The Empire of Necessity (39 page)

27 and 28.
“It was too much like hitting a man when he is down”: the technique of killing seals hadn’t changed much between Amasa Delano’s time and the late nineteenth century, when this illustration (right) was done.

29.
Herman Melville said Más Afuera looked like a “vast iceberg drifting in tremendous poise. Its sides are split with dark cavernous recesses, as an old cathedral with its gloomy lateral chapels.”

30.
This painting is of the square-sterned, flush-decked
Ann Alexander
, a ship that resembled the
Tryal
.

31.
A West African Mandinka marabout.

32.
Map of Santa María Island, 1804. The
Perseverance
met the
Tryal
in the island’s leeward bay, to the left of the sandbar.

33.
A wood engraving by Garrick Palmer from an illustrated edition of
Benito Cereno
: Amasa’s boat approaching the Spanish ship.

34.
Seal blubber is tendinous, so superb steel was used in the blades of skinning knives, like the kind used to disembowel and flay the
Tryal
rebels. Delano said that his were “always kept exceedingly sharp and as bright as a gentleman’s sword.” This knife, found in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, is five inches wide and forty-eight inches long. Note the knot work, which was needed to keep hands from sliding down the oily handle onto the double-edged blade.

35.
Talcahuano viewed from the sea in 1793.

36.
Concepción’s finest families would have turned out to view the hanging of the leaders of the
Tryal
’s rebellion wearing their best dress.

37.
Another engraving by Palmer. In Melville’s retelling of events on the
Tryal
, Babo survives the retaking of the ship but then is condemned and executed in Lima, his head displayed on a pike: “Dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites.”

38.
“Death grim and grasping.”

A NOTE ON SOURCES AND OTHER MATTERS

BENITO CERENO

Benito Cereno
is a true story but not in the way
Moby-Dick
is a true story. Melville’s whale book is based as much on
King Lear
and
Paradise Lost
as it is on the stoving of the
Essex
.
Benito Cereno
, in contrast, is taken almost entirely from chapter 18 of Amasa Delano’s
A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands
. The historian Sterling Stuckey argues that Melville drew on the travel writings of Mungo Park to develop an appreciation of West African culture, and Robert Wallace believes that Melville borrowed imagery from Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist orator, including for the famous scene in which Melville has Babo terrorize Cereno under the pretense of shaving him. But
Benito Cereno
’s primary source is nearly wholly Delano’s memoir,
A Narrative of Voyages
. In his book, Delano reproduces a series of translated Spanish court documents to bolster his claims against Benito Cerreño (whom Delano refers to as Don Bonito throughout). Melville likewise reproduces these documents in his fictional account, with important alterations to support his narrative. The originals are in Chile’s Archivo Nacional and Biblioteca Nacional.