Benito Cereno

(1855)

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, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors 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, howeveruninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying,was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations. Considering thelawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at thatday, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might havedeepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularlyundistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary andrepeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, anyway involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view ofwhat humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolentheart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectualperception, may be left to the wise to determine.

But whatever misgivings might have obtruded on first seeing thestranger, would almost, in any seaman's mind, have been dissipated byobserving that, the ship, in navigating into the harbor, was drawing toonear the land; a sunken reef making out off her bow. This seemed toprove her a stranger, indeed, not only to the sealer, but the island;consequently, she could be no wonted freebooter on that ocean. With nosmall interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her — a proceeding notmuch facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through whichthe far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; muchlike 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 Limaintriguante's one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indianloop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta.