 | The piazza tales |  |
BENITO CERENO.
In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano,
of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a
large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor
with a valuable cargo, in the harbor of St.
Maria—a small, desert, uninhabited island toward
the southern extremity of the long coast
of Chili. There he had touched for water.
On the second day, not long after dawn,
while lying in his berth, his mate came below,
informing him that a strange sail was coming
into the bay. Ships were then not so plenty in
those waters as now. He rose, dressed, and
went on deck.
The morning was one peculiar to that coast.
Everything was mute and calm; everything
gray. The sea, though undulated into long
roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked
at the surface like waved lead that has cooled
and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed
a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl,
among which they were mixed, skimmed
low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows
over meadows before storms. Shadows present,
foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.
To Captain Delano's surprise, the stranger,
viewed through the glass, showed no colors;
though to do so upon entering a haven, however
uninhabited in its shores, where but a
single other ship might be lying, was the custom
among peaceful seamen of all nations.
Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of
the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day,
associated with those seas, Captain Delano's
surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness
had he not been a person of a singularly
undistrustful goodnature, not liable, except on
extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly
then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way
involving the imputation of malign evil in man.
Whether, in view of what humanity is capable,
such a trait implies, along with a benevolent
heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy
of intellectual perception, may be left to
the wise to determine.
But whatever misgivings might have obtruded
on first seeing the stranger, would almost, in
any seaman's mind, have been dissipated by
observing that, the ship, in navigating into the
harbor, was drawing too near the land; a sunken
reef making out off her bow. This seemed
to prove her a stranger, indeed, not only to the
sealer, but the island; consequently, she could
be no wonted freebooter on that ocean. With
no small interest, Captain Delano continued to
watch her—a proceeding not much facilitated
by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through
which the far matin light from her cabin
streamed equivocally enough; much like the
sun—by this time hemisphered on the rim of
the horizon, and, apparently, in company with
the strange ship entering the harbor—which,
wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds,
showed not unlike a Lima intriguante's one
sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the
Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta.
It might have been but a deception of the
vapors, but, the longer the stranger was watched
the more singular appeared her manœuvres.
Ere long it seemed hard to decide whether she
what she was about. The wind, which had
breezed up a little during the night, was now extremely
light and baffling, which the more increased
the apparent uncertainty of her movements.
Surmising, at last, that it might be a ship in
distress, Captain Delano ordered his whale-boat
to be dropped, and, much to the wary opposition
of his mate, prepared to board her, and, at the
least, pilot her in. On the night previous, a
fishing-party of the seamen had gone a long
distance to some detached rocks out of sight
from the sealer, and, an hour or two before daybreak,
had returned, having met with no small
success. Presuming that the stranger might
have been long off soundings, the good captain
put several baskets of the fish, for presents, into
his boat, and so pulled away. From her continuing
too near the sunken reef, deeming her
in danger, calling to his men, he made all haste
to apprise those on board of their situation.
But, some time ere the boat came up, the wind,
light though it was, having shifted, had headed
the vessel off, as well as partly broken the
vapors from about her.
Upon gaining a less remote view, the ship,
when made signally visible on the verge of the
leaden-hued swells, with the shreds of fog here
and there raggedly furring her, appeared like a
white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm,
seen perched upon some dun cliff among the
Pyrenees. But it was no purely fanciful resemblance
which now, for a moment, almost
led Captain Delano to think that nothing less
than a ship-load of monks was before him.
Peering over the bulwarks were what really
seemed, in the hazy distance, throngs of dark
cowls; while, fitfully revealed through the
open port-holes, other dark moving figures were
dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the
cloisters.
Upon a still nigher approach, this appearance
was modified, and the true character of the
vessel was plain—a Spanish merchantman of
the first class, carrying negro slaves, amongst
other valuable freight, from one colonial port to
another. A very large, and, in its time, a very
fine vessel, such as in those days were at intervals
encountered along that main; sometimes
superseded Acapulco treasure-ships, or retired
superannuated Italian palaces, still, under a
decline of masters, preserved signs of former
state.
As the whale-boat drew more and more nigh,
the cause of the peculiar pipe-clayed aspect of
the stranger was seen in the slovenly neglect
pervading her. The spars, ropes, and great
part of the bulwarks, looked woolly, from long
unacquaintance with the scraper, tar, and the
brush. Her keel seemed laid, her ribs put
together, and she launched, from Ezekiel's Valley
of Dry Bones.
In the present business in which she was
engaged, the ship's general model and rig appeared
to have undergone no material change
from their original warlike and Froissart pattern.
However, no guns were seen.
The tops were large, and were railed about
with what had once been octagonal net-work,
all now in sad disrepair. These tops hung overhead
like three ruinous aviaries, in one of
which was seen perched, on a ratlin, a white
noddy, a strange fowl, so called from its lethargic,
somnambulistic character, being frequently
the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient
turret, long ago taken by assault, and then left
to decay. Toward the stern, two high-raised
quarter galleries—the balustrades here and
there covered with dry, tindery sea-moss—opening
out from the unoccupied state-cabin, whose
dead-lights, for all the mild weather, were
hermetically closed and calked—these tenantless
balconies hung over the sea as if it were
the grand Venetian canal. But the principal
relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of
the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved
with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned
about by groups of mythological or symbolical
devices; uppermost and central of which was
a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the
prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise
masked.
Whether the ship had a figure-head, or only
a plain beak, was not quite certain, owing to
canvas wrapped about that part, either to protect
it while undergoing a re-furbishing, or else
decently to hide its decay. Rudely painted or
chalked, as in a sailor freak, along the forward
was the sentence, “Seguid vuestro jefe,” (follow
your leader); while upon the tarnished headboards,
near by, appeared, in stately capitals,
once gilt, the ship's name, “San Dominick,”
each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings
of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning
weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept
to and fro over the name, with every hearselike
roll of the hull.
As, at last, the boat was hooked from the bow
along toward the gangway amidship, its keel,
while yet some inches separated from the hull,
harshly grated as on a sunken coral reef. It
proved a huge bunch of conglobated barnacles
adhering below the water to the side like a
wen—a token of baffling airs and long calms
passed somewhere in those seas.
Climbing the side, the visitor was at once
surrounded by a clamorous throng of whites
and blacks, but the latter outnumbering the
former more than could have been expected,
negro transportation-ship as the stranger in
port was. But, in one language, and as with
one voice, all poured out a common tale of
were not a few, exceeded the others in their
dolorous vehemence. The scurvy, together
with the fever, had swept off a great part of
their number, more especially the Spaniards.
Off Cape Horn they had narrowly escaped shipwreck;
then, for days together, they had lain
tranced without wind; their provisions were
low; their water next to none; their lips that
moment were baked.
While Captain Delano was thus made the
mark of all eager tongues, his one eager glance
took in all faces, with every other object about
him.
Always upon first boarding a large and populous
ship at sea, especially a foreign one, with
a nondescript crew such as Lascars or Manilla
men, the impression varies in a peculiar way
from that produced by first entering a strange
house with strange inmates in a strange land.
Both house and ship—the one by its walls and
blinds, the other by its high bulwarks like
ramparts—hoard from view their interiors till
the last moment: but in the case of the ship
there is this addition; that the living spectacle
has, in contrast with the blank ocean
which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment.
The ship seems unreal; these
strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a
shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep,
which directly must receive back what it
gave.
Perhaps it was some such influence, as above
is attempted to be described, which, in Captain
Delano's mind, heightened whatever, upon a
staid scrutiny, might have seemed unusual;
especially the conspicuous figures of four elderly
grizzled negroes, their heads like black, doddered
willow tops, who, in venerable contrast
to the tumult below them, were couched,
sphynx-like, one on the starboard cat-head,
another on the larboard, and the remaining pair
face to face on the opposite bulwarks above
the main-chains. They each had bits of unstranded
old junk in their hands, and, with a
sort of stoical self-content, were picking the
junk into oakum, a small heap of which lay
by their sides. They accompanied the task with
a continuous, low, monotonous chant; droning
bag-pipers playing a funeral march.
The quarter-deck rose into an ample elevated
poop, upon the forward verge of which, lifted,
like the oakum-pickers, some eight feet above
the general throng, sat along in a row, separated
by regular spaces, the cross-legged figures
of six other blacks; each with a rusty hatchet
in his hand, which, with a bit of brick and a rag,
he was engaged like a scullion in scouring;
while between each two was a small stack of
hatchets, their rusted edges turned forward
awaiting a like operation. Though occasionally
the four oakum-pickers would briefly
address some person or persons in the crowd
below, yet the six hatchet-polishers neither
spoke to others, nor breathed a whisper
among themselves, but sat intent upon their
task, except at intervals, when, with the
peculiar love in negroes of uniting industry
with pastime, two and two they sideways
clashed their hatchets together, like cymbals,
with a barbarous din. All six, unlike
the generality, had the raw aspect of unsophisticated
Africans.
But that first comprehensive glance which
took in those ten figures, with scores less conspicuous,
rested but an instant upon them, as,
impatient of the hubbub of voices, the visitor
turned in quest of whomsoever it might be
that commanded the ship.
But as if not unwilling to let nature make
known her own case among his suffering charge,
or else in despair of restraining it for the time,
the Spanish captain, a gentlemanly, reserved-looking,
and rather young man to a stranger's
eye, dressed with singular richness, but bearing
plain traces of recent sleepless cares and disquietudes,
stood passively by, leaning against
the main-mast, at one moment casting a dreary,
spiritless look upon his excited people, at the
next an unhappy glance toward his visitor. By
his side stood a black of small stature, in whose
rude face, as occasionally, like a shepherd's dog,
he mutely turned it up into the Spaniard's, sorrow
and affection were equally blended.
Struggling through the throng, the American
advanced to the Spaniard, assuring him of his
sympathies, and offering to render whatever
assistance might be in his power. To which
and ceremonious acknowledgments, his national
formality dusked by the saturnine mood of
ill-health.
But losing no time in mere compliments,
Captain Delano, returning to the gangway, had
his basket of fish brought up; and as the wind
still continued light, so that some hours at
least must elapse ere the ship could be brought
to the anchorage, he bade his men return to the
sealer, and fetch back as much water as the
whale-boat could carry, with whatever soft
bread the steward might have, all the remaining
pumpkins on board, with a box of sugar,
and a dozen of his private bottles of cider.
Not many minutes after the boat's pushing
off, to the vexation of all, the wind entirely
died away, and the tide turning, began drifting
back the ship helplessly seaward. But trusting
this would not long last, Captain Delano
sought, with good hopes, to cheer up the strangers,
feeling no small satisfaction that, with persons
in thier condition, he could—thanks to his
frequent voyages along the Spanish main—converse
with some freedom in their native tongue.
While left alone with them, he was not long
in observing some things tending to heighten
his first impressions; but surprise was lost
in pity, both for the Spaniards and blacks,
alike evidently reduced from scarcity of water
and provisions; while long-continued suffering
seemed to have brought out the less good-natured
qualities of the negroes, besides, at the
same time, impairing the Spaniard's authority
over them. But, under the circumstances, precisely
this condition of things was to have been
anticipated. In armies, navies, cities, or families,
in nature herself, nothing more relaxes
good order than misery. Still, Captain Delano
was not without the idea, that had Benito
Cereno been a man of greater energy, misrule
would hardly have come to the present pass.
But the debility, constitutional or induced by
hardships, bodily and mental, of the Spanish
captain, was too obvious to be overlooked. A
prey to settled dejection, as if long mocked
with hope he would not now indulge it, even
when it had ceased to be a mock, the prospect
of that day, or evening at furthest, lying at
anchor, with plenty of water for his people,
seemed in no perceptible degree to encourage
him. His mind appeared unstrung, if not still
more seriously affected. Shut up in these oaken
walls, chained to one dull round of command,
whose unconditionality cloyed him, like some
hypochondriac abbot he moved slowly about,
at times suddenly pausing, starting, or staring,
biting his lip, biting his finger-nail, flushing,
paling, twitching his beard, with other symptoms
of an absent or moody mind. This distempered
spirit was lodged, as before hinted, in
as distempered a frame. He was rather tall,
but seemed never to have been robust, and now
with nervous suffering was almost worn to a
skeleton. A tendency to some pulmonary
complaint appeared to have been lately confirmed.
His voice was like that of one with
lungs half gone—hoarsely suppressed, a husky
whisper. No wonder that, as in this state he
tottered about, his private servant apprehensively
followed him. Sometimes the negro
gave his master his arm, or took his handkerchief
out of his pocket for him; performing
these and similar offices with that affectionate
fraternal acts in themselves but menial; and
which has gained for the negro the repute of
making the most pleasing body-servant in the
world; one, too, whom a master need be on no
stiffly superior terms with, but may treat with
familiar trust; less a servant than a devoted
companion.
Marking the noisy indocility of the blacks
in general, as well as what seemed the sullen
inefficiency of the whites it was not without
humane satisfaction that Captain Delano witnessed
the steady good conduct of Babo.
But the good conduct of Babo, hardly more
than the ill-behavior of others, seemed to withdraw
the half-lunatic Don Benito from his
cloudy languor. Not that such precisely was
the impression made by the Spaniard on the
mind of his visitor. The Spaniard's individual
unrest was, for the present, but noted as a conspicuous
feature in the ship's general affliction.
Still, Captain Delano was not a little concerned
at what he could not help taking for the
time to be Don Benito's unfriendly indifference
towards himself. The Spaniard's manner,
which he seemed at no pains to disguise.
But this the American in charity ascribed to
the harassing effects of sickness, since, in former
instances, he had noted that there are peculiar
natures on whom prolonged physical
suffering seems to cancel every social instinct
of kindness; as if, forced to black bread themselves,
they deemed it but equity that each
person coming nigh them should, indirectly,
by some slight or affront, be made to partake
of their fare.
But ere long Captain Delano bethought him
that, indulgent as he was at the first, in judging
the Spaniard, he might not, after all, have
exercised charity enough. At bottom it was
Don Benito's reserve which displeased him;
but the same reserve was shown towards all
but his faithful personal attendant. Even the
formal reports which, according to sea-usage,
were, at stated times, made to him by some
petty underling, either a white, mulatto or
black, he hardly had patience enough to listen
to, without betraying contemptuous aversion.
His manner upon such occasions was, in its
to have been his imperial countryman's,
Charles V., just previous to the anchoritish retirement
of that monarch from the throne.
This splenetic disrelish of his place was
evinced in almost every function pertaining to it.
Proud as he was moody, he condescended to no
personal mandate. Whatever special orders were
necessary, their delivery was delegated to his
body-servant, who in turn transferred them to
their ultimate destination, through runners,
alert Spanish boys or slave boys, like pages or
pilot-fish within easy call continually hovering
round Don Benito. So that to have beheld this
undermonstrative invalid gliding about, apathetic
and mute, no landsman could have
dreamed that in him was lodged a dictatorship
beyond which, while at sea, there was no earthly
appeal.
Thus, the Spaniard, regarded in his reserve,
seemed the involuntary victim of mental disorder.
But, in fact, his reserve might, in some
degree, have proceeded from design. If so,
then here was evinced the unhealthy climax of
that icy though conscientious policy, more or
which, except in signal emergencies, obliterates
alike the manifestation of sway with every
trace of sociality; transforming the man into
a block, or rather into a loaded cannon, which,
until there is call for thunder, has nothing to
say.
Viewing him in this light, it seemed but a
natural token of the perverse habit induced by
a long course of such hard self-restraint, that,
notwithstanding the present condition of his
ship, the Spaniard should still persist in a demeanor,
which, however harmless, or, it may
be, appropriate, in a well-appointed vessel, such
as the San Dominick might have been at the
outset of the voyage, was anything but judicious
now. But the Spaniard, perhaps, thought
that it was with captains as with gods: reserve,
under all events, must still be their cue. But
probably this appearance of slumbering dominion
might have been but an attempted disguise
to conscious imbecility—not deep policy, but
shallow device. But be all this as it might,
whether Don Benito's manner was designed or
not, the more Captain Delano noted its pervading
particular manifestation of that reserve towards
himself.
Neither were his thoughts taken up by the
captain alone. Wonted to the quiet orderliness
of the sealer's comfortable family of a
crew, the noisy confusion of the San Dominick's
suffering host repeatedly challenged his
eye. Some prominent breaches, not only of
discipline but of decency, were observed. These
Captain Delano could not but ascribe, in the
main, to the absence of those subordinate
deck-officers to whom, along with higher duties,
is intrusted what may be styled the police
department of a populous ship. True, the old
oakum-pickers appeared at times to act the
part of monitorial constables to their countrymen,
the blacks; but though occasionally succeeding
in allaying trifling outbreaks now
and then between man and man, they could
do little or nothing toward establishing general
quiet. The San Dominick was in the condition
of a transatlantic emigrant ship, among
whose multitude of living freight are some
individuals, doubtless, as little troublesome as
of such with their ruder companions
are of not so much avail as the unfriendly arm
of the mate. What the San Dominick wanted
was, what the emigrant ship has, stern superior
officers. But on these decks not so much
as a fourth-mate was to be seen.
The visitor's curiosity was roused to learn
the particulars of those mishaps which had
brought about such absenteeism, with its consequences;
because, though deriving some inkling
of the voyage from the wails which at the
first moment had greeted him, yet of the details
no clear understanding had been had.
The best account would, doubtless, be given
by the captain. Yet at first the visitor was
loth to ask it, unwilling to provoke some distant
rebuff. But plucking up courage, he at
last accosted Don Benito, renewing the expression
of his benevolent interest, adding, that
did he (Captain Delano) but know the particulars
of the ship's misfortunes, he would, perhaps,
be better able in the end to relieve
them. Would Don Benito favor him with the
whole story.
Don Benito faltered; then, like some somnambulist
suddenly interfered with, vacantly
stared at his visitor, and ended by looking
down on the deck. He maintained this posture
so long, that Captain Delano, almost equally
disconcerted, and involuntarily almost as rude,
turned suddenly from him, walking forward to
accost one of the Spanish seamen for the desired
information. But he had hardly gone
five paces, when, with a sort of eagerness, Don
Benito invited him back, regretting his momentary
absence of mind, and professing readiness
to gratify him.
While most part of the story was being
given, the two captains stood on the after part
of the main-deck, a privileged spot, no one
being near but the servant.
“It is now a hundred and ninety days,”
began the Spaniard, in his husky whisper,
“that this ship, well officered and well manned,
with several cabin passengers—some fifty Spaniards
in all—sailed from Buenos Ayres bound
to Lima, with a general cargo, hardware, Paraguay
tea and the like—and,” pointing forward,
“that parcel of negroes, now not more than a
over three hundred souls. Off Cape Horn
we had heavy gales. In one moment, by night,
three of my best officers, with fifteen sailors,
were lost, with the main-yard; the spar
snapping under them in the slings, as they
sought, with heavers, to beat down the icy
sail. To lighten the hull, the heavier sacks of
mata were thrown into the sea, with most of
the water-pipes lashed on deck at the time.
And this last necessity it was, combined with
the prolonged detentions afterwards experienced,
which eventually brought about our
chief causes of suffering. When—”
Here there was a sudden fainting attack of
his cough, brought on, no doubt, by his mental
distress. His servant sustained him, and drawing
a cordial from his pocket placed it to his
lips. He a little revived. But unwilling to
leave him unsupported while yet imperfectly
restored, the black with one arm still encircled
his master, at the same time keeping his eye
fixed on his face, as if to watch for the first
sign of complete restoration, or relapse, as the
event might prove.
The Spaniard proceeded, but brokenly and
obscurely, as one in a dream.
—“Oh, my God! rather than pass through
what I have, with joy I would have hailed the
most terrible gales; but—”
His cough returned and with increased violence;
this subsiding, with reddened lips and
closed eyes he fell heavily against his supporter.
“His mind wanders. He was thinking of
the plague that followed the gales,” plaintively
sighed the servant; “my poor, poor master!”
wringing one hand, and with the other
wiping the mouth. “But be patient, Señor,'
again turning to Captain Delano, “these fits
do not last long; master will soon be himself.”
Don Benito reviving, went on; but as this
portion of the story was very brokenly delivered,
the substance only will here be set down.
It appeared that after the ship had been
many days tossed in storms off the Cape, the
scurvy broke out, carrying off numbers of the
whites and blacks. When at last they had
worked round into the Pacific, their spars and
sails were so damaged, and so inadequately
whom were become invalids, that, unable to
lay her northerly course by the wind, which
was powerful, the unmanageable ship, for successive
days and nights, was blown northwestward,
where the breeze suddenly deserted her,
in unknown waters, to sultry calms. The
absence of the water-pipes now proved as fatal
to life as before their presence had menaced it.
Induced, or at least aggravated, by the more
than scanty allowance of water, a malignant
fever followed the scurvy; with the excessive
heat of the lengthened calm, making such short
work of it as to sweep away, as by billows,
whole families of the Africans, and a yet larger
number, proportionably, of the Spaniards, including,
by a luckless fatality, every remaining
officer on board. Consequently, in the smart
west winds eventually following the calm, the
already rent sails, having to be simply dropped,
not furled, at need, had been gradually reduced
to the beggars' rags they were now. To procure
substitutes for his lost sailors, as well as
supplies of water and sails, the captain, at the
earliest opportunity, had made for Baldivia, the
America; but upon nearing the coast the thick
weather had prevented him from so much as
sighting that harbor. Since which period, almost
without a crew, and almost without
canvas and almost without water, and, at intervals,
giving its added dead to the sea, the San
Dominick had been battle-dored about by contrary
winds, inveigled by currents, or grown
weedy in calms. Like a man lost in woods,
more than once she had doubled upon her own
track.
“But throughout these calamities,” huskily
continued Don Benito, painfully turning in the
half embrace of his servant, “I have to thank
those negroes you see, who, though to your
inexperienced eyes appearing unruly, have, indeed,
conducted themselves with less of restlessness
than even their owner could have
thought possible under such circumstances.”
Here he again fell faintly back. Again his
mind wandered; but he rallied, and less obscurely
proceeded.
“Yes, their owner was quite right in assuring
me that no fetters would be needed with
transportation, those negroes have always remained
upon deck—not thrust below, as in the
Guinea-men—they have, also, from the beginning,
been freely permitted to range within
given bounds at their pleasure.”
Once more the faintness returned—his mind
roved—but, recovering, he resumed:
“But it is Babo here to whom, under God, I
owe not only my own preservation, but likewise
to him, chiefly, the merit is due, of pacifying
his more ignorant brethren, when at intervals
tempted to murmurings.”
“Ah, master,” sighed the black, bowing his
face, “don't speak of me; Babo is nothing;
what Babo has done was but duty.”
“Faithful fellow!” cried Captain Delano.
“Don Benito, I envy you such a friend; slave
I cannot call him.”
As master and man stood before him, the
black upholding the white, Captain Delano
could not but bethink him of the beauty of
that relationship which could present such a
spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence
on the other. The scene was heightened
relative positions. The Spaniard wore a loose
Chili jacket of dark velvet; white small-clothes
and stockings, with silver buckles at the
knee and instep; a high-crowned sombrero, of
fine grass; a slender sword, silver mounted,
hung from a knot in his sash—the last being an
almost invariable adjunct, more for utility than
ornament, of a South American gentleman's
dress to this hour. Excepting when his occasional
nervous contortions brought about disarray,
there was a certain precision in his attire
curiously at variance with the unsightly disorder
around; especially in the belittered
Ghetto, forward of the main-mast, wholly occupied
by the blacks.
The servant wore nothing but wide trowsers,
apparently, from their coarseness and patches,
made out of some old topsail; they were clean,
and confined at the waist by a bit of unstranded
rope, which, with his composed, deprecatory
air at times, made him look something like a
begging friar of St. Francis.
However unsuitable for the time and place,
at least in the blunt-thinking American's eyes,
of all his afflictions, the toilette of Don Benito
might not, in fashion at least, have gone beyond
the style of the day among South Americans
of his class. Though on the present voyage
sailing from Buenos Ayres, he had avowed himself
a native and resident of Chili, whose
inhabitants had not so generally adopted the
plain coat and once plebeian pantaloons; but,
with a becoming modification, adhered to their
provincial costume, picturesque as any in the
world. Still, relatively to the pale history of
the voyage, and his own pale face, there seemed
something so incongruous in the Spaniard's
apparel, as almost to suggest the image of an
invalid courtier tottering about London streets
in the time of the plague.
The portion of the narrative which, perhaps,
most excited interest, as well as some surprise,
considering the latitudes in question, was the
long calms spoken of, and more particularly the
ship's so long drifting about. Without communicating
the opinion, of course, the American
could not but impute at least part of the
detentions both to clumsy seamanship and
yellow hands, he easily inferred that the young
captain had not got into command at the hawsehole,
but the cabin-window; and if so, why
wonder at incompetence, in youth, sickness,
and gentility united?
But drowning criticism in compassion, after
a fresh repetition of his sympathies, Captain
Delano, having heard out his story, not only
engaged, as in the first place, to see Don Benito
and his people supplied in their immediate
bodily needs, but, also, now further promised
to assist him in procuring a large permanent
supply of water, as well as some sails and rigging;
and, though it would involve no small
embarrassment to himself, yet he would spare
three of his best seamen for temporary deck
officers; so that without delay the ship might
proceed to Conception, there fully to refit for
Lima, her destined port.
Such generosity was not without its effect,
even upon the invalid. His face lighted up;
eager and hectic, he met the honest glance of
his visitor. With gratitude he seemed overcome.
“This excitement is bad for master,” whispered
the servant, taking his arm, and with
soothing words gently drawing him aside.
When Don Benito returned, the American
was pained to observe that his hopefulness, like
the sudden kindling in his cheek, was but
febrile and transient.
Ere long, with a joyless mien, looking up
towards the poop, the host invited his guest to
accompany him there, for the benefit of what
little breath of wind might be stirring.
As, during the telling of the story, Captain
Delano had once or twice started at the occasional
cymballing of the hatchet-polishers,
wondering why such an interruption should be
allowed, especially in that part of the ship, and
in the ears of an invalid; and moreover, as the
hatchets had anything but an attractive look,
and the handlers of them still less so, it was,
therefore, to tell the truth, not without some
lurking reluctance, or even shrinking, it may
be, that Captain Delano, with apparent complaisance,
acquiesced in his host's invitation. The
more so, since, with an untimely caprice of
punctilio, rendered distressing by his cadaverous
solemnly insisted upon his guest's preceding him
up the ladder leading to the elevation; where,
one on each side of the last step, sat for armorial
supporters and sentries two of the ominous
file. Gingerly enough stepped good Captain
Delano between them, and in the instant of
leaving them behind, like one running the
gauntlet, he felt an apprehensive twitch in the
calves of his legs.
But when, facing about, he saw the whole
file, like so many organ-grinders, still stupidly
intent on their work, unmindful of everything
beside, he could not but smile at his late
fidgety panic.
Presently, while standing with his host,
looking forward upon the decks below, he was
struck by one of those instances of insubordination
previously alluded to. Three black
boys, with two Spanish boys, were sitting
together on the hatches, scraping a rude wooden
platter, in which some scanty mess had
recently been cooked. Suddenly, one of the
black boys, enraged at a word dropped by one
of his white companions, seized a knife, and,
struck the lad over the head, inflicting
a gash from which blood flowed.
In amazement, Captain Delano inquired what
this meant. To which the pale Don Benito
dully muttered, that it was merely the sport
of the lad.
“Pretty serious sport, truly,” rejoined Captain
Delano. “Had such a thing happened on
board the Bachelor's Delight, instant punishment
would have followed.”
At these words the Spaniard turned upon
the American one of his sudden, staring, half-lunatic
looks; then, relapsing into his torpor,
answered, “Doubtless, doubtless, Señor.”
Is it, thought Captain Delano, that this hapless
man is one of those paper captains I've
known, who by policy wink at what by power
they cannot put down? I know no sadder
sight than a commander who has little of command
but the name.
“I should think, Don Benito,” he now said,
glancing towards the oakum-picker who had
sought to interfere with the boys, “that you
would find it advantageous to keep all your
no matter at what useless task, and no matter
what happens to the ship. Why, even with
my little band, I find such a course indispensable.
I once kept a crew on my quarter-deck
thrumming mats for my cabin, when, for three
days, I had given up my ship—mats, men, and
all—for a speedy loss, owing to the violence
of a gale, in which we could do nothing but
helplessly drive before it.”
“Doubtless, doubtless,” muttered Don Benito.
“But,” continued Captain Delano, again
glancing upon the oakum-pickers and then at
the hatchet-polishers, near by, “I see you keep
some, at least, of your host employed.”
“Yes,” was again the vacant response.
“Those old men there, shaking their pows
from their pulpits,” continued Captain Delano,
pointing to the oakum-pickers, “seem to act
the part of old dominies to the rest, little
heeded as their admonitions are at times. Is
this voluntary on their part, Don Benito, or
have you appointed them shepherds to your
flock of black sheep?”
“What posts they fill, I appointed them,”
rejoined the Spaniard, in an acrid tone, as if
resenting some supposed satiric reflection.
“And these others, these Ashantee conjurors
here,” continued Captain Delano, rather uneasily
eying the brandished steel of the hatchet-polishers,
where, in spots, it had been brought
to a shine, “this seems a curious business they
are at, Don Benito?”
“In the gales we met,” answered the Spaniard,
“what of our general cargo was not
thrown overboard was much damaged by the
brine. Since coming into calm weather, I have
had several cases of knives and hatchets daily
brought up for overhauling and cleaning.”
“A prudent idea, Don Benito. You are
part owner of ship and cargo, I presume; but
none of the slaves, perhaps?”
`I am owner of all you see,” impatiently
returned Don Benito, “except the main company
of blacks, who belonged to my late friend,
Alexandro Aranda.”
As he mentioned this name, his air was
heart-broken; his knees shook; his servant
supported him.
Thinking he divined the cause of such unusual
emotion, to confirm his surmise, Captain
Delano, after a pause, said: “And may I ask,
Don Benito, whether—since awhile ago you
spoke of some cabin passengers—the friend,
whose loss so afflicts you, at the outset of the
voyage accompanied his blacks?”
“Yes.”
“But died of the fever?”
`Died of the fever. Oh, could I but—”
Again quivering, the Spaniard paused.
“Pardon me,” said Captain Delano, lowly,
“but I think that, by a sympathetic experience,
I conjecture, Don Benito, what it is that
gives the keener edge to your grief. It was
once my hard fortune to lose, at sea, a dear
friend, my own brother, then supercargo. Assured
of the welfare of his spirit, its departure
I could have borne like a man; but that honest
eye, that honest hand—both of which had so
often met mine—and that warm heart; all,
all—like scraps to the dogs—to throw all to
the sharks! It was then I vowed never to
have for fellow-voyager a man I loved, unless,
unbeknown to him, I had provided every requisite,
mortal part for interment on shore. Were
your friend's remains now on board this ship,
Don Benito, not thus strangely would the
mention of his name affect you.”
“On board this ship?” echoed the Spaniard.
Then, with horrified gestures, as directed against
some spectre, he unconsciously fell into the
ready arms of his attendant, who, with a silent
appeal toward Captain Delano, seemed beseeching
him not again to broach a theme so
unspeakably distressing to his master.
This poor fellow now, thought the pained
American, is the victim of that sad superstition
which associates goblins with the deserted
body of man, as ghosts with an abandoned
house. How unlike are we made! What to
me, in like case, would have been a solemn
satisfaction, the bare suggestion, even, terrifies
the Spaniard into this trance. Poor Alexandro
Aranda! what would you say could you here
see your friend—who, on former voyages,
when you, for months, were left behind, has,
I dare say, often longed, and longed, for one
peep at you—now transported with terror at
him.
At this moment, with a dreary grave-yard
toll, betokening a flaw, the ship's forecastle
bell, smote by one of the grizzled oakum-pickers,
proclaimed ten o'clock, through the leaden
calm; when Captain Delano's attention was
caught by the moving figure of a gigantic
black, emerging from the general crowd below,
and slowly advancing towards the elevated
poop. An iron collar was about his neck,
from which depended a chain, thrice wound
round his body; the terminating links padlocked
together at a broad band of iron, his girdle.
“How like a mute Atufal moves,” murmured
the servant.
The black mounted the steps of the poop,
and, like a brave prisoner, brought up to receive
sentence, stood in unquailing muteness
before Don Benito, now recovered from his
attack.
At the first glimpse of his approach, Don
Benito had started, a resentful shadow swept
over his face; and, as with the sudden memory
of bootless rage, his white lips glued together.
This is some mulish mutineer, thought Captain
Delano, surveying, not without a mixture
of admiration, the colossal form of the negro.
“See, he waits your question, master,” said
the servant.
Thus reminded, Don Benito, nervously averting
his glance, as if shunning, by anticipation,
some rebellious response, in a disconcerted
voice, thus spoke:—
“Atufal, will you ask my pardon, now?”
The black was silent.
“Again, master,” murmured the servant,
with bitter upbraiding eyeing his countryman,
“Again, master; he will bend to master yet.”
“Answer,” said Don Benito, still averting
his glance, “say but the one word, pardon, and
your chains shall be off.”
Upon this, the black, slowly raising both
arms, let them lifelessly fall, his links clanking,
his head bowed; as much as to say, “no, I am
content.”
“Go,” said Don Benito, with inkept and
unknown emotion.
Deliberately as he had come, the black
obeyed.
“Excuse me, Don Benito,” said Captain Delano,
“but this scene surprises me; what means
it, pray?”
“It means that that negro alone, of all the
band, has given me peculiar cause of offense.
I have put him in chains; I —”
Here he paused; his hand to his head, as if
there were a swimming there, or a sudden bewilderment
of memory had come over him; but
meeting his servant's kindly glance seemed reassured,
and proceeded:—
“I could not scourge such a form. But I
told him he must ask my pardon. As yet he
has not. At my command, every two hours he
stands before me.”
“And how long has this been?”
“Some sixty days.”
“And obedient in all else? And respectful?”
“Yes.”
“Upon my conscience, then,” exclaimed Captain
Delano, impulsively, “he has a royal spirit
in him, this fellow.”
“He may have some right to it,” bitterly returned
Don Benito, “he says he was king in his
own land.”
“Yes,” said the servant, entering a word,
“those slits in Atufal's ears once held wedges
of gold; but poor Babo here, in his own land,
was only a poor slave; a black man's slave was
Babo, who now is the white's.”
Somewhat annoyed by these conversational
familiarities, Captain Delano turned curiously
upon the attendant, then glanced inquiringly
at his master; but, as if long wonted to these
little informalities, neither master nor man
seemed to understand him.
“What, pray, was Atufal's offense, Don
Benito?” asked Captain Delano; “if it was
not something very serious, take a fool's advice,
and, in view of his general docility, as well as
in some natural respect for his spirit, remit him
his penalty.”
“No, no, master never will do that,” here
murmured the servant to himself, “proud Atufal
must first ask master's pardon. The slave
there carries the padlock, but master here
carries the key.”
His attention thus directed, Captain Delano
now noticed for the first, that, suspended by a
slender silken cord, from Don Benito's neck,
syllables, divining the key's purpose, he
smiled and said:—“So, Don Benito—padlock
and key—significant symbols, truly.”
Biting his lip, Don Benito faltered.
Though the remark of Captain Delano, a
man of such native simplicity as to be incapable
of satire or irony, had been dropped in
playful allusion to the Spaniard's singularly
evidenced lordship over the black; yet the
hypochondriac seemed some way to have taken
it as a malicious reflection upon his confessed
inability thus far to break down, at least, on a
verbal summons, the entrenched will of the
slave. Deploring this supposed misconception,
yet despairing of correcting it, Captain Delano
shifted the subject; but finding his companion
more than ever withdrawn, as if still sourly
digesting the lees of the presumed affront
above-mentioned, by-and-by Captain Delano
likewise became less talkative, oppressed,
against his own will, by what seemed the secret
vindictiveness of the morbidly sensitive Spaniard.
But the good sailor, himself of a quite
contrary disposition, refrained, on his part,
of resentment, and if silent, was only so from
contagion.
Presently the Spaniard, assisted by his servant
somewhat discourteously crossed over from
his guest; a procedure which, sensibly enough,
might have been allowed to pass for idle caprice
of ill-humor, had not master and man,
lingering round the corner of the elevated
skylight, began whispering together in low
voices. This was unpleasing. And more; the
moody air of the Spaniard, which at times had
not been without a sort of valetudinarian stateliness,
now seemed anything but dignified;
while the menial familiarity of the servant lost
its original charm of simple-hearted attachment.
In his embarrassment, the visitor turned his
face to the other side of the ship. By so doing,
his glance accidentally fell on a young
Spanish sailor, a coil of rope in his hand, just
stepped from the deck to the first round of
the mizzen-rigging. Perhaps the man would
not have been particularly noticed, were it
not that, during his ascent to one of the yards,
eye fixed on Captain Delano, from whom, presently,
it passed, as if by a natural sequence, to
the two whisperers.
His own attention thus redirected to that
quarter, Captain Delano gave a slight start.
From something in Don Benito's manner just
then, it seemed as if the visitor had, at least
partly, been the subject of the withdrawn consultation
going on—a conjecture as little agreeable
to the guest as it was little flattering to
the host.
The singular alternations of courtesy and ill-breeding
in the Spanish captain were unaccountable,
except on one of two suppositions—
innocent lunacy, or wicked imposture.
But the first idea, though it might naturally
have occurred to an indifferent observer, and,
in some respect, had not hitherto been wholly
a stranger to Captain Delano's mind, yet, now
that, in an incipient way, he began to regard
the stranger's conduct something in the light
of an intentional affront, of course the idea of
lunacy was virtually vacated. But if not a
lunatic, what then? Under the circumstances,
the part now acted by his host? The man was
an impostor. Some low-born adventurer, masquerading
as an oceanic grandee; yet so
ignorant of the first requisites of mere gentlemanhood
as to be betrayed into the present
remarkable indecorum. That strange ceremoniousness,
too, at other times evinced, seemed not
uncharacteristic of one playing a part above
his real level. Benito Cereno—Don Benito
Cereno—a sounding name. One, too, at that
period, not unknown, in the surname, to supercargoes
and sea captains trading along the
Spanish Main, as belonging to one of the most
enterprising and extensive mercantile families
in all those provinces; several members of it
having titles; a sort of Castilian Rothschild,
with a noble brother, or cousin, in every great
trading town of South America. The alleged
Don Benito was in early manhood, about
twenty-nine or thirty. To assume a sort of
roving cadetship in the maritime affairs of such
a house, what more likely scheme for a young
knave of talent and spirit? But the Spaniard
was a pale invalid. Never mind. For even to
craft of some tricksters had been known to
attain. To think that, under the aspect of infantile
weakness, the most savage energies
might be couched—those velvets of the Spaniard
but the silky paw to his fangs.
From no train of thought did these fancies
come; not from within, but from without;
suddenly, too, and in one throng, like hoar
frost; yet as soon to vanish as the mild sun of
Captain Delano's good-nature regained its meridian.
Glancing over once more towards his host—
whose side-face, revealed above the skylight,
was now turned towards him—he was struck
by the profile, whose clearness of cut was refined
by the thinness, incident to ill-health, as
well as ennobled about the chin by the beard.
Away with suspicion. He was a true off-shoot
of a true hidalgo Cereno.
Relieved by these and other better thoughts,
the visitor, lightly humming a tune, now began
indifferently pacing the poop, so as not to betray
to Don Benito that he had at all mistrusted
incivility, much less duplicity; for such
the event; though, for the present, the circumstance
which had provoked that distrust remained
unexplained. But when that little
mystery should have been cleared up, Captain
Delano thought he might extremely regret it,
did he allow Don Benito to become aware that
he had indulged in ungenerous surmises. In
short, to the Spaniard's black-letter text, it was
best, for awhile, to leave open margin.
Presently, his pale face twitching and overcast,
the Spaniard, still supported by his attendant,
moved over towards his guest, when, with
even more than his usual embarrassment, and a
strange sort of intriguing intonation in his
husky whisper, the following conversation began:—
“Señor, may I ask how long you have lain
at this isle?”
“Oh, but a day or two, Don Benito.”
“And from what port are you last?”
“Canton.”
“And there, Señor, you exchanged your sealskins
for teas and silks, I think you said?”
“Yes. Silks, mostly.”
“And the balance you took in specie, perhaps?”
Captain Delano, fidgeting a little, answered—
“Yes; some silver; not a very great deal,
though.”
“Ah—well. May I ask how many men
have you, Señor?”
Captain Delano slightly started, but answered—
“About five-and-twenty, all told.”
“And at present, Señor, all on board, I suppose?”
“All on board, Don Benito,” replied the
Captain, now with satisfaction.
“And will be to-night, Señor?”
At this last question, following so many pertinacious
ones, for the soul of him Captain
Delano could not but look very earnestly at
the questioner, who, instead of meeting the
glance, with every token of craven discomposure
dropped his eyes to the deck; presenting
an unworthy contrast to his servant, who, just
then, was kneeling at his feet, adjusting a loose
shoe-buckle; his disengaged face meantime,
his master's downcast one.
The Spaniard, still with a guilty shuffle, repeated
his question:
“And—and will be to-night, Señor?”
“Yes, for aught I know,” returned Captain
Delano—“but nay,” rallying himself into fearless
truth, “some of them talked of going off
on another fishing party about midnight.”
“Your ships generally go—go more or less
armed, I believe, Señor?”
“Oh, a six-pounder or two, in case of emergency,”
was the intrepidly indifferent reply,
“with a small stock of muskets, sealing-spears,
and cutlasses, you know.”
As he thus responded, Captain Delano again
glanced at Don Benito, but the latter's eyes
were averted; while abruptly and awkwardly
shifting the subject, he made some peevish allusion
to the calm, and then, without apology,
once more, with his attendant, withdrew to
the opposite bulwarks, where the whispering
was resumed.
At this moment, and ere Captain Delano
could cast a cool thought upon what had just
was seen descending from the rigging.
In act of stooping over to spring inboard to
the deck, his voluminous, unconfined frock, or
shirt, of coarse woolen, much spotted with
tar, opened out far down the chest, revealing
a soiled under garment of what seemed the
finest linen, edged, about the neck, with a
narrow blue ribbon, sadly faded and worn. At
this moment the young sailor's eye was again
fixed on the whisperers, and Captain Delano
thought he observed a lurking significance in
it, as if silent signs, of some Freemason sort,
had that instant been interchanged.
This once more impelled his own glance in
the direction of Don Benito, and, as before,
he could not but infer that himself formed the
subject of the conference. He paused. The
sound of the hatchet-polishing fell on his ears.
He cast another swift side-look at the two.
They had the air of conspirators. In connection
with the late questionings, and the incident
of the young sailor, these things now
begat such return of involuntary suspicion, that
the singular guilelessness of the American could
expression, he crossed over to the two
rapidly, saying:—“Ha, Don Benito, your black
here seems high in your trust; a sort of privycounselor,
in fact.”
Upon this, the servant looked up with a
good-natured grin, but the master started as
from a venomous bite. It was a moment or
two before the Spaniard sufficiently recovered
himself to reply; which he did, at last, with
cold constraint:—“Yes, Señor, I have trust in
Babo.”
Here Babo, changing his previous grin of
mere animal humor into an intelligent smile,
not ungratefully eyed his master.
Finding that the Spaniard now stood silent
and reserved, as if involuntarily, or purposely
giving hint that his guest's proximity was inconvenient
just then, Captain Delano, unwilling
to appear uncivil even to incivility itself,
made some trivial remark and moved off; again
and again turning over in his mind the mysterious
demeanor of Don Benito Cereno.
He had descended from the poop, and,
wrapped in thought, was passing near a dark
when, perceiving motion there, he looked to
see what moved. The same instant there was
a sparkle in the shadowy hatchway, and he
saw one of the Spanish sailors, prowling there
hurriedly placing his hand in the bosom of his
frock, as if hiding something. Before the man
could have been certain who it was that was
passing, he slunk below out of sight. But
enough was seen of him to make it sure that
he was the same young sailor before noticed in
the rigging.
What was that which so sparkled? thought
Captain Delano. It was no lamp—no match—
no live coal. Could it have been a jewel?
But how come sailors with jewels?—or with
silk-trimmed under-shirts either? Has he been
robbing the trunks of the dead cabin-passengers?
But if so, he would hardly wear one of
the stolen articles on board ship here. Ah, ah
—if, now, that was, indeed, a secret sign I saw
passing between this suspicious fellow and his
captain awhile since; if I could only be certain
that, in my uneasiness, my senses did not deceive
me, then—
Here, passing from one suspicious thing to
another, his mind revolved the strange questions
put to him concerning his ship.
By a curious coincidence, as each point was
recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would
strike up with their hatchets, as in ominous
comment on the white stranger's thoughts.
Pressed by such enigmas and portents, it would
have been almost against nature, had not, even
into the least distrustful heart, some ugly misgivings
obtruded.
Observing the ship, now helplessly fallen
into a current, with enchanted sails, drifting
with increased rapidity seaward; and noting
that, from a lately intercepted projection of the
land, the sealer was hidden, the stout mariner
began to quake at thoughts which he barely
durst confess to himself. Above all, he began
to feel a ghostly dread of Don Benito. And
yet, when he roused himself, dilated his chest,
felt himself strong on his legs, and coolly considered
it—what did all these phantoms amount
to?
Had the Spaniard any sinister scheme, it
must have reference not so much to him (Captain
Delight). Hence the present drifting away of
the one ship from the other, instead of favoring
any such possible scheme, was, for the time, at
least, opposed to it. Clearly any suspicion,
combining such contradictions, must need be
delusive. Beside, was it not absurd to think
of a vessel in distress—a vessel by sickness
almost dismanned of her crew—a vessel whose
inmates were parched for water—was it not a
thousand times absurd that such a craft should,
at present, be of a piratical character; or her
commander, either for himself or those under
him, cherish any desire but for speedy relief
and refreshment? But then, might not general
distress, and thirst in particular, be affected?
And might not that same undiminished
Spanish crew, alleged to have perished off to a
remnant, be at that very moment lurking in
the hold? On heart-broken pretense of entreating
a cup of cold water, fiends in human
form had got into lonely dwellings, nor retired
until a dark deed had been done. And among
the Malay pirates, it was no unusual thing to
lure ships after them into their treacherous
enemy at sea, by the spectacle of thinly manned
or vacant decks, beneath which prowled a
hundred spears with yellow arms ready to
upthrust them through the mats. Not that
Captain Delano had entirely credited such
things. He had heard of them—and now, as
stories, they recurred. The present destination
of the ship was the anchorage. There
she would be near his own vessel. Upon gaining
that vicinity, might not the San Dominick,
like a slumbering volcano, suddenly let loose
energies now hid?
He recalled the Spaniard's manner while
telling his story. There was a gloomy hesitancy
and subterfuge about it. It was just the
manner of one making up his tale for evil
purposes, as he goes. But if that story was
not true, what was the truth? That the ship
had unlawfully come into the Spaniard's possession?
But in many of its details, especially
in reference to the more calamitous parts, such
as the fatalities among the seamen, the consequent
prolonged beating about, the past sufferings
from obstinate calms, and still continued
well as others, Don Benito's story had corroborated
not only the wailing ejaculations of
the indiscriminate multitude, white and black,
but likewise—what seemed impossible to be
counterfeit—by the very expression and play
of every human feature, which Captain Delano
saw. If Don Benito's story was, throughout,
an invention, then every soul on board, down
to the youngest negress, was his carefully
drilled recruit in the plot: an incredible inference.
And yet, if there was ground for mistrusting
his veracity, that inference was a
legitimate one.
But those questions of the Spaniard. There,
indeed, one might pause. Did they not seem
put with much the same object with which
the burglar or assassin, by day-time, reconnoitres
the walls of a house? But, with ill purposes,
to solicit such information openly of the
chief person endangered, and so, in effect, setting
him on his guard; how unlikely a procedure
was that? Absurd, then, to suppose
that those questions had been prompted by
evil designs. Thus, the same conduct, which,
to dispel it. In short, scarce any suspicion or
uneasiness, however apparently reasonable at
the time, which was not now, with equal apparent
reason, dismissed.
At last he began to laugh at his former forebodings;
and laugh at the strange ship for,
in its aspect, someway siding with them, as
it were; and laugh, too, at the odd-looking
blacks, particularly those old scissors-grinders,
the Ashantees; and those bed-ridden old knitting
women, the oakum-pickers; and almost at
the dark Spaniard himself, the central hobgoblin
of all.
For the rest, whatever in a serious way
seemed enigmatical, was now good-naturedly
explained away by the thought that, for the
most part, the poor invalid scarcely knew what
he was about; either sulking in black vapors,
or putting idle questions without sense or object.
Evidently for the present, the man was
not fit to be intrusted with the ship. On
some benevolent plea withdrawing the command
from him, Captain Delano would yet
have to send her to Conception, in charge of
navigator—a plan not more convenient for the
San Dominick than for Don Benito; for, relieved
from all anxiety, keeping wholly to his
cabin, the sick man, under the good nursing
of his servant, would, probably, by the end of
the passage, be in a measure restored to health,
and with that he should also be restored to
authority.
Such were the American's thoughts. They
were tranquilizing. There was a difference
between the idea of Don Benito's darkly
pre-ordaining Captain Delano's fate, and Captain
Delano's lightly arranging Don Benito's.
Nevertheless, it was not without something of
relief that the good seaman presently perceived
his whale-boat in the distance. Its absence
had been prolonged by unexpected detention
at the sealer's side, as well as its returning trip
lengthened by the continual recession of the
goal.
The advancing speck was observed by the
blacks. Their shouts attracted the attention
of Don Benito, who, with a return of courtesy,
approaching Captain Delano, expressed
slight and temporary as they must necessarily
prove.
Captain Delano responded; but while doing
so, his attention was drawn to something passing
on the deck below: among the crowd
climbing the landward bulwarks, anxiously
watching the coming boat, two blacks, to all
appearances accidentally incommoded by one
of the sailors, violently pushed him aside, which
the sailor someway resenting, they dashed him
to the deck, despite the earnest cries of the
oakum-pickers.
“Don Benito,” said Captain Delano quickly,
“do you see what is going on there? Look!”
But, seized by his cough, the Spaniard staggered,
with both hands to his face, on the point
of falling. Captain Delano would have supported
him, but the servant was more alert,
who, with one hand sustaining his master, with
the other applied the cordial. Don Benito restored,
the black withdrew his support, slipping
aside a little, but dutifully remaining within
call of a whisper. Such discretion was here
evinced as quite wiped away, in the visitor's
have attached to the attendant, from the indecorous
conferences before mentioned; showing,
too, that if the servant were to blame, it might
be more the master's fault than his own, since,
when left to himself, he could conduct thus
well.
His glance called away from the spectacle of
disorder to the more pleasing one before him,
Captain Delano could not avoid again congratulating
his host upon possessing such a servant,
who, though perhaps a little too forward now
and then, must upon the whole be invaluable
to one in the invalid's situation.
“Tell me, Don Benito,” he added, with a
smile—“I should like to have your man here,
myself—what will you take for him? Would
fifty doubloons be any object?”
“Master wouldn't part with Babo for a
thousand doubloons,” murmured the black,
overhearing the offer, and taking it in earnest,
and, with the strange vanity of a faithful slave,
appreciated by his master, scorning to hear so
paltry a valuation put upon him by a stranger.
But Don Benito, apparently hardly yet completely
cough, made but some broken reply.
Soon his physical distress became so great,
affecting his mind, too, apparently, that, as
if to screen the sad spectacle, the servant
gently conducted his master below.
Left to himself, the American, to while
away the time till his boat should arrive,
would have pleasantly accosted some one of
the few Spanish seamen he saw; but recalling
something that Don Benito had said touching
their ill conduct, he refrained; as a shipmaster
indisposed to countenance cowardice
or unfaithfulness in seamen.
While, with these thoughts, standing with eye
directed forward towards that handful of sailors,
suddenly he thought that one or two of
them returned the glance and with a sort of
meaning. He rubbed his eyes, and looked
again; but again seemed to see the same
thing. Under a new form, but more obscure
than any previous one, the old suspicions recurred,
but, in the absence of Don Benito,
with less of panic than before. Despite the bad
account given of the sailors, Captain Delano
the poop, he made his way through
the blacks, his movement drawing a queer
cry from the oakum-pickers, prompted by
whom, the negroes, twitching each other aside,
divided before him; but, as if curious to see
what was the object of this deliberate visit
to their Ghetto, closing in behind, in tolerable
order, followed the white stranger up.
His progress thus proclaimed as by mounted
kings-at-arms, and escorted as by a Caffre
guard of honor, Captain Delano, assuming a
good-humored, off-handed air, continued to
advance; now and then saying a blithe word
to the negroes, and his eye curiously surveying
the white faces, here and there sparsely
mixed in with the blacks, like stray white
pawns venturously involved in the ranks of
the chess-men opposed.
While thinking which of them to select for
his purpose, he chanced to observe a sailor
seated on the deck engaged in tarring the strap
of a large block, a circle of blacks squatted
round him inquisitively eying the process.
The mean employment of the man was in
His hand, black with continually thrusting
it into the tar-pot held for him by a
negro, seemed not naturally allied to his face,
a face which would have been a very fine one
but for its haggardness. Whether this 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, when,
through casual association with mental pain,
stamping any visible impress, use one seal—
a hacked one.
Not again that this reflection occurred to
Captain Delano at the time, charitable man
as he was. Rather another idea. Because observing
so singular a haggardness combined
with a dark eye, averted as in trouble and
shame, and then again recalling Don Benito's
confessed ill opinion of his crew, insensibly he
was operated upon by certain general notions
which, while disconnecting pain and abashment
from virtue, invariably link them with
vice.
If, indeed, there by any wickedness on board
that man there has fouled his hand in it, even
as now he fouls it in the pitch. I don't like
to accost him. I will speak to this other,
this old Jack here on the windlass.
He advanced to an old Barcelona tar, in
ragged red breeches and dirty night-cap,
cheeks trenched and bronzed, whiskers dense
as thorn hedges. Seated between two sleepy-looking
Africans, this mariner, like his younger
shipmate, was employed upon some rigging
—splicing a cable—the sleepy-looking blacks
performing the inferior function of holding the
outer parts of the ropes for him.
Upon Captain Delano's approach, the man
at once hung his head below its previous
level; the one necessary for business. It appeared
as if he desired to be thought absorbed,
with more than common fidelity, in his
task. Being addressed, he glanced up, but
with what seemed a furtive, diffident air,
which sat strangely enough on his weatherbeaten
visage, much as if a grizzly bear, instead
of growling and biting, should simper
and cast sheep's eyes. He was asked several
purposely referring to several particulars in
Don Benito's narrative, not previously corroborated
by those impulsive cries greeting the
visitor on first coming on board. The questions
were briefly answered, confirming all that
remained to be confirmed of the story. The
negroes about the windlass joined in with
the old sailor; but, as they became talkative,
he by degrees became mute, and at length
quite glum, seemed morosely unwilling to answer
more questions, and yet, all the while,
this ursine air was somehow mixed with his
sheepish one.
Despairing of getting into unembarrassed
talk with such a centaur, Captain Delano,
after glancing round for a more promising
countenance, but seeing none, spoke pleasantly
to the blacks to make way for him; and so,
amid various grins and grimaces, returned to
the poop, feeling a little strange at first, he
could hardly tell why, but upon the whole
with regained confidence in Benito Cereno.
How plainly, thought he, did that old
whiskerando yonder betray a consciousness of
he dreaded lest I, apprised by his Captain
of the crew's general misbehavior, came with
sharp words for him, and so down with his
head. And yet—and yet, now that I think of
it, that very old fellow, if I err not, was one of
those who seemed so earnestly eying me here
awhile since. Ah, these currents spin one's
head round almost as much as they do the ship.
Ha, there now's a pleasant sort of sunny sight;
quite sociable, too.
His attention had been drawn to a slumbering
negress, partly disclosed through the lacework
of some rigging, lying, with youthful
limbs carelessly disposed, under the lee of the
bulwarks, like a doe in the shade of a woodland
rock. Sprawling at her lapped breasts,
was her wide-awake fawn, stark naked, its
black little body half lifted from the deck,
crosswise with its dam's; its hands, like two
paws, clambering upon her; its mouth and
nose ineffectually rooting to get at the mark;
and meantime giving a vexatious half-grunt,
blending with the composed snore of the
negress.
The uncommon vigor of the child at length
roused the mother. She started up, at a distance
facing Captain Delano. But as if not at
all concerned at the attitude in which she had
been caught, delightedly she caught the child
up, with maternal transports, covering it with
kisses.
There's naked nature, now; pure tenderness
and love, thought Captain Delano,
well pleased.
This incident prompted him to remark the
other negresses more particularly than before.
He was gratified with their manners: like most
uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender
of heart and tough of constitution; equally
ready to die for their infants or fight for
them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving
as doves. Ah! thought Captain Delano, these,
perhaps, are some of the very women whom
Ledyard saw in Africa, and gave such a noble
account of.
These natural sights somehow insensibly
deepened his confidence and ease. At last he
looked to see how his boat was getting on;
but it was still pretty remote. He turned to
not.
To change the scene, as well as to please
himself with a leisurely observation of the
coming boat, stepping over into the mizzenchains,
he clambered his way into the starboard
quarter-gallery—one of those abandoned Venetian-looking
water-balconies previously mentioned—retreats
cut off from the deck. As his
foot pressed the half-damp, half-dry sea-mosses
matting the place, and a chance phantom cats-paw—an
islet of breeze, unheralded, unfollowed—as
this ghostly cats paw came fanning his
cheek; as his glance fell upon the row of small,
round dead-lights—all closed like coppered
eyes of the coffined—and the state-cabin door,
once connecting with the gallery, even as the
dead-lights had once looked out upon it, but
now calked fast like a sarcophagus lid; and to a
purple-black tarred-over, panel, threshold, and
post; and he bethought him of the time, when
that state-cabin and this state-balcony had
heard the voices of the Spanish king's officers,
and the forms of the Lima viceroy's daughters
had perhaps leaned where he stood—as these
the cats-paw through the calm, gradually he
felt rising a dreamy inquietude, like that of one
who alone on the prairie feels unrest from the
repose of the noon.
He leaned against the carved balustrade,
again looking off toward his boat; but found
his eye falling upon the ribbon grass, trailing
along the ship's water-line, straight as a border
of green box; and parterres of sea-weed, broad
ovals and crescents, floating nigh and far, with
what seemed long formal alleys between,
crossing the terraces of swells, and sweeping
round as if leading to the grottoes below. And
overhanging all was the balustrade by his arm,
which, partly stained with pitch and partly
embossed with moss, seemed the charred ruin
of some summer-house in a grand garden long
running to waste.
Trying to break one charm, he was but becharmed
anew. Though upon the wide sea, he
seemed in some far inland country; prisoner in
some deserted château, left to stare at empty
grounds, and peer out at vague roads, where
never wagon or wayfarer passed.
But these enchantments were a little disenchanted
as his eye fell on the corroded main-chains.
Of an ancient style, massy and rusty
in link, shackle and bolt, they seemed even
more fit for the ship's present business than the
one for which she had been built.
Presently he thought something moved nigh
the chains. He rubbed his eyes, and looked
hard. Groves of rigging were about the chains;
and there, peering from behind a great stay,
like an Indian from behind a hemlock, a Spanish
sailor, a marlingspike in his hand, was
seen, who made what seemed an imperfect
gesture towards the balcony, but immediately
as if alarmed by some advancing step along the
deck within, vanished into the recesses of the
hempen forest, like a poacher.
What meant this? Something the man had
sought to communicate, unbeknown to any
one, even to his captain. Did the secret involve
aught unfavorable to his captain? Were
those previous misgivings of Captain Delano's
about to be verified? Or, in his haunted mood
at the moment, had some random, unintentional
motion of the man, while busy with the
significant beckoning?
Not unbewildered, again he gazed off for his
boat. But it was temporarily hidden by a
rocky spur of the isle. As with some eagerness
he bent forward, watching for the first
shooting view of its beak, the balustrade gave
way before him like charcoal. Had he not
clutched an outreaching rope he would have
fallen into the sea. The crash, though feeble,
and the fall, though hollow, of the rotten fragments,
must have been overheard. He glanced
up. With sober curiosity peering down upon
him was one of the old oakum-pickers, slipped
from his perch to an outside boom; while below
the old negro, and, invisible to him, reconnoitering
from a port-hole like a fox from the
mouth of its den, crouched the Spanish sailor
again. From something suddenly suggested
by the man's air, the mad idea now darted into
Captain Delano's mind, that Don Benito's plea
of indisposition, in withdrawing below, was
but a pretense: that he was engaged there
maturing his plot, of which the sailor, by some
means gaining an inkling, had a mind to warn
gratitude for a kind word on first boarding the
ship. Was it from foreseeing some possible
interference like this, that Don Benito had, beforehand,
given such a bad character of his
sailors, while praising the negroes; though,
indeed, the former seemed as docile as the
latter the contrary? The whites, too, by
nature, were the shrewder race. A man with
some evil design, would he not be likely to
speak well of that stupidity which was blind
to his depravity, and malign that intelligence
from which it might not be hidden? Not unlikely,
perhaps. But if the whites had dark
secrets concerning Don Benito, could then Don
Benito be any way in complicity with the
blacks? But they were too stupid. Besides,
who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as
to apostatize from his very species almost, by
leaguing in against it with negroes? These
difficulties recalled former ones. Lost in their
mazes, Captain Delano, who had now regained
the deck, was uneasily advancing along it,
when he observed a new face; an aged sailor
seated cross-legged near the main hatchway
pelican's empty pouch; his hair frosted; his
countenance grave and composed. His hands
were full of ropes, which he was working into
a large knot. Some blacks were about him
obligingly dipping the strands for him, here
and there, as the exigencies of the operation
demanded.
Captain Delano crossed over to him, and
stood in silence surveying the knot; his mind,
by a not uncongenial transition, passing from
its own entanglements to those of the hemp.
For intricacy, such a knot he had never seen in
an American ship, nor indeed any other. The
old man looked like an Egyptian priest, making
Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon. The
knot seemed a combination of double-bowline-knot,
treble-crown-knot, back-handed-well-knot,
knot-in-and-out-knot, and jamming-knot.
At last, puzzled to comprehend the meaning
of such a knot, Captain Delano addressed the
knotter:—
“What are you knotting there, my man?”
“The knot,” was the brief reply, without
looking up.
“So it seems; but what is it for?”
“For some one else to undo,” muttered back
the old man, plying his fingers harder than
ever, the knot being now nearly completed.
While Captain Delano stood watching him,
suddenly the old man threw the knot towards
him, saying in broken English—the first heard
in the ship—something to this effect: “Undo
it, cut it, quick.” It was said lowly, but with
such condensation of rapidity, that the long,
slow words in Spanish, which had preceded
and followed, almost operated as covers to the
brief English between.
For a moment, knot in hand, and knot in
head, Captain Delano stood mute; while, without
further heeding him, the old man was now
intent upon other ropes. Presently there was
a slight stir behind Captain Delano. Turning,
he saw the chained negro, Atufal, standing
quietly there. The next moment the old
sailor rose, muttering, and, followed by his
subordinate negroes, removed to the forward
part of the ship, where in the crowd he disappeared.
An elderly negro, in a clout like an infant's,
attorney air, now approached Captain Delano.
In tolerable Spanish, and with a good-natured,
knowing wink, he informed him that the old
knotter was simple-witted, but harmless;
often playing his odd tricks. The negro concluded
by begging the knot, for of course the
stranger would not care to be troubled with it.
Unconsciously, it was handed to him. With a
sort of congé, the negro received it, and, turning
his back, ferreted into it like a detective
custom-house officer after smuggled laces.
Soon, with some African word, equivalent to
pshaw, he tossed the knot overboard.
All this is very queer now, thought Captain
Delano, with a qualmish sort of emotion; but,
as one feeling incipient sea-sickness, he strove,
by ignoring the symptoms, to get rid of the
malady. Once more he looked off for his boat.
To his delight, it was now again in view, leaving
the rocky spur astern.
The sensation here experienced, after at first
relieving his uneasiness, with unforeseen efficacy
soon began to remove it. The less distant
sight of that well-known boat—showing it, not
outline defined, so that its individuality, like a
man's, was manifest; that boat, Rover by name,
which, though now in strange seas, had often
pressed the beach of Captain Delano's home,
and, brought to its threshold for repairs, had
familiarly lain there, as a Newfoundland dog;
the sight of that household boat evoked a
thousand trustful associations, which, contrasted
with previous suspicions, filled him not only
with lightsome confidence, but somehow with
half humorous self-reproaches at his former
lack of it.
“What, I, Amasa Delano—Jack of the
Beach, as they called me when a lad—I, Amasa;
the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to
paddle along the water-side to the school-house
made from the old hulk—I, little Jack of the
Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin
Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the
ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirateship
by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical
to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano?
His conscience is clean. There is some
one above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you
old boy; you are beginning to dote and
drule, I'm afraid.”
Light of heart and foot, he stepped aft, and
there was met by Don Benito's servant, who,
with a pleasing expression, responsive to his
own present feelings, informed him that his
master had recovered from the effects of his
coughing fit, and had just ordered him to go
present his compliments to his good guest,
Don Amasa, and say that he (Don Benito)
would soon have the happiness to rejoin him.
There now, do you mark that? again thought
Captain Delano, walking the poop. What a
donkey I was. This kind gentleman who here
sends me his kind compliments, he, but ten
minutes ago, dark-lantern in had, was dodging
round some old grind-stone in the hold, sharpening
a hatchet for me, I thought. Well, well;
these long calms have a morbid effect on the
mind, I've often heard, though I never believed
it before. Ha! glancing towards the
boat; there's Rover; good dog; a white bone
in her mouth. A pretty big bone though,
seems to me.—What? Yes, she has fallen
her the other way, too, for the time. Patience.
It was now about noon, though, from the
grayness of everything, it seemed to be getting
towards dusk.
The calm was confirmed. In the far distance,
away from the influence of land, the leaden
ocean seemed laid out and leaded up, its course
finished, soul gone, defunct. But the current
from landward, where the ship was, increased;
silently sweeping her further and further towards
the tranced waters beyond.
Still, from his knowledge of those latitudes,
cherishing hopes of a breeze, and a fair and
fresh one, at any moment, Captain Delano,
despite present prospects, buoyantly counted
upon bringing the San Dominick safely to
anchor ere night. The distance swept over
was nothing; since, with a good wind, ten
minutes' sailing would retrace more than sixty
minutes, drifting. Meantime, one moment turning
to mark “Rover” fighting the tide-rip, and
the next to see Don Benito approaching, he
continued walking the poop.
Gradually he felt a vexation arising from the
and at last—his eye falling continually,
as from a stage-box into the pit, upon the
strange crowd before and below him, and, by-and-by,
recognizing there the face—now composed
to indifference—of the Spanish sailor
who had seemed to beckon from the main-chains—something
of his old trepidations returned.
Ah, thought he—gravely enough—this is
like the ague: because it went off, it follows
not that it won't come back.
Though ashamed of the relapse, he could not
altogether subdue it; and so, exerting his good-nature
to the utmost, insensibly he came to a
compromise.
Yes, this is a strange craft; a strange history,
too, and strange folks on board. But—
nothing more.
By way of keeping his mind out of mischief
till the boat should arrive, he tried to occupy
it with turning over and over, in a purely
speculative sort of way, some lesser peculiarities
of the captain and crew. Among others,
four curious points recurred:
First, the affair of the Spanish lad assailed
with a knife by the slave boy; an act winked
at by Don Benito. Second, the tyranny in
Don Benito's treatment of Atufal, the black;
as if a child should lead a bull of the Nile by
the ring in his nose. Third, the trampling of
the sailor by the two negroes; a piece of insolence
passed over without so much as a reprimand.
Fourth, the cringing submission to
their master, of all the ship's underlings, mostly
blacks; as if by the least inadvertence
they feared to draw down his despotic displeasure.
Coupling these points, they seemed somewhat
contradictory. But what then, thought
Captain Delano, glancing towards his now
nearing boat—what then? Why, Don Benito
is a very capricious commander. But he is not
the first of the sort I have seen; though it's
true he rather exceeds any other. But as a
nation—continued he in his reveries—these
Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word
Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish
twang to it. And yet, I dare say,
Spaniards in the main are as good folks as any
last “Rover” has come.
As, with its welcome freight, the boat
touched the side, the oakum-pickers, with
venerable gestures, sought to restrain the
blacks, who, at the sight of three gurried
water-casks in its bottom, and a pile of wilted
pumpkins in its bow, hung over the bulwarks
in disorderly raptures.
Don Benito, with his servant, now appeared;
his coming, perhaps, hastened by hearing the
noise. Of him Captain Delano sought permission
to serve out the water, so that all might
share alike, and none injure themselves by unfair
excess. But sensible, and, on Don Benito's
account, kind as this offer was, it was received
with what seemed impatience; as if aware that
he lacked energy as a commander, Don Benito,
with the true jealousy of weakness, resented
as an affront any interference. So, at least,
Captain Delano inferred.
In another moment the casks were being
hoisted in, when some of the eager negroes
accidentally jostled Captain Delano, where he
stood by the gangway; so that, unmindful of
moment, with good-natured authority he bade
the blacks stand back; to enforce his words
making use of a half-mirthful, half-menacing
gesture. Instantly the blacks paused, just
where they were, each negro and negress suspended
in his or her posture, exactly as the
word had found them—for a few seconds continuing
so—while, as between the responsive
posts of a telegraph, an unknown syllable ran
from man to man among the perched oakum-pickers.
While the visitor's attention was
fixed by this scene, suddenly the hatchet-polishers
half rose, and a rapid cry came from
Don Benito.
Thinking that at the signal of the Spaniard
he was about to be massacred, Captain Delano
would have sprung for his boat, but paused, as
the oakum-pickers, dropping down into the
crowd with earnest exclamations, forced every
white and every negro back, at the same moment,
with gestures friendly and familiar,
almost jocose, bidding him, in substance, not
be a fool. Simultaneously the hatchet-polishers
resumed their seats, quietly as so many
the work of hoisting in the casks was resumed,
whites and blacks singing at the tackle.
Captain Delano glanced towards Don Benito.
As he saw his meagre form in the act of recovering
itself from reclining in the servant's
arms, into which the agitated invalid had fallen,
he could not but marvel at the panic by
which himself had been surprised, on the darting
supposition that such a commander, who,
upon a legitimate occasion, so trivial, too, as
it now appeared, could lose all self-command,
was, with energetic iniquity, going to bring
about his murder.
The casks being on deck, Captain Delano
was handed a number of jars and cups by one
of the steward's aids, who, in the name of his
captain, entreated him to do as he had proposed—
dole out the water. He complied, with republican
impartiality as to this republican element,
which always seeks one level, serving the oldest
white no better than the youngest black; excepting,
indeed, poor Don Benito, whose condition,
if not rank, demanded an extra allowance.
To him, in the first place, Captain Delano presented
as he was for it, the Spaniard quaffed not a drop
until after several grave bows and salutes. A
reciprocation of courtesies which the sight-loving
Africans hailed with clapping of hands.
Two of the less wilted pumpkins being reserved
for the cabin table, the residue were minced up
on the spot for the general regalement. But
the soft bread, sugar, and bottled cider, Captain
Delano would have given the whites alone, and
in chief Don Benito; but the latter objected;
which disinterestedness not a little pleased the
American; and so mouthfuls all around were
given alike to whites and blacks; excepting one
bottle of cider, which Babo insisted upon setting
aside for his master.
Here it may be observed that as, on the first
visit of the boat, the American had not permitted
his men to board the ship, neither did he
now; being unwilling to add to the confusion
of the decks.
Not uninfluenced by the peculiar good-humor
at present prevailing, and for the time oblivious
of any but benevolent thoughts, Captain Delano,
who, from recent indications, counted upon a
the boat back to the sealer, with orders
for all the hands that could be spared immediately
to set about rafting casks to the watering-place
and filling them. Likewise he bade
word be carried to his chief officer, that if,
against present expectation, the ship was not
brought to anchor by sunset, he need be under
no concern; for as there was to be a full moon
that night, he (Captain Delano) would remain
on board ready to play the pilot, come the wind
soon or late.
As the two Captains stood together, observing
the departing boat—the servant, as it happened,
having just spied a spot on his master's velvet
sleeve, and silently engaged rubbing it out—the
American expressed his regrets that the San
Dominick had no boats; none, at least, but the
unseaworthy old hulk of the long-boat, which,
warped as a camel's skeleton in the desert, and
almost as bleached, lay pot-wise inverted amidships,
one side a little tipped, furnishing a subterraneous
sort of den for family groups of the
blacks, mostly women and small children; who,
squatting on old mats below, or perched above
descried, some distance within, like a social circle
of bats, sheltering in some friendly cave; at
intervals, ebon flights of naked boys and girls,
three or four years old, darting in and out of the
den's mouth.
“Had you three or four boats now, Don
Benito,” said Captain Delano, “I think that, by
tugging at the oars, your negroes here might
help along matters some. Did you sail from
port without boats, Don Benito?”
“They were stove in the gales, Señor.”
“That was bad. Many men, too, you lost
then. Boats and men. Those must have been
hard gales, Don Benito.”
“Past all speech,” cringed the Spaniard.
“Tell me, Don Benito,” continued his companion
with increased interest, “tell me, were
these gales immediately off the pitch of Cape
Horn?”
“Cape Horn?—who spoke of Cape Horn?”
“Yourself did, when giving me an account
of your voyage,” answered Captain Delano, with
almost equal astonishment at this eating of his
own words, even as he ever seemed eating his
yourself, Don Benito, spoke of Cape Horn,” he
emphatically repeated.
The Spaniard turned, in a sort of stooping
posture, pausing an instant, as one about to
make a plunging exchange of elements, as from
air to water.
At this moment a messenger-boy, a white,
hurried by, in the regular performance of his
function carrying the last expired half hour forward
to the forecastle, from the cabin time-piece,
to have it struck at the ship's large bell.
“Master,” said the servant, discontinuing his
work on the coat sleeve, and addressing the
rapt Spaniard with a sort of timid apprehensiveness,
as one charged with a duty, the discharge
of which, it was foreseen, would prove irksome
to the very person who had imposed it, and for
whose benefit it was intended, “master told me
never mind where he was, or how engaged, always
to remind him, to a minute, when shaving-time
comes. Miguel has gone to strike the half-hour
afternoon. It is now, master. Will master
go into the cuddy?”
“Ah—yes,” answered the Spaniard, starting,
Captain Delano, he said that ere long he would
resume the conversation.
“Then if master means to talk more to Don
Amasa,” said the servant, “why not let Don
Amasa sit by master in the cuddy, and master
can talk, and Don Amasa can listen, while Babo
here lathers and strops.”
“Yes,” said Captain Delano, not unpleased
with this sociable plan, “yes, Don Benito, unless
you had rather not, I will go with you.”
“Be it so, Señor.”
As the three passed aft, the American could
not but think it another strange instance of his
host's capriciousness, this being shaved with
such uncommon punctuality in the middle of
the day. But he deemed it more than likely
that the servant's anxious fidelity had something
to do with the matter; inasmuch as the timely
interruption served to rally his master from the
mood which had evidently been coming upon
him.
The place called the cuddy was a light deck-cabin
formed by the poop, a sort of attic to the
large cabin below. Part of it had formerly
death all the partitionings had been thrown
down, and the whole interior converted into one
spacious and airy marine hall; for absence of
fine furniture and picturesque disarray of odd
appurtenances, somewhat answering to the
wide, cluttered hall of some eccentric bachelor-squire
in the country, who hangs his shooting-jacket
and tobacco-pouch on deer antlers, and
keeps his fishing-rod, tongs, and walking-stick
in the same corner.
The similitude was heightened, if not originally
suggested, by glimpses of the surrounding
sea; since, in one aspect, the country and the
ocean seem cousins-german.
The floor of the cuddy was matted. Overhead,
four or five old muskets were stuck into
horizontal holes along the beams. 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. Urder
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
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. A flag locker was in one corner,
open, exposing various colored bunting, some
rolled up, others half unrolled, still others tumbled.
Opposite was a cumbrous washstand, of
black mahogany, all of one block, with a pedestal,
like a font, and over it a railed shelf,
containing combs, brushes, and other implements
of the toilet. A torn hammock of stained
grass swung near; the sheets toosed, and
the pillow wrinkled up like a brow, as if who
ever slept here slept but illy, with alternate
visitations of sad thoughts and bad dreams.
The further extremity of the cuddy, overhanging
the ship's stern, was pierced with three
openings, windows or port-holes, according as
men or cannon might peer, socially or unsocially,
out of them. At present neither men nor
cannon were seen, though huge ring-bolts and
other rusty iron fixtures of the wood-work hinted
of twenty-four-pounders.
Glancing towards the hammock as he entered,
Captain Delano said, “You sleep here, Don
Benito?”
“Yes, Señor, since we got into mild weather.”
“This seems a sort of dormitory, sittingroom,
sail-loft, chapel, armory, and private
closet all together, Don Benito,” added Captain
Delano, looking round.
“Yes, Señor; events have not been favorable
to much order in my arrangements.”
Here the servant, napkin on arm, made a motion
as if waiting his master's good pleasure.
Don Benito signified his readiness, when, seating
him in the Malacca arm-chair, and for the
guest's convenience drawing opposite one of
the settees, the servant commenced operations
by throwing back his master's collar and loosening
his cravat.
There is something in the negro which, in a
peculiar way, fits him for avocations about
one's person. Most negroes are natural valets
and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and
brush congenially as to the castinets, and flourishing
them apparently with almost equal satisfaction.
There is, too, a smooth tact about
noiseless, gliding briskness, not ungraceful in
its way, singularly pleasing to behold, and still
more so to be the manipulated subject of.
And above all is the great gift of good-humor.
Not the mere grin or laugh is here meant.
Those were unsuitable. But a certain easy
cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance and
gesture; as though God had set the whole
negro to some pleasant tune.
When to this is added the docility arising
from the unaspiring contentment of a limited
mind, and that susceptibility of blind attachment
sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors,
one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs,
Johnson and Byron—it may be,
something like the hypochondriac Benito Cereno—took
to their hearts, almost to the exclusion
of the entire white race, their serving
men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher. But
if there be that in the negro which exempts
him from the inflicted sourness of the morbid
or cynical mind, how, in his most prepossessing
aspects, must he appear to a benevolent one?
When at ease with respect to exterior things,
but familiarly and humorously so. At home,
he had often taken rare satisfaction in sitting in
his door, watching some free man of color at
his work or play. If on a voyage he chanced
to have a black sailor, invariably he was on
chatty and half-gamesome terms with him. In
fact, like most men of a good, blithe heart,
Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically,
but genially, just as other men to
Newfoundland dogs.
Hitherto, the circumstances in which he
found the San Dominick had repressed the
tendency. But in the cuddy, relieved from
his former uneasiness, and, for various reasons,
more sociably inclined than at any previous
period of the day, and seeing the colored servant,
napkin on arm, so debonair about his
master, in a business so familiar as that of
shaving, too, all his old weakness for negroes
returned.
Among other things, he was amused with
an odd instance of the African love of bright
colors and fine shows, in the black's informally
taking from the flag-locker a great piece of
under his master's chin for an apron.
The mode of shaving among the Spaniards is
a little different from what it is with other
nations. They have a basin, specifically called
a barber's basin, which on one side is scooped
out, so as accurately to receive the chin, against
which it is closely held in lathering; which is
done, not with a brush, but with soap dipped
in the water of the basin and rubbed on the
face.
In the present instance salt-water was used
for lack of better; and the parts lathered were
only the upper lip, and low down under the
throat, all the rest being cultivated beard.
The preliminaries being somewhat novel to
Captain Delano, he sat curiously eying them,
so that no conversation took place, nor, for the
present, did Don Benito appear disposed to
renew any.
Setting down his basin, the negro searched
among the razors, as for the sharpest, and having
found it, gave it an additional edge by
expertly strapping it on the firm, smooth, oily
skin of his open palm; he then made a gesture
an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the
other professionally dabbling among the bubbling
suds on the Spaniard's lank neck. Not
unaffected by the close sight of the gleaming
steel, Don Benito nervously shuddered; his
usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather,
which lather, again, was intensified in its hue
by the contrasting sootiness of the negro's body.
Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar,
at least to Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the
two thus postured, could he resist the vagary,
that in the black he saw a headsman, and in
the white a man at the block. But this was
one of those antic conceits, appearing and vanishing
in a breath, from which, perhaps, the
best regulated mind is not always free.
Meantime the agitation of the Spaniard had
a little loosened the bunting from around him,
so that one broad fold swept curtain-like over
the chair-arm to the floor, revealing, amid a
profusion of armorial bars and ground-colors—
black, blue, and yellow—a closed castle in a
blood red field diagonal with a lion rampant in
a white.
“The castle and the lion,” exclaimed Captain
Delano—“why, Don Benito, this is the
flag of Spain you use here. It's well it's only
I, and not the King, that sees this,” he added,
with a smile, “but”—turning towards the
black—“it's all one, I suppose, so the colors
be gay;” which playful remark did not fail
somewhat to tickle the negro.
“Now, master,” he said, readjusting the
flag, and pressing the head gently further back
into the crotch of the chair; “now, master,”
and the steel glanced nigh the throat.
Again Don Benito faintly shuddered.
“You must not shake so, master. See, Don
Amasa, master always shakes when I shave
him. And yet master knows I never yet have
drawn blood, though it's true, if master will
shake so, I may some of these times. Now
master,” he continued. “And now, Don Amasa,
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,
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, similar to that just before on the
deck, 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, spots of which stained the creamy lather
under the throat: immediately the black barber
drew back his steel, and, remaining in his professional
attitude, back to Captain Delano, and
face to Don Benito, held up the trickling razor,
saying, with a sort of half humorous sorrow,
“See, master—you shook so—here's Babo's
first blood.”
No sword drawn before James the First of
England, no assassination in that timid King's
presence, could have produced a more terrified
aspect than was now presented by Don
Benito.
Poor fellow, thought Captain Delano, so
nervous he can't even bear the sight of barber's
blood; and this unstrung, sick man, is
it credible that I should have imagined he
meant to spill all my blood, who can't endure
the sight of one little drop of his own? Surely,
Amasa Delano, you have been beside yourself
this day. Tell it not when you get home,
sappy Amasa. Well, well, he looks like a
murderer, doesn't he? More like as if himself
were to be done for. Well, well, this
day's experience shall be a good lesson.
Meantime, while these things were running
through the honest seaman's mind, the servant
had taken the napkin from his arm, and to Don
Benito had said — “But answer Don Amasa,
please, master, while I wipe this ugly stuff
off the razor, and strop it again.”
As he said the words, his face was turned
half round, so as to be alike visible to the
its expression, to hint, that he was desirous, by
getting his master to go on with the conversation,
considerately to withdraw his attention
from the recent annoying accident. As if glad
to snatch the offered relief, Don Benito resumed,
rehearsing to Captain Delano, that not
only were the calms of unusual duration, but
the ship had fallen in with obstinate currents;
and other things he added, some of which were
but repetitions of former statements, to explain
how it came to pass that the passage from
Cape Horn to St. Maria had been so exceedingly
long; now and then mingling with his
words, incidental praises, less qualified than
before, to the blacks, for their general good
conduct. These particulars were not given
consecutively, the servant, at convenient times,
using his razor, and so, between the intervals
of shaving, the story and panegyric went on
with more than usual huskiness.
To Captain Delano's imagination, now again
not wholly at rest, there was something so
hollow in the Spaniard's manner, with apparently
some reciprocal hollowness in the
idea flashed across him, that possibly master
and man, for some unknown purpose, were
acting out, both in word and deed, nay, to the
very tremor of Don Benito's limbs, some juggling
play before him. Neither did the suspicion
of collusion lack apparent support, from
the fact of those whispered conferences before
mentioned. But then, what could be the object
of enacting this play of the barber before
him? At last, regarding the notion as a
whimsy, insensibly suggested, perhaps, by the
theatrical aspect of Don Benito in his harlequin
ensign, Captain Delano speedily banished
it.
The shaving over, the servant bestirred himself
with a small bottle of scented waters,
pouring a few drops on the head, and then
diligently rubbing; the vehemence of the exercise
causing the muscles of his face to twitch
rather strangely.
His next operation was with comb, scissors,
and brush; going round and round, smoothing
a curl here, clipping an unruly whisker-hair
there, giving a graceful sweep to the temple-lock,
the hand of a master; while, like any resigned
gentleman in barber's hands, Don Benito bore
all, much less uneasily, at least, than he had
done the razoring; indeed, he sat so pale and
rigid now, that the negro seemed a Nubian
sculptor finishing off a white statue-head.
All being over at last, the standard of Spain
removed, tumbled up, and tossed back into the
flag-locker, the negro's warm breath blowing
away any stray hair which might have lodged
down his master's neck; collar and cravat
readjusted; a speak of lint whisked off the
velvet lapel; all this being done; backing off
a little space, and pausing with an expression
of subdued self-complacency, the servant
for a moment surveyed his master, as, in
toilet at least, the creature of his own tasteful
hands.
Captain Delano playfully complimented him
upon his achievement; at the same time congratulating
Don Benito.
But neither sweet waters, nor shampooing,
nor fidelity, nor sociality, delighted the Spaniard.
Seeing him relapsing into forbidding
thinking that his presence was undesired
just then, withdrew, on pretense of seeing
whether, as he had prophesied, any signs of a
breeze were visible.
Walking forward to the main-mast, he stood
awhile thinking over the scene, and not without
some undefined misgivings, when he heard
a noise near the cuddy, and turning, saw the
negro, his hand to his cheek. Advancing,
Captain Delano perceived that the cheek was
bleeding. He was about to ask the cause,
when the negro's wailing soliloquy enlightened
him.
“Ah, when will master get better from his
sickness; only the sour heart that sour sickness
breeds made him serve Babo so; cutting Babo
with the razor, because, only by accident,
Babo had given master one little scratch; and
for the first time in so many a day, too. Ah,
ah, ah,” holding his hand to his face.
Is it possible, thought Captain Delano; was
it to wreak in private his Spanish spite against
this poor friend of his, that Don Benito, by his
sullen manner, impelled me to withdraw? Ah
Poor fellow!
He was about to speak in sympathy to the
negro, but with a timid reluctance he now re-entered
the cuddy.
Presently master and man came forth; Don
Benito leaning on his servant as if nothing had
happened.
But a sort of love-quarrel, after all, thought
Captain Delano.
He accosted Don Benito, and they slowly
walked together. They had gone but a few
paces, when the steward—a tall, rajah-looking
mulatto, orientally set off with a pagoda turban
formed by three or four Madras handker-chiefs
wound about his head, tier on tier—
approaching with a saalam, announced lunch
in the cabin.
On their way thither, the two captains were
preceded by the mulatto, who, turning round
as he advanced, with continual smiles and bows,
ushered them on, a display of elegance which
quite completed the insignificance of the small
bare-headed Babo, who, as if not unconscious
of inferiority, eyed askance the graceful steward.
his jealous watchfulness to that peculiar feeling
which the full-blooded African entertains for
the adulterated one. As for the steward, his
manner, if not bespeaking much dignity of self-respect,
yet evidenced his extreme desire to
please; which is doubly meritorious, as at once
Christian and Chesterfieldian.
Captain Delano observed with interest that
while the complexion of the mulatto was hybrid,
his physiognomy was European—classically
so.
“Don Benito,” whispered he, “I am glad to
see this usher-of-the-golden-rod of yours; the
sight refutes an ugly remark once made to me
by a Barbadoes planter; that when a mulatto
has a regular European face, look out for him;
he is a devil. But see, your steward here has
features more regular than King George's of
England; and yet there he nods, and bows,
and smiles; a king, indeed—the king of kind
hearts and polite fellows. What a pleasant
voice he has, too?
“He has, Señor.”
“But tell me, has he not, so far as you have
fellow?” said Captain Delano, pausing, while
with a final genuflexion the steward disappeared
into the cabin; “come, for the reason
just mentioned, I am curious to know.”
“Francesco is a good man,” a sort of sluggishly
responded Don Benito, like a phlegmatic
appreciator, who would neither find fault nor
flatter.
“Ah, I thought so. For it were strange,
indeed, and not very creditable to us whiteskins,
if a little of our blood mixed with the
African's, should, far from improving the
latter's quality, have the sad effect of pouring
vitriolic acid into black broth; improving
the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness.”
“Doubtless, doubtless, Señor, but”—glancing
at Babo—“not to speak of negroes, your
planter's remark I have heard applied to the
Spanish and Indian intermixtures in our provinces.
But I know nothing about the matter,”
he listlessly added.
And here they entered the cabin.
The lunch was a frugal one. Some of Captain
and salt beef, the reserved bottle of cider, and
the San Dominick's last bottle of Canary.
As they entered, Francesco, with two or
three colored aids, was hovering over the table
giving the last adjustments. Upon perceiving
their master they withdrew, Francesco making
a smiling congé, and the Spaniard, without
condescending to notice it, fastidiously remarking
to his companion that he relished not superfluous
attendance.
Without companions, host and guest sat
down, like a childless married couple, at opposite
ends of the table, Don Benito waving
Captain Delano to his place, and, weak as he
was, insisting upon that gentleman being seated
before himself.
The negro placed a rug under Don Benito's
feet, and a cushion behind his back, and then
stood behind, not his master's chair, but Captain
Delano's. At first, this a little surprised
the latter. But it was soon evident that, in
taking his position, the black was still true to
his master; since by facing him he could the
more readily anticipate his slightest want.
“This is an uncommonly intelligent fellow
of yours, Don Benito,” whispered Captain
Delano across the table.
“You say true, Señor.”
During the repast, the guest again reverted
to parts of Don Benito's story, begging further
particulars here and there. He inquired how
it was that the scurvy and fever should have
committed such wholesale havoc upon the
whites, while destroying less than half of the
blacks. As if this question reproduced the
whole scene of plague before the Spaniard's
eyes, miserably reminding him of his solitude
in a cabin where before he had had so many
friends and officers round him, his hand shook,
his face became hueless, broken words escaped;
but directly the sane memory of the past seemed
replaced by insane terrors of the present.
With starting eyes he stared before him at
vacancy. For nothing was to be seen but the
hand of his servant pushing the Canary over
towards him. At length a few sips served
partially to restore him. He made random reference
to the different constitution of races,
enabling one to offer more resistance to certain
to his companion.
Presently Captain Delano, intending to say
something to his host concerning the pecuniary
part of the business he had undertaken for him,
especially—since he was strictly accountable
to his owners—with reference to the new suit
of sails, and other things of that sort; and
naturally preferring to conduct such affairs in
private, was desirous that the servant should
withdraw; imagining that Don Benito for a
few minutes could dispense with his attendance.
He, however, waited awhile; thinking that, as
the conversation proceeded, Don Benito, without
being prompted, would perceive the propriety
of the step.
But it was otherwise. At last catching his
host's eye, Captain Delano, with a slight backward
gesture of his thumb, whispered, “Don
Benito, pardon me, but there is an interference
with the full expression of what I have to say
to you.”
Upon this the Spaniard changed countenance;
which was imputed to his resenting the hint,
as in some way a reflection upon his servant.
that the black's remaining with them could be
of no disservice; because since losing his officers
he had made Babo (whose original office, it now
appeared, had been captain of the slaves) not
only his constant attendant and companion, but
in all things his confidant.
After this, nothing more could be said;
though, indeed, Captain Delano could hardly
avoid some little tinge of irritation upon being
left ungratified in so inconsiderable a wish, by
one, too, for whom he intended such solid services.
But it is only his querulousness, thought
he; and so filling his glass he proceeded to
business.
The price of the sails and other matters was
fixed upon. But while this was being done,
the American observed that, though his original
offer of assistance had been hailed with hectic
animation, yet now when it was reduced to a
business transaction, indifference and apathy
were betrayed. Don Benito, in fact, appeared
to submit to hearing the details more out of
regard to common propriety, than from any
his voyage was involved.
Soon, his manner became still more reserved.
The effort was vain to seek to draw him into
social talk. Gnawed by his splenetic mood, he
sat twitching his beard, while to little purpose
the hand of his servant, mute as that on the
wall, slowly pushed over the Canary.
Lunch being over, they sat down on the
cushioned transom; the servant placing a pillow
behind his master. The long continuance
of the calm had now affected the atmosphere.
Don Benito sighed heavily, as if for
breath.
“Why not adjourn to the cuddy,” said Captain
Delano; “there is more air there.” But
the host sat silent and motionless.
Meantime his servant knelt before him, with
a large fan of feathers. And Francesco coming
in on tiptoes, handed the negro a little cup of
aromatic waters, with which at intervals he
chafed his master's brow; smoothing the hair
along the temples as a nurse does a child's. He
spoke no word. He only rested his eye on his
master's, as if, amid all Don Benito's distress,
of fidelity.
Presently the ship's bell sounded two o'clock;
and through the cabin windows a slight rippling
of the sea was discerned; and from the desired
direction.
“There,” exclaimed Captain Delano, “I
told you so, Don Benito, look!”
He had risen to his feet, speaking in a very animated
tone, with a view the more to rouse his
companion. But though the crimson curtain
of the stern-window near him that moment
fluttered against his pale cheek, Don Benito
seemed to have even less welcome for the breeze
than the calm.
Poor fellow, thought Captain Delano, bitter
experience has taught him that one ripple does
not make a wind, any more than one swallow
a summer. But he is mistaken for once. I
will get his ship in for him, and prove it.
Briefly alluding to his weak condition, he
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.
Upon gaining the deck, Captain Delano started
at the unexpected figure of Atufal, monumentally
fixed at the threshold, like one of
those sculptured porters of black marble guarding
the porches of Egyptian tombs.
But this time the start was, perhaps, purely
physical. Atufal's presence, singularly attesting
docility even in sullenness, was contrasted
with that of the hatchet-polishers, who in patience
evinced their industry; while both spectacles
showed, that lax as Don Benito's general
authority might be, still, whenever he chose to
exert it, no man so savage or colossal but must,
more or less, bow.
Snatching a trumpet which hung from the
bulwarks, with a free step Captain Delano advanced
to the forward edge of the poop, issuing
his orders in his best Spanish. The few sailors
and many negroes, all equally pleased, obediently
set about heading the ship towards the
harbor.
While giving some directions about setting
a lower stu'n'-sail, suddenly Captain Delano
heard a voice faithfully repeating his orders.
Turning, he saw Babo, now for the time acting,
the slaves. This assistance proved valuable.
Tattered sails and warped yards were soon
brought into some trim. And no brace or halyard
was pulled but to the blithe songs of the
inspirited negroes.
Good fellows, thought Captain Delano, a little
training would make fine sailors of them.
Why see, the very women pull and sing too.
These must be some of those Ashantee negresses
that make such capital soldiers, I've heard.
But who's at the helm. I must have a good
hand there.
He went to see.
The San Dominick steered with a cumbrous
tiller, with large horizontal pullies attached. At
each pully-end stood a subordinate black, and
between them, at the tiller-head, there sponsible
post, a Spanish seaman, whose countenance
evinced his due share in the general hopefulness
and confidence at the coming of the breeze.
He proved the same man who had behaved
with so shame-faced an air on the windlass.
“Ah,—it is you, my man,” exclaimed Captain
Delano—“well, no more sheep's-eyes now;—
Good hand, I trust? And want to get into the
harbor, don't you?”
The man assented with an inward chuckle,
grasping the tiller-head firmly. Upon this,
unperceived by the American, the two blacks
eyed the sailor intently.
Finding all right at the helm, the pilot went
forward to the forecastle, to see how matters
stood there.
The ship now had way enough to breast the
current. With the approach of evening, the
breeze would be sure to freshen.
Having done all that was needed for the present,
Captain Delano, giving his last orders to
the sailors, turned aft to report affairs to Don
Benito in the cabin; perhaps additionally incited
to rejoin him by the hope of snatching a
moment's private chat while the servant was
engaged upon deck.
From opposite sides, there were, beneath the
poop, two approaches to the cabin; one further
forward than the other, and consequently
communicating with a longer passage. Marking
the servant still above, Captain Delano,
named, and at whose porch Atufal still stood—
hurried on his way, till, arrived at the cabin
threshold, he paused an instant, a little to recover
from his eagerness. Then, with the
words of his intended business upon his lips, he
entered. As he advanced toward the seated
Spaniard, he heard another footstep, keeping
time with his. From the opposite door, a salver
in hand, the servant was likewise advancing.
“Confound the faithful fellow,” thought Captain
Delano; “what a vexatious coincidence.”
Possibly, the vexation might have been something
different, were it not for the brisk confidence
inspired by the breeze. But even as it
was, he felt a slight twinge, from a sudden
indefinite association in his mind of Babo with
Atufal.
“Don Benito,” said he, “I give you joy;
the breeze will hold, and will increase. By the
way, your tall man and time-piece, Atufal,
stands without. By your order, of course?”
Don Benito recoiled, as if at some bland
satirical touch, delivered with such adroit garnish
no handle for retort.
He is like one flayed alive, thought Captain
Delano; where may one touch him without
causing a shrink?
The servant moved before his master, adjusting
a cushion; recalled to civility, the Spaniard
stiffly replied: “you are right. The slave appears
where you saw him, according to my
command; which is, that if at the given hour
I am below, he must take his stand and abide
my coming.”
“Ah now, pardon me, but that is treating
the poor fellow like an ex-king indeed. Ah,
Don Benito,” smiling, “for all the license you
permit in some things, I fear lest, at bottom,
you are a bitter hard master.”
Again Don Benito shrank; and this time, as
the good sailor thought, from a genuine twinge
of his conscience.
Again conversation became constrained. In
vain Captain Delano called attention to the now
perceptible motion of the keel gently cleaving
the sea; with lack-lustre eye, Don Benito returned
words few and reserved.
By-and-by, the wind having steadily risen,
and still blowing right into the harbor, bore
the San Dominick swiftly on. Rounding a
point of land, the sealer at distance came into
open view.
Meantime Captain Delano had again repaired
to the deck, remaining there some time. Having
at last altered the ship's course, so as to give
the reef a wide berth, he returned for a few
moments below.
I will cheer up my poor friend, this time,
thought he.
“Better and better,” Don Benito, he cried
as he blithely re-entered: “there will soon be
an end to your cares, at least for awhile. For
when, after a long, sad voyage, you know, the
anchor drops into the haven, all its vast weight
seems lifted from the captain's heart. We are
getting on famously, Don Benito. My ship is
in sight. Look through this side-light here;
there she is; all a-taunt-o! The Bachelor's
Delight, my good friend. Ah, how this wind
braces one up. Come, you must take a cup of
coffee with me this evening. My old steward
will give you as fine a cup as ever any sultan
you?”
At first, the Spaniard glanced feverishly up,
casting a longing look towards the sealer, while
with mute concern his servant gazed into his
face. Suddenly the old ague of coldness returned,
and dropping back to his cushions he
was silent.
“You do not answer. Come, all day you
have been my host; would you have hospitality
all on one side?”
“I cannot go,” was the response.
“What? it will not fatigue you. The ships
will lie together as near as they can, without
swinging foul. It will be little more than stepping
from deck to deck; which is but as from
room to room. Come, come, you must not refuse
me.”
“I cannot go,” decisively and repulsively
repeated Don Benito.
Renouncing all but the last appearance of
courtesy, with a sort of cadaverous sullenness,
and biting his thin nails to the quick, he glanced,
almost glared, at his guest, as if impatient that
a stranger's presence should interfere with the
the sound of the parted waters came more and
more gurglingly and merrily in at the windows;
as reproaching him for his dark spleen; as
telling him that, sulk as he might, and go mad
with it, nature cared not a jot; since, whose
fault was it, pray?
But the foul mood was now at its depth, as
the fair wind at its height.
There was something in the man so far beyond
any mere unsociality or sourness previously
evinced, that even the forbearing good-nature
of his guest could no longer endure it.
Wholly at a loss to account for such demeanor,
and deeming sickness with eccentricity, however
extreme, no adequate excuse, well satisfied,
too, that nothing in his own conduct could
justify it, Captain Delano's pride began to be
roused. Himself became reserved. But all
seemed one to the Spaniard. Quitting him,
therefore, Captain Delano once more went to
the deck.
The ship was now within less than two
miles of the sealer. The whale-boat was seen
darting over the interval.
To be brief, the two vessels, thanks to the
pilot's skill, ere long in neighborly style lay
anchored together.
Before returning to his own vessel, Captain
Delano had intended communicating to Don
Benito the smaller details of the proposed services
to be rendered. But, as it was, unwilling
anew to subject himself to rebuffs, he resolved,
now that he had seen the San Dominick safely
moored, immediately to quit her, without further
allusion to hospitality or business. Indefinitely
postponing his ulterior plans, he would
regulate his future actions according to future
circumstances. His boat was ready to receive
him; but his host still tarried below. Well,
thought Captain Delano, if he has little breeding,
the more need to show mine. He descended
to the cabin to bid a ceremonious, and,
it may be, tacitly rebukeful adieu. But to his
great satisfaction, Don Benito, as if he began to
feel the weight of that treatment with which
his slighted guest had, not indecorously, retaliated
upon him, now supported by his servant,
rose to his feet, and grasping Captain Delano's
hand, stood tremulous; too much agitated to
suddenly dashed, by his resuming all his previous
reserve, with augmented gloom, as, with
half-averted eyes, he silently reseated himself
on his cushions. With a corresponding return
of his own chilled feelings, Captain Delano
bowed and withdrew.
He was hardly midway in the narrow corridor,
dim as a tunnel, leading from the cabin to
the stairs, when a sound, as of the tolling for
execution in some jail-yard, fell on his ears. It
was the echo of the ship's flawed bell, striking
the hour, drearily reverberated in this subterranean
vault. Instantly, by a fatality not to be
withstood, his mind, responsive to the portent,
swarmed with superstitious suspicions. He
paused. In images far swifter than these sentences,
the minutest details of all his former
distrusts swept through him.
Hitherto, credulous good-nature had been
too ready to furnish excuses for reasonable
fears. Why was the Spaniard, so superfluously
punctilious at times, now heedless of common
propriety in not accompanying to the side his
departing guest? Did indisposition forbid?
exertion that day. His last equivocal demeanor
recurred. He had risen to his feet, grasped
his guest's hand, motioned toward his hat;
then, in an instant, all was eclipsed in sinister
muteness and gloom. Did this imply one brief,
repentant relenting at the final moment, from
some iniquitous plot, followed by remorseless
return to it? His last glance seemed to express
a calamitous, yet acquiescent farewell to
Captain Delano forever. Why decline the invitation
to visit the sealer that evening? Or
was the Spaniard less hardened than the Jew,
who refrained not from supping at the board of
him whom the same night he meant to betray?
What imported all those day-long enigmas and
contradictions, except they were intended to
mystify, preliminary to some stealthy blow?
Atufal, the pretended rebel, but punctual
shadow, that moment lurked by the threshold
without. He seemed a sentry, and more.
Who, by his own confession, had stationed
him there? Was the negro now lying in
wait?
The Spaniard behind—his creature before:
choice.
The next moment, with clenched jaw and
hand, he passed Atufal, and stood unharmed in
the light. As he saw his trim ship lying
peacefully at anchor, and almost within ordinary
call; as he saw his household boat, with
familiar faces in it, patiently rising and falling
on the short waves by the San Dominick's
side; and then, glancing about the decks
where he stood, saw the oakum-pickers still
gravely plying their fingers; and heard the
low, buzzing whistle and industrious hum of
the hatchet-polishers, still bestirring themselves
over their endless occupation; and more than
all, as he saw the benign aspect of nature,
taking her innocent repose in the evening;
the screeened sun in the quiet camp of the
west shining out like the mild light from
Abraham's tent; as charmed eye and ear took
in all these, with the chained figure of the
black, clenched jaw and hand relaxed. Once
again he smiled at the phantoms which had
mocked him, and felt something like a tinge
of remorse, that, by harboring them even for a
an atheist doubt of the ever-watchful
Providence above.
There was a few minutes' delay, while, in
obedience to his orders, the boat was being
hooked along to the gangway. During this
interval, a sort of saddened satisfaction stole
over Captain Delano, at thinking of the kindly
offices he had that day discharged for a stranger.
Ah, thought he, after good actions one's
conscience is never ungrateful, however much
so the benefited party may be.
Presently, his foot, in the first act of descent
into the boat, pressed the first round of the
side-ladder, his face presented inward upon the
deck. In the same moment, he heard his name
courteously sounded; and, to his pleased surprise,
saw Don Benito advancing—an unwonted
energy in his air, as if, at the last moment,
intent upon making amends for his recent discourtesy.
With instinctive good feeling, Captain
Delano, withdrawing his foot, turned and
reciprocally advanced. As he did so, the
Spaniard's nervous eagerness increased, but his
vital energy failed; so that, the better to support
hand on his naked shoulder, and gently holding
it there, formed himself into a sort of
crutch.
When the two captains met, the Spaniard
again fervently took the hand of the American,
at the same time casting an earnest glance into
his eyes, but, as before, too much overcome to
speak.
I have done him wrong, self-reproachfully
thought Captain Delano; his apparent coldness
has deceived me; in no instance has he
meant to offend.
Meantime, as if fearful that the continuance
of the scene might too much unstring his master,
the servant seemed anxious to terminate
it. And so, still presenting himself as a crutch,
and walking between the two captains, he advanced
with them towards the gangway; while
still, as if full of kindly contrition, Don Benito
would not let go the hand of Captain Delano,
but retained it in his, across the black's body.
Soon they were standing by the side, looking
over into the boat, whose crew turned up their
curious eyes Waiting a moment for the Spaniard
Captain Delano lifted his foot, to overstep the
threshold of the open gangway; but still Don
Benito would not let go his hand. And
yet, with an agitated tone, he said, “I can
go no further; here I must bid you adieu.
Adieu, my dear, dear Don Amasa. Go—go!”
suddenly tearing his hand loose, “go, and God
guard you better than me, my best friend.”
Not unaffected, Captain Delano would now
have lingered; but catching the meekly admonitory
eye of the servant, with a hasty farewell
he descended into his boat, followed by
the continual adieus of Don Benito, standing
rooted in the gangway.
Seating himself in the stern, Captain Delano,
making a last salute, ordered the boat shoved
off. The crew had their oars on end. The
bowsmen pushed the boat a sufficient distance
for the oars to be lengthwise dropped. The
instant that was done, Don Benito sprang over
the bulwarks, falling at the feet of Captain
Delano; at the same time calling towards his
ship, but in tones so frenzied, that none in the
boat could understand him. But, as if not
and distant parts of the ship, splashed into
the sea, swimming after their captain, as if intent
upon his rescue.
The dismayed officer of the boat eagerly
asked what this meant. To which, Captain
Delano, turning a disdainful smile upon the
unaccountable Spaniard, answered that, for his
part, he neither knew nor cared; but it seemed
as if Don Benito had taken it into his head to
produce the impression among his people that
the boat wanted to kidnap him. “Or else—
give way for your lives,” he wildly added,
starting at a clattering hubbub in the ship,
above which rang the tocsin of the hatchet-polishers;
and seizing Don Benito by the
throat he added, “this plotting pirate means
murder!” Here, in apparent verification of
the words, the servant, a dagger in his hand,
was seen on the rail overhead, poised, in the
act of leaping, as if with desperate fidelity to
befriend his master to the last; while, seemingly
to aid the black, the three white sailors
were trying to clamber into the hampered
bow. Meantime, the whole host of negroes, as
captain, impended in one sooty avalanche over
the bulwarks.
All this, with what preceded, and what
followed, occurred with such involutions of
rapidity, that past, present, and future seemed
one.
Seeing the negro coming, Captain Delano
had flung the Spaniard aside, almost in the
very act of clutching him, and, by the unconscious
recoil, shifting his place, with arms
thrown up, so promptly grappled the servant in
his descent, that with dagger presented at Captain
Delano's heart, the black seemed of purpose
to have leaped there as to his mark. But
the weapon was wrenched away, and the assailant
dashed down into the bottom of the
boat, which now, with disentangled oars, began
to speed through the sea.
At this juncture, the left hand of Captain
Delano, on one side, again clutched the half-reclined
Don Benito, heedless that he was in a
speechless faint, while his right foot, on the
other side, ground the prostrate negro; and his
right arm pressed for added speed on the after
to their utmost.
But here, the officer of the boat, who had at
last succeeded in beating off the towing sailors,
and was now, with face turned aft, assisting
the bowsman at his oar, suddenly called to
Captain Delano, to see what the black was
about; while a Portuguese oarsman shouted to
him to give heed to what the Spaniard was
saying.
Glancing down at his feet, Captain Delano
saw the freed hand of the servant aiming with
a second dagger—a small one, before concealed
in his wool—with this he was snakishly writhing
up from the boat's bottom, at the heart of
his master, his countenance lividly vindictive,
expressing the centred purpose of his soul;
while the Spaniard, half-choked, was vainly
shrinking away, with husky words, incoherent
to all but the Portuguese.
That moment, across the long-benighted
mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelation
swept, illuminating, in unanticipated clearness,
his host's whole mysterious demeanor, with
every enigmatic event of the day, as well as
He smote Babo's hand down, but his own
heart smote him harder. With infinite pity
he withdrew his hold from Don Benito. Not
Captain Delano, but Don Benito, the black, in
leaping into the boat, had intended to stab.
Both the black's hands were held, as, glancing
up towards the San Dominick, Captain
Delano, now with scales dropped from his
eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in
tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don
Benito, but with mask torn away, flourishing
hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt.
Like delirious black dervishes, the six
Ashantees danced on the poop. Prevented by
their foes from springing into the water, the
Spanish boys were hurrying up to the topmost
spars, while such of the few Spanish sailors,
not already in the sea, less alert, were descried,
helplessly mixed in, on deck, with the blacks.
Meantime Captain Delano hailed his own
vessel, ordering the ports up, and the guns run
out. But by this time the cable of the San
Dominick had been cut; and the fag-end, in
lashing out, whipped away the canvas shroud
bleached hull swung round towards the open
ocean, death for the figure-head, in a human
skeleton; chalky comment on the chalked
words below, “Follow your leader.”
At the sight, Don Benito, covering his face,
wailed out: “'Tis he, Aranda! my murdered,
unburied friend!”
Upon reaching the sealer, calling for ropes,
Captain Delano bound the negro, who made
no resistance, and had him hoisted to the deck.
He would then have assisted the now almost
helpless Don Benito up the side; but Don
Benito, wan as he was, refused to move, or
be moved, until the negro should have been
first put below out of view. When, presently
assured that it was done, he no more shrank
from the ascent.
The boat was immediately dispatched back
to pick up the three swimming sailors. Meantime,
the guns were in readiness, though, owing
to the San Dominick having glided somewhat
astern of the sealer, only the aftermost one
could be brought to bear. With this, they
fired six times; thinking to cripple the fugitive
a few inconsiderable ropes were shot away.
Soon the ship was beyond the gun's range,
steering broad out of the bay; the blacks
thickly clustering round the bowsprit, one moment
with taunting cries towards the whites,
the next with upthrown gestures hailing the
now dusky moors of ocean—cawing crows escaped
from the hand of the fowler.
The first impulse was to slip the cables and
give chase. But, upon second thoughts, to
pursue with whale-boat and yawl seemed more
promising.
Upon inquiring of Don Benito what firearms
they had on board the San Dominick,
Captain Delano was answered that they had
none that could be used; because, in the earlier
stages of the mutiny, a cabin-passenger, since
dead, had secretly put out of order the locks
of what few muskets there were. But with
all his remaining strength, Don Benito entreated
the American not to give chase, either with
ship or boat; for the negroes had already
proved themselves such desperadoes, that, in
case of a present assault, nothing but a total
But, regarding this warning as coming from
one whose spirit had been crushed by misery
the American did not give up his design.
The boats were got ready and armed. Captain
Delano ordered his men into them. He
was going himself when Don Benito grasped
his arm.
“What! have you saved my life, Señor, and
are you now going to throw away your own?”
The officers also, for reasons connected with
their interests and those of the voyage, and a
duty owing to the owners, strongly objected
against their commander's going. Weighing
their remonstrances a moment, Captain Delano
felt bound to remain; appointing his chief mate
—an athletic and resolute man, who had been
a privateer's-man—to head the party. The
more 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.
The fugitives had now almost gained an
offing. It was nearly night; but the moon
was rising. After hard, prolonged pulling, the
boats came up on the ship's quarters, at a
suitable distance laying upon their oars to discharge
their muskets. Having no bullets to
return, the negroes sent their yells. But, upon
the second volley, Indian-like, they hurtled
their hatchets. One took off a sailor's fingers.
Another struck the whale-boat's bow, cutting
off the rope there, and remaining stuck in the
gunwale like a woodman's axe. Snatching it,
quivering from its lodgment, the mate hurled it
back. The returned gauntlet now stuck in
the ship's broken quarter-gallery, and so remained.
The negroes giving too hot a reception, the
whites kept a more respectful distance. Hovering
now just out of reach of the hurtling
hatchets, they, with a view to the close encounter
which must soon come, sought to decoy
the blacks into entirely disarming themselves
of their most murderous weapons in a
hand-to-hand fight, by foolishly flinging them,
as missiles, short of the mark, into the sea.
negroes desisted, though not before many of
them had to replace their lost hatchets with
handspikes; an exchange which, as counted
upon, proved, in the end, favorable to the assailants.
Meantime, with a strong wind, the ship still
clove the water; the boats alternately falling
behind, and pulling up, to discharge fresh volleys.
The fire was mostly directed towards the
stern, since there, chiefly, the negroes, at present,
were clustering. But to kill or maim the
negroes was not the object. To take them,
with the ship, was the object. To do it, the
ship must be boarded; which could not be
done by boats while she was sailing so fast.
A thought now struck the mate. Observing
the Spanish boys still aloft, high as they could
get, he called to them to descend to the yards,
and cut adrift the sails. It was done. About
this time, owing to causes hereafter to be
shown, two Spaniards, in the dress of sailors,
and conspicuously showing themselves, were
killed; not by volleys, but by deliberate marksman's
by one of the general discharges, Atufal, the
black, and the Spaniard at the helm likewise
were killed. What now, with the loss of the
sails, and loss of leaders, the ship became unmanageable
to the negroes.
With creaking masts, she came heavily round
to the wind; the prow slowly swinging into
view of the boats, its skeleton gleaming in the
horizontal moonlight, and casting a gigantic
ribbed shadow upon the water. One extended
arm of the ghost seemed beckoning the whites
to avenge it.
“Follow your leader!” cried the mate; and,
one on each bow, the boats boarded. Sealingspears
and cutlasses crossed hatchets and hand-spikes.
Huddled upon the long-boat amidships,
the negresses raised a wailing chant, whose
chorus was the clash of the steel.
For a time, the attack wavered; the negroes
wedging themselves to beat it back; the half-repelled
sailors, as yet unable to gain a footing,
fighting as troopers in the saddle, one leg
sideways flung over the bulwarks, and one
without, plying their cutlasses like carters'
when, rallying themselves into a squad
as one man, with a huzza, they sprang inboard,
where, entangled, they involuntarily separated
again. For a few breaths' space, there was a
vague, muffled, inner sound, as of submerged
sword-fish rushing hither and thither through
shoals of black-fish. Soon, in a reunited band,
and joined by the Spanish seamen, the whites
came to the surface, irresistibly driving the
negroes toward the stern. But a barricade
of casks and sacks, from side to side, had been
thrown up by the mainmast. Here the negroes
faced about, and though scorning peace or
truce, yet fain would have had respite. But,
without pause, overleaping the barrier, the unflagging
sailors again closed. Exhausted, the
blacks now fought in despair. Their red
tongues lolled, wolf-like, from their black
mouths. But the pale sailors' teeth were set;
not a word was spoken; and, in five minutes
more, the ship was won.
Nearly a score of the negroes were killed.
Exclusive of those by the balls, many were
mangled; their wounds—mostly inflicted by
shaven ones of the English at Preston Pans,
made by the poled scythes of the Highlanders.
On the other side, none were killed, though
several were wounded; some severely, including
the mate. The surviving negroes were
temporarily secured, and the ship, towed back
into the harbor at midnight, once more lay
anchored.
Omitting the incidents and arrangements ensuing,
suffice it that, after two days spent in
refitting, the ships sailed in company for Conception,
in Chili, and thence for Lima, in Peru;
where, before the vice-regal courts, the whole
affair, from the beginning, underwent investigation.
Though, midway on the passage, the ill-fated
Spaniard, relaxed from constraint, showed
some signs of regaining health with free-will;
yet, agreeably to his own foreboding, shortly
before arriving at Lima, he relapsed, finally
becoming so reduced as to be carried ashore in
arms. Hearing of his story and plight, one of
the many religious institutions of the City of
Kings opened an hospitable refuge to him,
nurses, and a member of the order volunteered
to be his one special guardian and consoler, by
night and by day.
The following extracts, translated from one
of the official Spanish documents, will, it is
hoped, shed light on the preceding narrative,
as well as, in the first place, reveal the true
port of departure and true history of the San
Dominick's voyage, down to the time of her
touching at the island of St. Maria.
But, ere the extracts come, it may be well
to preface them with a remark.
The document selected, from among many
others, for partial translation, contains the
deposition of Benito Cereno; the first taken in
the case. Some disclosures therein were, at
the time, held dubious for both learned and
natural reasons. The tribunal inclined to the
opinion that the deponent, not undisturbed in
his mind by recent events, raved of some things
which could never have happened. But subsequent
depositions of the surviving sailors,
bearing out the revelations of their captain in
several of the strangest particulars, gave credence
final decision, rested its capital sentences upon
statements which, had they lacked confirmation,
it would have deemed it but duty to
reject.
I, Don Jose de Abos and Padilla, His
Majesty's Notary for the Royal Revenue, and
Register of this Province, and Notary Public
of the Holy Crusade of this Bishopric, etc.
Do certify and declare, as much as is requisite
in law, that, in the criminal cause commenced
the twenty-fourth of the month of
September, in the year seventeen hundred and
ninety-nine, against the negroes of the ship
San Dominick, the following declaration before
me was made:
Declaration of the first witness, Don Benito Cereno.
The same day, and month, and year, His Honor, Doctor
Juan Martinez de Rozas, Councilor of the Royal Audience
of this Kingdom, and learned in the law of this Intendency,
ordered the captain of the ship San Dominick, Don Benito
Cereno, to appear; which he did in his litter, attended by
the monk Infelez; of whom he received the oath, which
he took by God, our Lord, and a sign of the Cross; under
which he promised to tell the truth of whatever he should
know and should be asked;—and being interrogated agreeably
he said, that on the twentieth of May last, he set sail with
his ship from the port of Valparaiso, bound to that of Callao;
loaded with the produce of the country beside thirty
cases of hardware and one hundred and sixty blacks, of both
sexes, mostly belonging to Don Alexandro Aranda, gentleman,
of the city of Mendoza; that the crew of the ship
consisted of thirty-six men, beside the persons who went as
passengers; that the negroes were in part as follows:
[Here, in the original, follows a list of some fifty names,
descriptions, and ages, compiled from certain recovered documents
of Aranda's, and also from recollections of the deponent,
from which portions only are extracted.]
—One, from about eighteen to nineteen years, named
José, and this was the man that waited upon his master,
Don Alexandro, and who speaks well the Spanish, having
served him four or five years; * * * a mulatto, named Francesco,
the cabin steward, of a good person and voice, having sung
in the Valparaiso churches, native of the province of Buenos
Ayres, aged about thirty-five years. * * * A smart
negro, named Dago, who had been for many years a grave-digger
among the Spaniards, aged forty-six years. * * *
Four old negroes, born in Africa, from sixty to seventy, but
sound, calkers by trade, whose names are as follows:—the
first was named Muri, and he was killed (as was also his son
named Diamelo); the second, Nacta; the third, Yola, likewise
killed; the fourth, Ghofan; and six full-grown negroes, aged
from thirty to forty-five, all raw, and born among the Ashantees—Matiluqui,
Yan, Lecbe, Mapenda, Yambaio, Akim;
four of whom were killed; * * * a powerful negro named
Atufal, who being supposed to have been a chief in Africa,
his owner set great store by him. * * * And a small
negro of Senegal, but some years among the Spaniards, aged
does not remember the names of the others, but that still expecting
the residue of Don Alexandro's papers will be found,
will then take due account of them all, and remit to the
court; * * * and thirty-nine women and children of all
ages.
[The catalogue over, the deposition goes on]
* * * That all the negroes slept upon deck, as is customary
in this navigation, and none wore fetters, because the
owner, his friend Aranda, told him that they were all tractable;
* * * that on the seventh day after leaving port, at
three o'clock in the morning, all the Spaniards being asleep
except the two officers on the watch, who were the boatswain,
Juan Robles, and the carpenter, Juan Bautista Gayete,
and the helmsman and his boy, the negroes revolted
suddenly, wounded dangerously the boatswain and the carpenter,
and successively killed eighteen men of those who
were sleeping upon deck, some with hand-spikes and hatchets,
and others by throwing them alive overboard, after tying
them; that of the Spaniards upon deck, they left about
seven, as he thinks, alive and tied, to manœuvre the ship,
and three or four more, who hid themselves, remained also
alive. Although in the act of revolt the negroes made
themselves masters of the hatchway, six or seven wounded
went through it to the cockpit, without any hindrance on
their part; that during the act of revolt, the mate and another
person, whose name he does not recollect, attempted to
come up through the hatchway, but being quickly wounded,
were obliged to return to the cabin; that the deponent resolved
at break of day to come up the companion-way, where
the negro Babo was, being the ringleader, and Atufal, who
assisted him, and having spoken to them, exhorted them to
cease committing such atrocities, asking them, at the same
to obey their commands; that notwithstanding this, they
threw, in his presence, three men, alive and tied, overboard;
that they told the deponent to come up, and that they would
not kill him; which having done, the negro Babo asked him
whether there were in those seas any negro countries where
they might be carried, and he answered them, No; that the
negro Babo afterwards told him to carry them to Senegal,
or to the neighboring islands of St. Nicholas; and he answered,
that this was impossible, on account of the great
distance, the necessity involved of rounding Cape Horn, the
bad condition of the vessel, the want of provisions, sails, and
water; but that the negro Babo replied to him he must
carry them in any way; that they would do and conform
themselves to everything the deponent should require as to
eating and drinking; that after a long conference, being absolutely
compelled to please them, for they threatened to kill
all the whites if they were not, at all events, carried to Senegal,
he told them that what was most wanting for the
voyage was water; that they would go near the coast to
take it, and thence they would proceed on their course; that
the negro Babo agreed to it; and the deponent steered towards
the intermediate ports, hoping to meet some Spanish
or foreign vessel that would save them; that within ten or
eleven days they saw the land, and continued their course by
it in the vicinity of Nasca; that the deponent observed that
the negroes were now restless and mutinous, because he did
not effect the taking in of water, the negro Babo having required,
with threats, that it should be done, without fail, the
following day; he told him he saw plainly that the coast
was steep, and the rivers designated in the maps were not to
be found, with other reasons suitable to the circumstances;
that the best way would be to go to the island of Santa
Maria, where they might water easily, it being a solitary
island, as the foreigners did; that the deponent did not go to
because the negro Babo had intimated to him several times,
that he would kill all the whites the very moment he should
perceive any city, town, or settlement of any kind on the
shores to which they should be carried: that having determined
to go to the island of Santa Maria, as the deponent
had planned, for the purpose of trying whether, on the passage
or near the island itself, they could find any vessel that
should favor them, or whether he could escape from it in a
boat to the neighboring coast of Arruco, to adopt the necessary
means he immediately changed his course, steering
for the island; that the negroes Babo and Atufal held daily
conferences, in which they discussed what was necessary for
their design of returning to Senegal, whether they were to
kill all the Spaniards, and particularly the deponent; that
eight days after parting from the coast of Nasca, the deponent
being on the watch a little after day-break, and soon
after the negroes had their meeting, the negro Babo came to
the place where the deponent was, and told him that he had
determined to kill his master, Don Alexandro Aranda, both
because he and his companions could not otherwise be sure
of their liberty, and that to keep the seamen in subjection,
he wanted to prepare a warning of what road they should
be made to take did they or any of them oppose him; and
that, by means of the death of Don Alexandro, that warning
would best be given; but, that what this last meant, the deponent
did not at the time comprehend, nor could not, further
than that the death of Don Alexandro was intended;
and moreover the negro Babo proposed to the deponent to
call the mate Raneds, who was sleeping in the cabin, before
the thing was done, for fear, as the deponent understood it,
that the mate, who was a good navigator, should be killed
with Don Alexandro and the rest; that the deponent, who
was the friend, from youth, of Don Alexandro, prayed and
conjured, but all was useless; for the negro Babo answered
Spaniards risked their death if they should attempt to frustrate
his will in this matter, or any other; that, in this conflict,
the deponent called the mate, Raneds, who was forced
to go apart, and immediately the negro Babo commanded
the Ashantee Martinqui and the Ashantee Lecbe to go and
commit the murder; that those two went down with hatchets
to the berth of Don Alexandro; that, yet half alive and
mangled, they dragged him on deck; that they were going
to throw him overboard in that state, but the negro Babo
stopped them, bidding the murder be completed on the deck
before him, which was done, when, by his orders, the body
was carried below, forward; that nothing more was seen of
it by the deponent for three days; * * * that Don Alonzo
Sidonia, an old man, long resident at Valparaiso, and lately
appointed to a civil office in Peru, whither he had taken
passage, was at the time sleeping in the berth opposite Don
Alexandro's; that awakening at his cries, surprised by them,
and at the sight of the negroes with their bloody hatchets in
their hands, he threw himself into the sea through a window
which was near him, and was drowned, without it being in
the power of the deponent to assist or take him up; * * *
that a short time after killing Aranda, they brought upon
deck his german-cousin, of middle-age, Don Francisco Masa,
of Mendoza, and the young Don Joaquin, Marques de Aramboalaza,
then lately from Spain, with his Spanish servant
Ponce, and the three young clerks of Aranda, José Mozairi,
Lorenzo Bargas, and Hermenegildo Gandix, all of Cadiz;
that Don Joaquin and Hermenegildo Gandix, the negro Babo,
for purposes hereafter to appear, preserved alive; but
Don Francisco Masa, José Mozairi, and Lorenzo Bargas,
with Ponce the servant, beside the boatswain, Juan Robles,
the boatswain's mates, Manuel Viscaya and Roderigo Hurta,
and four of the sailors, the negro Babo ordered to be thrown
alive into the sea, although they made no resistance, nor
Juan Robles, who knew how to swim, kept the longest
above water, making acts of contrition, and, in the last words
he uttered, charged this deponent to cause mass to be said
for his soul to our Lady of Succor: * * * that, during the
three days which followed, the deponent, uncertain what fate
had befallen the remains of Don Alexandro, frequently asked
the negro Babo where they were, and, if still on board, whether
they were to be preserved for interment ashore, entreating
him so to order it; that the negro Babo answered nothing
till the fourth day, when at sunrise, the deponent coming on
deck, the negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been
substituted for the ship's proper figure-head—the image of
Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World; that
the negro Babo asked him whose skeleton that was, and
whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's;
that, upon discovering his face, the negro Babo, coming
close, said words to this effect: “Keep faith with the blacks
from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body,
follow your leader,” pointing to the prow; * * * that the
same morning the negro Babo took by succession each
Spaniard forward, and asked him whose skeleton that was,
and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a
white's; that each Spaniard covered his face; that then to
each the negro Babo repeated the words in the first place
said to the deponent; * * * that they (the Spaniards), being
then assembled aft, the negro Babo harangued them,
saying that he had now done all; that the deponent (as
navigator for the negroes) might pursue his course, warning
him and all of them that they should, soul and body, go the
way of Don Alexandro, if he saw them (the Spaniards) speak
or plot anything against them (the negroes)—a threat which
was repeated every day; that, before the events last mentioned,
they had tied the cook to throw him overboard, for
it is not known what thing they heard him speak, but finally
that a few days after, the deponent, endeavoring not
to omit any means to preserve the lives of the remaining
whites, spoke to the negroes peace and tranquillity, and
agreed to draw up a paper, signed by the deponent and the
sailors who could write, as also by the negro Babo, for himself
and all the blacks, in which the deponent obliged himself
to carry them to Senegal, and they not to kill any more, and
he formally to make over to them the ship, with the cargo,
with which they were for that time satisfied and quieted. * *
But the next day, the more surely to guard against the
sailors' escape, the negro Babo commanded all the boats to
be destroyed but the long-boat, which was unseaworthy,
and another, a cutter in good condition, which knowing it
would yet be wanted for towing the water casks, he had it
lowered down into the hold.
[Various particulars of the prolonged and perplexed
navigation ensuing here follow, with incidents of a calamitous
calm, from which portion one passage is extracted,
to wit:]
—That on the fifth day of the calm, all on board suffering
much from the heat, and want of water, and five having died
in fits, and mad, the negroes became irritable, and for a
chance gesture, which they deemed suspicious—though it
was harmless—made by the mate. Raneds, to the deponent
in the act of handing a quadrant, they killed him; but that
for this they afterwards were sorry, the mate being the only
remaining navigator on board, except the deponent.
—That omitting other events, which daily happened, and
which can only serve uselessly to recall past misfortunes and
conflicts, after seventy-three days' navigation, reckoned from
the time they sailed from Nasca, during which they navigated
under a scanty allowance of water, and were afflicted
island of Santa Maria, on the seventeenth of the month of
August, at about six o'clock in the afternoon, at which hour
they cast anchor very near the American ship, Bachelor's
Delight, which lay in the same bay, commanded by the generous
Captain Amasa Delano; but at six o'clock in the morning,
they had already descried the port, and the negroes became
uneasy, as soon as at distance they saw the ship, not having
expected to see one there; that the negro Babo pacified
them, assuring them that no fear need be had; that straightway
he ordered the figure on the bow to be covered with
canvas, as for repairs, and had the decks a little set in order;
that for a time the negro Babo and the negro Atufal conferred;
that the negro Atufal was for sailing away, but the
negro Babo would not, and, by himself, cast about what
to do; that at last he came to the deponent, proposing to
him to say and do all that the deponent declares to have
said and done to the American captain; * * *
* * * * that the negro Babo warned
him that if he varied in the least, or uttered any word, or
gave any look that should give the least intimation of the
past events or present state, he would instantly kill him,
with all his companions, showing a dagger, which he carried
hid, saying something which, as he understood it, meant that
that dagger would be alert as his eye; that the negro Babo
then announced the plan to all his companions, which pleased
them; that he then, the better to disguise the truth, devised
many expedients, in some of them uniting deceit and defense;
that of this sort was the device of the six Ashantees before
named, who were his bravoes; that them he stationed on the
break of the poop, as if to clean certain hatchets (in cases,
which were part of the cargo), but in reality to use them,
and distribute them at need, and at a given word he told
them; that, among other devices, was the device of presenting
Atufal, his right hand man, as chained, though in a moment
he informed the deponent what part he was expected to enact
in every device, and what story he was to tell on every
occasion, always threatening him with instant death if he
varied in the least: that, conscious that many of the negroes
would be turbulent, the negro Babo appointed the four aged
negroes, who were calkers, to keep what domestic order they
could on the decks; that again and again he harangued
the Spaniards and his companions, informing them of his
intent, and of his devices, and of the invented story that this
deponent was to tell; charging them lest any of them varied
from that story; that these arrangements were made and
matured during the interval of two or three hours, between
their first sighting the ship and the arrival on board of Captain
Amasa Delano; that this happened about half-past
seven o'clock in the morning, Captain Amasa Delano coming
in his boat, and all gladly receiving him; that the deponent,
as well as he could force himself, acting then the part
of principal owner, and a free captain of the ship, told Captain
Amasa Delano, when called upon, that he came from
Buenos Ayres, bound to Lima, with three hundred negroes;
that off Cape Horn, and in a subsequent fever, many negroes
had died; that also, by similar casualties, all the sea officers
and the greatest part of the crew had died.
[And so the deposition goes on, circumstantially recounting
the fictitious story dictated to the deponent by Babo, and through
the deponent imposed upon Captain Delano; and also recounting
the friendly offers of Captain Delano, with other things,
but all of which is here omitted. After the fictitious story. etc.
the deposition proceeds:]
—that the generous Captain Amasa Delano remained on
board all the day, till he left the ship anchored at six o'clock
in the evening, deponent speaking to him always of his pretended
having had it in his power to tell a single word, or give
him the least hint, that he might know the truth and state of
things; because the negro Babo, performing the office of an
officious servant with all the appearance of submission of the
humble slave, did not leave the deponent one moment; that
this was in order to observe the deponent's actions and
words, for the negro Babo understands well the Spanish;
and besides, there were thereabout some others who were
constantly on the watch, and likewise understood the Spanish;
* * * that upon one occasion, while deponent was
standing on the deck conversing with Amasa Delano, by a
secret sign the negro Babo drew him (the deponent) aside,
the act appearing as if originating with the deponent; that
then, he being drawn aside, the negro Babo proposed to him
to gain from Amasa Delano full particulars about his ship,
and crew, and arms; that the deponent asked “For what?”
that the negro Babo answered he might conceive; that,
grieved at the prospect of what might overtake the generous
Captain Amasa Delano, the deponent at first refused to ask
the desired questions, and used every argument to induce the
negro Babo to give up this new design; that the negro Babo
showed the point of his dagger; that, after the information
had been obtained the negro Bubo again drew him aside,
telling him that that very night he (the deponent) would be
captain of two ships, instead of one, for that, great part of
the American's ship's crew being to be absent fishing, the
six Ashantees, without any one else, would easily take it;
that at this time he said other things to the same purpose;
that no entreaties availed; that, before Amasa Delano's
coming on board, no hint had been given touching the capture
of the American ship: that to prevent this project the
deponent was powerless; * * *—that in some things his
memory is confused, he cannot distinctly recall every event;
* * *—that as soon as they had cast anchor at six of the
Captain took leave, to return to his vessel; that upon a
sudden impulse, which the deponent believes to have come
from God and his angels, he, after the farewell had been said,
followed the generous Captain Amasa Delano as far as the
gunwale, where he stayed, under pretense of taking leave,
until Amasa Delano should have been seated in his boat;
that on shoving off, the deponent sprang from the gunwale
into the boat, and fell into it, he knows not how, God guarding
him; that—
[Here, in the original, follows the account of what further
happened at the escape, and how the San Dominick was retaken,
and of the passage to the coast; including in the recital many
expressions of “eternal gratitude” to the “generous Captain
Amasa Delano.” The deposition then proceeds with recapitulatory
remarks, and a partial renumeration of the negroes,
making record of their individual part in the past events, with
a view to furnishing, according to command of the court, the
data whereon to found the criminal sentences to be pronounced.
From this portion is the following;]
—That he believes that all the negroes, though not in the
first place knowing to the design of revolt, when it was accomplished,
approved it. * * * That the negro, José,
eighteen years old, and in the personal service of Don Alexandro,
was the one who communicated the information to the
negro Babo, about the state of things in the cabin, before
the revolt; that this is known, because, in the preceding midnight,
he use to come from his berth, which was under his
master's, in the cabin, to the deck where the ringleader and
his associates were, and had secret conversations with the
negro Babo, in which he was several times seen by the mate;
that, one night, the mate drove him away twice; * * that
this same negro José was the one who, without being commanded
to do so by the negro Babo, as Lecbe and Martinqui
dragged half-lifeless to the deck; * * that the mulatto steward,
Francesco, was of the first band of revolters, that he
was, in all things, the creature and tool of the negro Babo;
that, to make his court, he, just before a repast in the cabin,
proposed, to the negro Babo, poisoning a dish for the generous
Captain Amasa Delano; this is known and believed, because
the negroes have said it; but that the negro Babo,
having another design, forbade Francesco; * * that the
Ashantee Lecbe was one of the worst of them; for that, on
the day the ship was retaken, he assisted in the defense of
her, with a hatchet in each hand, with one of which he
wounded, in the breast, the chief mate of Amasa Delano, in
the first act of boarding; this all knew; that, in sight of
the deponent, Lecbe struck, with a hatchet, Don Francisco
Masa, when, by the negro Babo's orders, he was carrying him
to throw him overboard, alive, beside participating in the
murder, before mentioned, of Don Alexandro Aranda, and
others of the cabin-passengers; that, owing to the fury with
which the Ashantees fought in the engagement with the
boats, but this Lecbe and Yan survived; that Yan was bad
as Lecbe; that Yan was the man who, by Babo's command,
willingly prepared the skeleton of Don Alexandro, in a way
the negroes afterwards told the deponent, but which he, so
long as reason is left him, can never divulge; that Yan and
Lecbe were the two who, in a calm by night, riveted the
skeleton to the bow; this also the negroes told him; that the
negro Babo was he who traced the inscription below it; that
the negro Babo was the plotter from first to last; he ordered
every murder, and was the helm and keel of the revolt; that
Atufal was his lieutenant in all; but Atufal, with his own
hand, committed no murder; nor did the negro Babo; * *
that Atufal was shot, being killed in the fight with the boats,
ere boarding; * * that the negresses, of age, were knowing
to the revolt, and testified themselves satisfied at the death
restrained them, they would have tortured to death, instead
of simply killing, the Spaniards slain by command of the
negro Babo; that the negresses used their utmost influence
to have the deponent made away with; that, in the various
acts of murder, they sang songs and danced—not gaily, but
solemnly; and before the engagement with the boats, as well
as during the action, they sang melancholy songs to the
negroes, and that this melancholy tone was more inflaming
than a different one would have been, and was so intended;
that all this is believed, because the negroes have said it.
—that of the thirty-six men of the crew, exclusive of the passengers
(all of whom are now dead), which the deponent
had knowledge of, six only remained alive, with four cabin-boys
and ship-boys, not included with the crew; * * —that
the negroes broke an arm of one of the cabin-boys and gave
him strokes with hatchets.
[Then follow various random disclosures referring to various
periods of time. The following are extracted;]
—That during the presence of Captain Amasa Delano on
board, some attempts were made by the sailors, and one by
Hermenegildo Gandix, to convey hints to him of the true
state of affairs; but that these attempts were ineffectual,
owing to fear of incurring death, and, futhermore, owing to
the devices which offered contradictions to the true state
of affairs, as well as owing to the generosity and piety
of Amasa Delano incapable of sounding such wickedness; *
* * that Luys Galgo, a sailor about sixty years of age, and
formerly of the king's navy, was one of those who sought to
convey tokens to Captain Amasa Delano; but his intent,
though undiscovered, being suspected, he was, on a pretense,
made to retire out of sight, and at last into the hold, and
there was made away with. This the negroes have since
said; * * * that one of the ship-boys feeling, from Captain
having enough prudence, dropped some chance-word respecting
his expectations, which being overheard and understood
by a slave-boy with whom he was eating at the time, the
latter struck him on the head with a knife, inflicting a bad
wound, but of which the boy is now healing; that likewise,
not long before the ship was brought to anchor, one of the
seamen, steering at the time, endangered himself by letting
the blacks remark some expression in his countenance, arising
from a cause similar to the above; but this sailor, by his
heedful after conduct, escaped; * * * that these statements
are made to show the court that from the beginning to the end
of the revolt, it was impossible for the deponent and his men
to act otherwise than they did; * * *—that the third clerk,
Hermenegildo Gandix, who before had been forced to live
among the seamen, wearing a seaman's habit, and in all
respects appearing to be one for the time, he, Gandix, was
killed by a musket ball fired through mistake from the boats
before boarding; having in his fright run up the mizzen-rigging,
calling to the boats—“don't board,” lest upon their
boarding the negroes should kill him; that this inducing the
Americans to believe he some way favored the cause of the negroes,
they fired two balls at him, so that he fell wounded from
the rigging, and was drowned in the sea; * * *—that the
young Don Joaquin, Marques de Aramboalaza, like Hermenegildo
Gandix, the third clerk, was degraded to the office
and appearance of a common seaman; that upon one occasion
when Don Joaquin shrank, the negro Babo commanded the
Ashantee Lecbe to take tar and heat it, and pour it upon Don
Joaquin's hands; * * * —that Don Joaquin was killed owing
to another mistake of the Americans, but one impossible to be
avoided, as upon the approach of the boats, Don Joaquin, with
a hatchet tied edge out and upright to his hand, was made by
the negroes to appear on the bulwarks; whereupon, seen with
arms in his hands and in a questionable a titude, he was shot
Joaquin was found secreted a jewel, which, by papers that
were discovered, proved to have been meant 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; * * * —that the
jewel, with the other effects of the late Don Joaquin, is in
the custody of the brethren of the Hospital de Sacerdotes,
awaiting the disposition of the honorable court; * * *
—that, owing to the condition of the deponent, as well as the
haste in which the boats departed for the attack, the Americans
were not forewarned that there were, among the apparent
crew, a passenger and one of the clerks disguised by
the negro Babo; * * * —that, beside the negroes killed in
the action, some were killed after the capture and re-anchoring
at night, when shackled to the ring-bolts on deck; that
these deaths were committed by the sailors, ere they could be
prevented. That so soon as informed of it, Captain Amasa
Delano used all his authority, and, in particular with his own
hand, struck down Martinez Gola, who, having found a razor
in the pocket of an old jacket of his, which one of the shackled
negroes had on, was aiming it at the negro's throat; that
the noble Captain Amasa Delano also wrenched from the
hand of Bartholomew Barlo a dagger, secreted at the time
of the massacre of the whites, with which he was in the act
of stabbing a shackled negro, who, the same day, with another
negro, had thrown him down and jumped upon him; * * *
—that, for all the events, befalling through so long a time,
during which the ship was in the hands of the negro Babo,
he cannot here give account; but that, what he has said is
the most substantial of what occurs to him at present, and is
the truth under the oath which he has taken; which declaration
he affirmed and ratified, after hearing it read to him.
He said that he is twenty-nine years of age, and broken in
shall not return home to Chili, but betake himself to the
monastery on Mount Agonia without; and signed with his
honor, and crossed himself, and, for the time, departed as he
came, in his litter, with the monk Infelez, to the Hospital de
Sacerdotes.
If the Deposition have served as the key to fit
into the lock of the complications which precede
it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung
back, the San Dominick's hull lies open today.
Hitherto the nature of this narrative, besides
rendering the intricacies in the beginning unavoidable,
has more or less required that many
things, instead of being set down in the order
of occurrence, should be retrospectively, or
irregularly given; this last is the case with the
following passages, which will conclude the
account:
During the long, mild voyage to Lima, there
was, as before hinted, a period during which
the sufferer a little recovered his health, or, at
least in some degree, his tranquillity. Ere the
decided relapse which came, the two captains
had many cordial conversations—their fraternal
withdrawments.
Again and again it was repeated, how hard
it had been to enact the part forced on the
Spaniard by Babo.
“Ah, my dear friend,” Don Benito once
said, “at those very times when you thought
me so morose and ungrateful, nay, when, as
you now admit, you half thought me plotting
your murder, at those very times my heart was
frozen; I could not look at you, thinking of
what, both on board this ship and your own,
hung, from other hands, over my kind benefactor.
And as God lives, Don Amasa, I know
not whether desire for my own safety alone
could have nerved me to that leap into your
boat, had it not been for the thought that, did
you, unenlightened, return to your ship, you,
my best friend, with all who might be with
you, stolen upon, that night, in your hammocks,
would never in this world have wakened
again. Do but think how you walked this
deck, how you sat in this cabin, every inch of
ground mined into honey-combs under you.
Had I dropped the least hint, made the least
death, explosive death—yours as mine—would
have ended the scene.”
“True, true,” cried Captain Delano, starting,
“you have saved my life, Don Benito,
more than I yours; saved it, too, against my
knowledge and will.”
“Nay, my friend,” rejoined the Spaniard,
courteous even to the point of religion, “God
charmed your life, but you saved mine. To
think of some things you did—those smilings
and chattings, rash pointings and gesturings.
For less than these, they slew my mate, Raneds;
but you had the Prince of Heaven's safe-conduct
through all ambuscades.”
“Yes, all is owing to Providence, I know:
but the temper of my mind that morning was
more than commonly pleasant, while the sight
of so much suffering, more apparent than real,
added to my good-nature, compassion, and
charity, happily interweaving the three. Had
it been otherwise, doubtless, as you hint, some
of my interferences might have ended unhappily
enough. Besides, those feelings I spoke
of enabled me to get the better of momentary
cost me my life, without saving another's.
Only at the end did my suspicions get the better
of me, and you know how wide of the mark
they then proved.”
“Wide, indeed,” said Don Benito, sadly;
“you were with me all day; stood with me,
sat with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate
with me, drank with me; and yet, your last
act was to clutch for a monster, not only an
innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men.
To such degree may malign machinations and
deceptions impose. So far may even the best
man err, in judging the conduct of one with
the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted.
But you were forced to it; and you
were in time undeceived. Would that, in
both respects, it was so ever, and with all
men.”
“You generalize, Don Benito; and mournfully
enough. But the past is passed; why
moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon
bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue
sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over
new leaves.”
“Because they have no memory,” he dejectedly
replied; “because they are not human.”
“But these mild trades that now fan your
cheek, do they not come with a human-like
healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast
friends are the trades.”
“With their steadfastness they but waft
me to my tomb, Señor,” was the foreboding
response.
“You are saved,” cried Captain Delano,
more and more astonished and pained; “you
are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon
you?”
“The negro.”
There was silence, while the moody man
sat, slowly and unconsciously gathering his
mantle about him, as if it were a pall.
There was no more conversation that day.
But if the Spaniard's melancholy sometimes
ended in muteness upon topics like the above,
there were others upon which he never spoke
at all; on which, indeed, all his old reserves
were piled. Pass over the worst, and, only to
elucidate, let an item or two of these be cited.
on the day whose events have been narrated,
had not willingly been put on. And that
silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic
command, was not, indeed, a sword, but
the ghost of one. The scabbard, artificially
stiffened, was empty.
As for the black—whose brain, not body,
had schemed and led the revolt, with the plot
—his slight frame, inadequate to that which it
held, had at once yielded to the superior muscular
strength of his captor, in the boat. Seeing
all was over, he uttered no sound, and
could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to
say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak
words. Put in irons in the hold, with the rest,
he was carried to Lima. During the passage,
Don Benito did not visit him. Nor then, nor
at any time after, would he look at him. Before
the tribunal he refused. When pressed
by the judges he fainted. On the testimony
of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of
Babo.
Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at
the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless
many days, the head, that hive of subtlety,
fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed,
the gaze of the whites; and across the Plaza
looked towards St. Bartholomew's church, in
whose vaults slept then, as now, the recovered
bones of Aranda: and across the Rimac bridge
looked towards the monastery, on Mount Agonia
without; where, three months after being
dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne
on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader.
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