Benito Cereno by Herman Melville is a complex and enigmatic novella, or short novel, that defies easy categorization within a single genre. Initially published in 1855 but set over 50 years earlier in 1799, Melville’s story is a work of historical fiction that borrows heavily from the conventions and techniques of other genres such as mystery and horror.
Despite the strong influence of other popular 19th-century genres, Benito Cereno is first and foremost a work of historical fiction due to its vivid and detailed depiction of the Transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century. Melville meticulously reconstructs this setting, drawing upon a number of historical sources and documents in order to lend the story a sense of historical accuracy. In particular, he drew extensively from the travel journals of an actual historical figure, Captain Amasa Delano, who was known in the 18th century for his role in putting down a slave revolt aboard a ship.
Though Melville’s story is a work of fiction that is not closely based on any actual incident in history, he uses Delano’s name for his protagonist and sets the story in a period of time in which slave revolts, including the successful Haitian Revolution, were common. The opening lines of the story foreground this historical context:
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. [...] Ships were then not so plenty in those waters as now.
Melville sets his story at the very end of the 18th century, two decades after the American Revolution and in the midst of the Haitian Revolution, led by formerly-enslaved Black Haitians. The narrator emphasizes the historical shifts that occurred between the time period of the story and Melville’s own time, noting for example that ships were “not so plenty in those waters as now,” which suggests that maritime trade in the Americas had not yet reached its peak.
