Benito Cereno

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, including antisemitism, and enslavement.

“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.”

In the opening passages, Herman Melville creates a somber and ominous atmosphere by detailing the dark and gray weather. This description serves as foreshadowing, hinting at the dark events that are about to unfold.

“To Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors.”

The ship Captain Delano observes lacks a flag (or colors). The absence of this standard maritime symbol suggests a disregard for ordinary navigation protocols, hinting at illicit activity. This serves as foreshadowing, signaling that the San Dominick operates outside the norm.

“Captain Delano’s surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, 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.”

Melville directly characterizes Captain Delano as a man who is inclined to see good in others. His naive and innocent nature plays a crucial role in the narrative, as it renders him unsuspecting of the true nature of the ship; he is particularly ill-equipped to deal with The Unreliability of Appearances.