Benito Cereno

Benito Cereno
Herman Melville

Summary:

Benito Cereno

     The year is 1799, and Captain Delano, an American, is just hanging out with his seal-killing buddies out on the ocean. What does he spy from his little eye? A strange Spanish ship drunk-shipping(?) in front of him without the proper registration. The ship doesn't have any flags, is covered in barnacles, has a creepy message tattooed on the side (follow your leader), and Delano's first idea is to head on over to say howdy to his neighbor. Armed with a couple baskets of fish, he rows over with a couple of guys from his ship to notice something even more strange about the lost vessel... it's manned entirely by African slaves.
On board, he's welcomed by a group of slaves and white people who have not been having a great time. He finds the captain of the ship, Bernito Cereno, a tweaky paranoid man who comes equipped with his right hand slave-man, Babo. Delano likes Babo's attentive style, and really likes the way he gives haircuts, and thinks it's kind of cute that he's always around when Cereno is talking. He keeps trying to get the story of how Cereno's ship got here, but Cereno is constantly plagued with coughing fits and fainting spells, which make his stories very long and very interuppted. This frustrates Delano, but as a narrator he's pretty sketchy... and really dumb. He asks why all of the African slaves are just hanging out, and Cereno tells him that they all died. Every last one of them died from starvation. And the scurvy.

I imagine Cereno making this face the entire story.

     Delano, chin scratching through all of this, finally decides that maybe Cereno is just a really crappy captain with really crappy luck. There is sketchiness everywhere (slaves are punching white guys, Cereno is really faint while getting shaved by Babo and then, supposedly, cuts his face, Cereno and Babo whispering secrets to one another, etc), and Delano doesn't like it... so he just wanders around his ship wondering why Cereno is a really terrible ship-host. He even uses his country's flag as a barber shawl... Not cool.
      Delano, still trying to CSI things together, interviews a knot-tying sailor, who, instead of answering his questions, just passes him the knot. Which is immediately confiscated by a large black slave who is unamused by the entire situation.
In an effort to get Cereno by himself, Delano invites the other captain to a private lunch, and is disappointed that Benito never goes anywhere, I mean, anywhere, without Babo. Weirded out, Delano decides that he just needs to frump away, give this crazy ship some supplies, and head away. He whistles a boat over full of supplies, says his goodbyes to Cereno, goes to leave, when Cereno leaps over the side of his ship to fall at Delano's feet! Babo, refusing to be left behind, also jumps, but he brings a dagger because... DUM DUM DUM, he was the bad guy all this time! The canvas covering the San Dominick falls away to reveal a human skeleton just above that phrase, follow your leader. 
     Delano, as the swarthy, and now understanding sea captain that he is, then takes over the ship, but not without a couple of deaths and fingers being chopped off by flying axes.