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A contribution to: Space/Time

Edited by Jessica Gildersleeve and John McKeane

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 4

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) adapted Captain Amasa Delano’s Voyages and Travels (1817) in order to draw out particular subtexts of racial politics and prejudicial attitudes, and thus to resonate with a contemporary antebellum audience. Exploring the rationale for these changes more broadly, this paper proposes that another change has so far gone unnoticed in critical responses to the tale: the transposition of Santa Maria, an island off the coast of Chile. Demonstrating that this is unlikely to be an unintentional slip, given Melville’s familiarity with both the source text and the Chilean coastline, it argues that there were numerous possible reasons for doing this, including a desire to highlight colonial issues and comment on contemporary race relations both north and south of the Equator. As such, this piece utilizes a small array of key texts, rather than the broader biographical and contextually oriented sources that comprise the core of the larger piece of ongoing research to which this belongs. In so doing, it asserts that Melville’s desire to change the source text to fit with his own artistic, political, and æsthetic goals still causes problems for critics today, inasmuch as this geographical mischief is yet another ‘knotty problem’ in the ongoing debate about Melville’s motives for writing Benito Cereno.

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