Amasa Delano

Amasa Delano , 1763-1823, American sea captain, b. Duxbury, Mass. He served in the American Revolution as a soldier at 15 and later as a privateersman. His experiences on the sea in the days of New England's supremacy are recorded in his Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, Comprising Three Voyages Round the World (1817).

Bibliography: See J. B. Connolly, Master Mariner (1943).

Benito Cereno, story by Melville, published in The Piazza Tales (1856). Its source is a chapter in Amasa Delano's Voyages and Travels (1817). Robert Lowell adapted Melville's story in a one‐act verse play of the same title in The Old Glory (1965).

In 1799 Captain Delano puts in for water at an uninhabited island off Chile, where he encounters a Spanish merchantman in ruinous condition, commanded by Benito Cereno, a sensitive young Spaniard now gravely ill and enabled to pursue his duties only with the solicitous care of his black servant Babo. Cereno tells the American that he sailed from Buenos Aires for Lima, with a crew of 50 and a cargo including 300 Negroes owned by Alexandro Aranda. Off Cape Horn, he says, many of the crew were lost in a storm, and disease destroyed most of the other whites and blacks. Delano offers aid, but is uneasy at the insubordination of the slaves and the careless seamanship and seeming ingratitude of Cereno. He is about to return to his ship when Cereno jumps into his boat, precipitating an attack by the Negroes from which they barely escape. Cereno explains that the blacks had mutinied, led by Babo, and wanted to be carried to Africa. Delano seizes the slave ship, and takes it with his own to Lima, where Babo is executed. Cereno enters a monastery, but soon dies.