In the story "Benito Cereno" by Herman Melville, the author tells a story that had been told before, a true story reported in a book by the real Amasa Delano. The story is interesting for the way the author shapes it so that the reader is led to see the story in one way until a single moment causes a reversal so that everything is seem to be the opposite of what it has seemed until then. Critics have had some difficulty with this story because of this way of telling:
If we take Melville's rendering of it as a fable--of innocence and evil, or of spiritual obtuseness and spiritual suffering--we might indeed have to say that the narrative is awkward and negligent in composition, an that it really does not make its point (Berthoff 151).
However, as Berthoff notes further, we might assume that it is precisely the strangeness of the situation and its double meaning that has attracted Melville in the first place and that he wants to convey to the reader, in which case he is highly successful in doing so.
Captain Amasa Delano is the intelligence serving as the focus of the story in "Benito Cereno." The reader learns as the captain learns, and sometimes the reader learns faster than does the captain. The reader can see early that something is wrong on the San Dominick, but Captain Delano accepts what Benito Cereno tells him until the evidence begins to mount that something is wrong. It is not that Delano is foolish but that he is trusting, and he does not understand the nature of evil until after his experience on the San Dominick.
The story begins simply enough with a direct statement of fact:
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 harbour of St. Maria- a small, desert, uninhabited island towards the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. There he had touched for water (Melville 1).
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