Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
page 73 of 287 (25%)
BENITO CERENO.


In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts,
commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor with a
valuable cargo, in the harbor of St. Maria--a small, desert, uninhabited
island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. There
he had touched for water.

On the second day, not long after dawn, while lying in his berth, his
mate came below, informing him that a strange sail was coming into the
bay. Ships were then not so plenty in those waters as now. He rose,
dressed, and went on deck.

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and
calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of
swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead
that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray
surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of
troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and
fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms.
Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

To Captain Delano's surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass,
showed no colors; though to do so upon entering a haven, however
uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying,
was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations. Considering the
lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that
day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might have
deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly
DigitalOcean Referral Badge