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  • The House of HarperMelville's Anti-Catholic Publisher
  • James Emmett Ryan (bio)

I can hardly imagine how under any circumstances the Harper brothers could have been other than good men. In ruminating over the reasons why they became the men they were, I find that much importance must be attached to the influence of Methodism, and still more to the impress of Methodist preachers.

—J. Henry Harper (1912)1

Seething with resentment at American and Spanish complicity in human trafficking, and masterfully narrated toward its violent climax and unsettling denouement, "Benito Cereno" (1855) is the only work of fiction by Herman Melville that reckons substantially and directly with the long history of the transatlantic slave trade. However, set in 1799 off the coast of Chile, the novella's devastating moral force is not merely applied to guilty empires or avaricious nation-states such as venerable Spain or the newly formed United States of America. Instead, Melville chooses to position the problem of slavery within a specific religious culture. The Spanish cultural identity of the novella's central figure, Captain Benito Cereno, which Melville likely deploys to show parallels between his fictional tale of slave trading and the history of the Spanish Inquisition in "Black Legend" ("leyenda negra") religious propaganda, also provides an opportunity to signify Cereno's personal religious background as a Roman Catholic.2 As is well known, Black Legend propaganda, beginning in the fifteenth century, sensationalized Catholic association with religious torture, witch hunting, and villainous priests during the Spanish Inquisition and produced a large and popular anti-Catholic literature as a result. In "Benito Cereno" the naïve American captain Amasa Delano serves as a secular foil to Captain Benito Cereno the Catholic Spaniard, whose ethereal strangeness is tied to his religious identity. Likewise, the novella's prevailing auras of menace and moral corruption are strongly associated primarily with Spanish Catholicism. Melville centers his narrative attention on Cereno, captain of the Catholically named San [End Page 76] Dominick, who—in a development initially invisible to Delano—is being physically and emotionally tortured by the insurgent Africans who, after a rebellion, have taken control of the ship and made its captain their hostage, undoing the Spanish Catholic power once vested in the pious Captain Cereno. Gradually, the dramatic irony of the novella escalates as readers discover, long before Delano, that Cereno is no longer in charge. Captain Delano's very late but violently decisive discovery of the San Dominick rebellion precipitates the novella's bloody climax. Throughout, Melville implies that Spain's role in slavery's grim commerce is intertwined with Spain's Catholic religious traditions. Indeed, while the institution of slave trading and the fate of the African captives are Melville's central concerns, linked powerfully to slavery is the religious identity of the story's moral villain: Cereno, whose Spanish version of Roman Catholic religiosity Melville cites, glosses, and emphasizes in a variety of ways.

As the novella opens, a Yankee captain named Amasa Delano, skipper of the American whaler Bachelor's Delight–encounters a mysterious slaveship off the coast of Chile, identified as the Spanish whaler San Dominick. Delano's first glimpses of the Spanish ship provide religious clues, as there are "dark moving figures … dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters." Dominican friars (Black Friars) are the imagined or spectral figures aboard the ship captained by Cereno, and Melville figures this strange ship as a zone of Roman Catholic imagery and culture. Dominican friars imagined on board a mysterious ship called the San Dominick: in these passages, Melville references the Castilian friar Saint Dominic (1170–1221), celebrated as founder of the Order of Friars Preachers (Dominicans). The anti-Catholic implications of these Dominican references are plain, as many of Melville's readers would have known that the Dominican order, under directions from Pope Gregory in the thirteenth century, had been charged with conducting the Spanish Inquisition against heresy and non-believers. Many Dominicans advanced their inquisitions notoriously and brutally, employing harsh interrogation, torture, and executions, usually by burning. Other nineteenth-century readers of "Benito Cereno" would have noticed the irony of naming a slave ship "San Dominick" in light of Santo Domingo...

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