710], p. 940). On Melville's familiarity with Bayle, see Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading: A Check-list of Books Owned and Borrowed (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 39.

44. Melville, Moby Dick, p. 408.