Herman Melville: Benito Cereno and Slavery

The film Amistad is about slavery. The plot takes place on a ship. America was the last country where slavery was abolished. Together with the rest of the writers of American renaissance Melville was very much against slavery and the reason why he wrote the story of Benito Cereno was to worn the United States if they follow the ways of the uropean countries especially Spain they are going to end up with the same kind of cultural problems. That is why one of the mottos of the story is follow the leader. The story takes place on a Spanish ship called St. !ominic and they are transporting slaves from Africa. Since slave trade was abolished in most of the uropean countries eventually that why new roots had to be made and it was called trade triangle because what happened was that they transported from Seriondeleon to South America and sold the slaves there because the industry in S.A. depended on salve labor. There were huge sugar plantations and working on those plantations is very hard and white people did not want to do it" in order to make a profit they needed free labor. #atin American countries kept importing slaves from Africa or actually kidnapping salves. They would attack African countries and they would $ust take people and transport them on slave ships and usually they would recruit more people than they actually needed and could cramp on the ship. These slaves were driven under the deck of the ship and they were usually not fed if somebody died people who were alive they were there beside the corpses and of curse rats attacked these people and the corpses. Around the middle of the Atlantic%refer to as the &middle passage'%ocean ships would stop and $ust throw overboard the number of slaves that they thought they will not need or who were weak or sick so this way they throw around () * of people off the ship. +t is considered that ,) million people were people that way. Slaves who arrived in #atin America would be bapti-ed" sprinkled with water and given different names to confuse nglish authorities who were trying to stop slave trade than they would be taken to the .est +ndies to Southern States because those states also depended on free labor because those states were agricultural sates and usually there were plantations of coffee and tobacco. /ne of the two main characters of the story is the Spanish captain and his occupation is slave trading so he picks up slaves in Africa transports them to #atin America and the story of Benito Cereno takes place on a voyage between these two continents. Things get out of control and the slaves rebel. The plot takes place in 0122" the Amistad rebellion happened in 3. But he actually wrote the story in 3 The slaves managed to overpower the Spanish troop and kill most of them only spared the captain and

some of the higher officers and wanted to make the Spaniards to turn the ship and get them back to Africa" however what they did not know was that the Spaniards were constantly navigating the ship towards the U.S. So Amistad one day arrived on 4ortimor and then a trial took place in order to make these people free or not and eventually they did become free but the trial lasted 0) years. Melville wanted to inspire Americans to abolish slavery because he said that slavery is one of the greatest flaw of the U.S. The beginning starts with this slave ship on to which slaves are driven. BC on first sight appears very noble" he comes from a noble Spanish family but when we dig deeper we find out that his whole family works in trading slaves. So he is really not a good person. The slaves were shackled. BC took these shackles of the slaves because he regarded them very stupid to rebel against them. Slaves at that time were really treated as ob$ects. ven in the constitution of the U.S. it was stated that slaves are not persons. Aeksandro B." Benito5s best friend and he would talk about the slaves as for e6ample chairs or goods which ought to be put on the ship. Slave traders did not feel any kind of remorse for what they were doing. The way Benito describes them and talks about them we can feel that he has absolutely no compassion for them. The scene when Benito is giving a deposition in court he is describing the ship. Stating that there are 0,) blacks and that they belong to a certain person and so on and so fort" so they are catalogued as any other ob$ects on the ship. They are catalogued among the goods and not among the people. The first part of the story is told by an omniscient narrator it is told through the eyes of captain !elano and he basically stands for the U. S. so while Benito stands for Spain and for urope and this is 7uite obvious since when you start reading it !elano is identified with U. S. +n first part of the story the reader can be 7uite confused by the way Captain !elano is dealing with the whole situation because he goes on this ship where he sees slaves running around on the ship and for him that is very strange and he thinks that Benito is a very bad captain he blames the whole situation on Benito. 8e blames for not being capable of keeping order and he never thinks about the fact that maybe the slaves rebelled. So we can see in action the opinion of the U.S. towards urope" because urope at the time in the 02th century was seen as corrupted" too catholic and actually U. S. did not like Catholics because 4uritans were persecuted by Catholics. That is one of the reasons why Captain !elano does not like Benito.

Throughout the first part of the story we see that Benito is being linked to Spanish Catholicism he is even compared to one of the Spanish kings who persecuted 4rotestants. !elano sees that ship as the embodiment of the catholic religion. And that is why he has these negative feelings toward Benito and the sailors. Also we have the evidence of inter-white racism. .hile slavery serves as a an e6ample for racism. +nter%white racism is portrayed through the relationship of Benito and !elano because they hate and despise each other because they come from two very different countries" continents" cultures and religions. Benito does not like !elano that he thinks that !elano is too arrogant and the same opinion that urope had fro the U.S. " that the states are too young a country and that they are ignorant they are not developed and we also see this interpretation of different perception of colonialism . That colonialism as a movement started from urope and introduced salve trade and with this the idea that one nation is more important than the other surfaced. This gives them" the better ones the right to impose their tradition" religion and culture on other nations. The Spanish and the 4ortuguese concurred America" and bapti-ed the people and developed the country" by destroying the culture of the Mayas and imploring their own culture. .e have the same ideas as far as Africa is concerned. .hile in America they did not like these colonial trends in urope but they did the same by taking the Spanish territories" that is why the war of the Me6ican 9ulf broke out. .hen Captain !elano is talking about slaves he calls them dogs and he thinks that the only possible occupation for a black man is to be a servant " that black men are stupid and even when they are benevolent they are like :ewfoundland dogs and he also compares African women to antelopes. .hen they are aggressive he compares them to aggressive" to more so called negative animals. !elano tried to buy slaves from Benito" although he comes from :ew ngland and in the :orthen states slavery was actually illegal still it was ignored that people held slaves. Melville is very ironic of his treatment of the US because while the U.S. tries to pro$ect this positive image of themselves as a free country as a country where everybody is e7ual where they have the declaration of independence" all people are free e6cept black people and :ative Americans. The figurehead on the ship of Benito is Christopher Columbus" which is a bit ironic and which is later on taken of and the skeleton of Ale6ander ;. is replaced with it. So the ship is sailing with a skeleton as a figurehead" which is another comment of Melville on the whole situation because Ale6ander ;. is the captain of the ship before the slaves kill him and on his skeleton they write <ollow the #eader. They want to tell Benito C. and all the other sailors that that if they try to be aggressive they are going to be killed. Melville is trying to tell his leaders that if you follow political leaders who are slaveholders that

is not going to end well that there will be rebellions and leaders killed and their skeletons displayed and also that the leader could be Spain and urope. So that if the U.S. look up to uropean countries like Spain like ngland who made their fortune on slave trade that again they are not following the right path. The story can be read on various political and social levels. There was great ambiguity when the story was written in 0=>> five years before the civil war started there was this great battle between the northern states and southern states as far as whether slavery should be introduced in new territories or not. U.S. was rapidly widening their territory" moving west so that they ac7uired in the Me6ican war they ac7uired several states they had #ouisiana 4urchase" which basically bought them the whole mid% west and northern sates demanded that all the new states should not adopt slavery while all the southern states wanted slavery to remain. Agricultural Slave conomy vs. #iberal Capitalism :orthern states wanted competition and did not want their income and economy to be based on slave labor. :orthern states were puritan states. There was a lot of confusion surrounding these issues. Melville wanted to capture that atmosphere and that is why Captain !elano at the very beginning of the story approaches St. !ominic" and the prominent color is grey because both character Benito and !elano are grey characters" they are not good. C. Delano keeps insisting that he is a good man and that he is a naive man a puritan from :ew ngland. 8e is also telling that he does not know what is happening around him. .hile he is on the ship St. !ominic and he sees that something strange is going on that Benito is strange" the deck is strange he $ust keeps ignoring all that and he keeps thinking that Benito wants to kill him. 8e keeps on insisting that Benito is the dangerous villain. At one point in the story one of the Spanish sailors gives him a knot which he should untie" and solve the situation and stop being blind but he until the very end he refuses to do so. 8e is blind and he is representing the blind U.S. 8e does not change" at the end he orders his men to kill the slaves who are waiting to be taken back to Africa. Those who survived were taken to court and in the trial everybody keeps insisting that what happened is not true. The $udge does not believe that the slaves rebelled since they are stupid like animals.

Benito is proclaimed insane. 8e decides to go to a monastery. 8e is not going there because he is suddenly very devout? he goes there because that is his last refuge. 8e is afraid of the slaves now that he knows that hey can rebel. 8e is also afraid of returning to Spain and be $udged there. 8e is very ine6perienced" young and he got his position through family connections. 8e goes to a monastery and dies relatively soon and before he goes there he has a last conversation with !elano. !elano asks him why he is sad and Benito says because the :egro has cast a shadow on me. !elano says that nothing really happened" everything is $ust fine. +gnorance is a blessing @positive attitudeA. Babo is sentenced to death? his head is chopped of and put on a stick. So that slaves wouldn5t rebel anymore. After the civil war" the slaves had the same treatment. This is regarded as the most contemporary work. Monologue racism on the part of captain !elano the shaving of BC is the degradation of Spain and C! is in fact en$oying that fight of Spanish humiliation