Benito Cereno

Herman Melville · 1855 CE · Short Story · Modern / American · Victorian

Off a deserted Chilean island an American sealer boards a battered Spanish slave ship where the discipline has gone strange: blacks move freely, sailors keep silent, and the Spanish captain is attended every minute by his servant Babo. Delano is generous, unsuspicious, and spends the day explaining away one oddity after another. Melville reworked a real captain's memoir into the sharpest American fiction about what benevolence cannot see.

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