(I know I have not completed the poem by Taylor, but I am easily distracted)

Exposition:

In the year 1799, [Setting] 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. [Setting] 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. [We have (1) some historical context: sails were not common; (2) an important scene: here comes the antagonist; that would make Delano the protagonist; (3) a symbol, a “strange sail.” I know it is a symbol because there is no need to call it “strange.” Something from outside is now intruding into reality.] 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 mantle. 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.

[Symbol here: this is literally foreshadowing! There is a storm coming, another symbol] 

Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

[This is an important fact, which Delano does not understand. The ship is supposed to show its colors, that is where it is from. Chile was part of Spain at the time, so it would be perfectly appropriate in this place. We are now entering into something strange – like the sail]

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. 

[Those who don’t fly flags are pirates. Why wasn’t he frightened?] 

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 undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectualperception, may be left to the wise to determine. 

[This is key to the movement of the story: He doesn’t (and won’t) understand what is happening]

But whatever misgivings might have obtruded on first seeing the stranger, would almost, in any seaman’s mind, have been dissipated by observing that, the ship, in navigating into the harbor, was drawing too near the land; a sunken reef making out off her bow. This seemed to prove her a stranger, indeed, not only to the sealer, but the island; consequently, she could be no wonted freebooter on that ocean. 

[It couldn’t be a pirate, because this was not a good sailor]

With no small interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her–a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun–by this time hemisphered on the rim of the horizon, and, apparently, in company with the strange ship entering the harbor–which,
wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriguante’s one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta.

It might have been but a deception of the vapors,

 [This is how Melville enters a symbol or something to think about: maybe our senses were wrong, but] but, the longer the
stranger was watched the more singular appeared her manoeuvres. Ere long it seemed hard to decide whether she meant to come in or no–what she wanted, or what she was about. [This ship that they will encounter will be completely ambiguous.]

[The first big plot point was the entry of the ship. Here is the next plot point, based upon the first. They decide to go to the mystery ship. I can’t help thinking about the Ancient Mariner, where the ship when it had rounded the southern most point of south America headed up and became a ghost ship. Melville would have known the poem. Chapter 52 of Moby Dick is titled, “The Albatross” and is an allusion Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. 

[That ship moved in a zig-zag.  The ship Life in Death is described advancing like this:

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist! 

And still it neared and neared: 

As if it dodged a water-sprite, 

It plunged and tacked and veered.]

The wind, which had breezed up a little during the night, was now extremely light and baffling, [great word here: the captain will be baffled] which the more increased the apparent uncertainty [again] of her movements. 

Surmising, at last, that it might be a ship in distress, Captain Delano ordered his whale-boat to be dropped, and, much to the wary opposition of his mate, prepared to board her, and, at the least, pilot her in. On the night previous, a fishing-party of the seamen had gone a long distance to some detached rocks out of sight from the sealer, and, an hour or two before daybreak, had returned, having met with no small success. Presuming that the stranger might have been long off soundings, the good captain put several baskets of the fish, for presents, into his boat, and so pulled away. 

From her continuing too near the sunken reef, deeming her in danger, calling to his men, he made all haste to apprise those on board of their situation. But, some time ere the boat came up, the wind, light though it was, having shifted, had headed the vessel off, as well as partly broken the vapors from about her.

Upon gaining a less remote view, the ship, when made signally visible on the verge of the leaden-hued swells, with the shreds of fog here and there raggedly furring her, appeared like a white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm, seen perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrenees.

[He is making a point here: The ship is 10,000 miles from Spain and it looks like it is a washed out monastery in Spain. I’m not sure what the point is.]

But it was no purely fanciful resemblance which now, for a moment, almost led Captain Delano to think that nothing less than a ship-load of monks was before him. Peering over the bulwarks were what really seemed, in the hazy distance, throngs of dark cowls; while, fitfully revealed through the open port-holes, other dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters. [Black Friars were Dominicans: they were sent to preach. So this ship is going to be a sermon to somone.]

Upon a still nigher approach, this appearance was modified, and the true character of the vessel was plain— He is resolving the symbol into something real a Spanish merchantman of the first class, carrying negro slaves, amongst other valuable freight, from one colonial port to another. 

[This is a vicious clause: Melville is an abolitionist. The story was published in an abolitionist magazine. https://melvillemichellefi.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/what-was-melvilles-view-on-slavery/ Putnams. He just called people “freight”. By taking the language of the slave trader and the position of the slave, he makes the point very sharp, the dehumanizing nature of slave trading.]

A very large, and, in its time, a very fine vessel, such as in those days were at intervals encountered along that main; sometimes superseded Acapulco treasure-ships, or retired frigates of the Spanish king’s navy, which, like superannuated Italian palaces, still, under a decline of masters, preserved signs of former state. [Spain was a declining empire by this time]

As the whale-boat drew more and more nigh, the cause of the peculiar pipe-clayed aspect of the stranger was seen in the slovenly neglect pervading her. The spars, ropes, and great part of the bulwarks, looked woolly, from long unacquaintance with the scraper, tar, and the brush. Her keel seemed laid, her ribs put together, and she launched, from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones.

[Melville often raises a vivid description to a symbol. This again reminds me of the ship in The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. 

When that strange shape drove suddenly 

Betwixt us and the Sun. 

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars, 

(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!) 

As if through a dungeon-grate he peered 

With broad and burning face. 

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) 

How fast she nears and nears! 

Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, 

Like restless gossameres? 

Are those her ribs through which the Sun 

Did peer, as through a grate? 

And is that Woman all her crew? 

Is that a DEATH? and are there two? 

Is DEATH that woman’s mate? 

Her lips were red, her looks were free, 

Her locks were yellow as gold: 

Her skin was as white as leprosy, 

The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, 

Who thicks man’s blood with cold. 

The approaching slave ship is the ship of Life-in-Death. At least that certainly seems to be the allusion.]

In the present business in which she was engaged, the ship’s general model and rig appeared to have undergone no material change from their original warlike and Froissart pattern. However, no guns were seen.

The tops were large, and were railed about with what had once been octagonal net-work, all now in sad disrepair. These tops hung overhead like three ruinous aviaries, in one of which was seen, perched, on a ratlin, a white noddy, a strange fowl, so called from its lethargic, somnambulistic character, being frequently caught by hand at sea. Battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turret, long ago taken by assault, and then left to decay. Toward the stern, two high-raised quarter galleries–the balustrades here and there covered with dry, tindery sea-moss–opening out from the unoccupied state-cabin, whose dead-lights, for all the mild weather, were hermetically closed and calked–these tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked.

[Another symbol:  a dangerous mythical beast is crushing another figure: both are masked. You cannot tell who they are. When the captain gets on the slave ship he assumes one group is oppressing the other, but in reality (at least or a time) the roles are reversed. The figures are masked because the captain does not know the truth. Melville even says this is a symbol.]

Whether the ship had a figure-head, or only a plain beak, was not quite certain, owing to canvas wrapped about that part, either to protect it while undergoing a re-furbishing, or else decently to hide its decay. Rudely painted or chalked, as in a sailor freak, along the forward side of a sort of pedestal below the canvas, was the sentence, “_Seguid vuestro jefe_” (follow your leader); 

[This is ironic: the slaves are not following the captain of the ship as a leader – but they are following their own leader.]

while upon the tarnished headboards, near by, appeared, in stately capitals, once gilt, the
ship’s name, “SAN DOMINICK,” each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept to and fro over the name, with every hearse-like roll of the hull.

[Another symbolic use: the ship sounds like a hearse, a vehicle delivering dead bodies.]

As, at last, the boat was hooked from the bow along toward the gangway amidship, its keel, while yet some inches separated from the hull, harshly grated as on a sunken coral reef. It proved a huge bunch of conglobated barnacles adhering below the water to the side like a wen—a token of baffling airs and long calms passed somewhere in those seas.

Climbing the side, the visitor was at once surrounded by a clamorous throng of whites and blacks, but the latter outnumbering the former more than could have been expected, negro transportation-ship as the stranger in port was. 

[There is another hint that something is wrong the proportions of the crew to slaves is wrong.]

[Here is exposition: the backstory. Hearing this information is a new plot point: A strange ship appears, then the ship tells a harrowing story of death.]

But, in one language, and as with one voice, all poured out a common tale of suffering; in which the negresses, of whom there were not a few, exceeded the others in their dolorous vehemence. The scurvy, together with the fever, had swept off a great part of their number, more especially the Spaniards. Off Cape Horn they had narrowly escaped shipwreck; then, for days together, they had lain tranced without wind; their provisions were low; their water next to none; their lips that moment were baked.

While Captain Delano was thus made the mark of all eager tongues, his one eager glance took in all faces, with every other object about him.

[Melville keeps underscoring the strangeness of this event. To enter into the ship is to enter into an enchantment.]

Always upon first boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially a foreign one, with a nondescript crew such as Lascars or Manilla men, the impression varies in a peculiar way from that produced by first entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land. Both house and ship–the one by its walls and blinds, the other by its high bulwarks like ramparts–hoard from view their interiors till the last moment: but in the case of the ship there is this addition; that the living spectacle it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave.

Perhaps it was some such influence, as above is attempted to be described, which, in Captain Delano’s mind, heightened whatever, upon a staid scrutiny, might have seemed unusual; especially the conspicuous figures of four elderly grizzled negroes, their heads like black, doddered willow tops, who, in venerable contrast to the tumult below them, were couched, sphynx-like, one on the starboard cat-head, another on the larboard, and the remaining pair face to face on the opposite bulwarks above the main-chains. They each had bits of unstranded old junk in their hands, and, with a sort of stoical self-content, were picking the junk into oakum, a small heap of which lay by their sides. They accompanied the task with a continuous, low, monotonous, chant; droning and drilling away like so many gray-headed bag-pipers playing a funeral march.

[Again the ship is Life-in-Death. There living beings, but it is a ship filled with death.]

The quarter-deck rose into an ample elevated poop, upon the forward verge of which, lifted, like the oakum-pickers, some eight feet above the general throng, sat along in a row, separated by regular spaces, the cross-legged figures of six other blacks; each with a rusty hatchet in his hand, [Here is another missed clue: the slave is holding a hatchet. Who would let someone who has nothing to lose by fighting you to the death a weapon?] which, with a bit of brick and a rag, he was engaged like a scullion in scouring; while between each two was a small stack of hatchets, their rusted edges turned forward awaiting a like operation.

Though occasionally the four oakum-pickers would briefly address some person or persons in the crowd below, yet the six hatchet-polishers neither spoke to others, nor breathed a whisper among themselves, but sat intent upon their task, except at intervals, when, with the peculiar love in negroes of uniting industry with pastime, two and two they sideways clashed their hatchets together,’ like cymbals, with a barbarous din. All six, unlike the generality, had the raw aspect of unsophisticated Africans.

But that first comprehensive glance which took in those ten figures, with scores less conspicuous, rested but an instant upon them, as, impatient of the hubbub of voices, the visitor turned in quest of whomsoever it might be that commanded the ship.

[Here we are going to meet the antagonist. Delano is going to be confused as to who is the real antagonist in this story (remember the Satyr with the mask). Delano thinks the Spanish captain matters, but really he has an adversary in the short man near the Spanish captain.]

But as if not unwilling to let nature make known her own case among his suffering charge, or else in despair of restraining it for the time, the Spanish captain, a gentlemanly, reserved-looking, and rather young man to a stranger’s eye, dressed with singular richness, but bearing plain traces of recent sleepless cares and disquietudes, stood passively by, leaning against the main-mast, at one moment casting a dreary, spiritless look upon his excited people, at the next an unhappy glance toward his visitor. By his side stood a black of small stature, in whose rude face, as occasionally, like a shepherd’s dog, he mutely turned it up into the Spaniard’s, sorrow and affection were equally blended.

[Delano seeks to do good to the Spanish ship.]

Struggling through the throng, the American advanced to the Spaniard, assuring him of his sympathies, and offering to render whatever assistance might be in his power. To which the Spaniard returned for the present but grave and ceremonious acknowledgments, his national formality dusked by the saturnine mood of ill-health.

But losing no time in mere compliments, Captain Delano, returning to the gangway, had his basket of fish brought up; and as the wind still continued light, so that some hours at least must elapse ere the ship could be brought to the anchorage, he bade his men return to the sealer, and fetch back as much water as the whale-boat could carry, with whatever soft bread the steward might have, all the remaining pumpkins on board, with a box of sugar, and a dozen of his private bottles of cider.

Not many minutes after the boat’s pushing off, to the vexation of all, the wind entirely died away, and the tide turning, began drifting back the ship helplessly seaward. But trusting this would not long last, Captain Delano sought, with good hopes, to cheer up the strangers, feeling no small satisfaction that, with persons in their condition, he could–thanks to his frequent voyages along the Spanish main—converse with some freedom in their native tongue.

While left alone with them, he was not long in observing some things tending to heighten his first impressions; but surprise was lost in pity, both for the Spaniards and blacks, alike evidently reduced from scarcity of water and provisions; while long-continued suffering seemed to have brought out the less good-natured qualities of the negroes, besides, at the same time, impairing the Spaniard’s authority over them.

But, under the circumstances, precisely this condition of things was to have been anticipated. In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery. Still, Captain Delano was not without the idea, that had Benito Cereno been a man of greater energy, misrule would hardly have come to the present pass. But the debility, constitutional or induced by hardships, bodily and mental, of the Spanish captain, was too obvious to be overlooked. A prey to settled dejection, as if long mocked with hope he would not now indulge it, even when it had ceased to be a mock, the prospect of that day, or evening at furthest, lying at anchor, with plenty of water for his people, and a brother captain to counsel and befriend, seemed in no perceptible degree to encourage him. 

[A ship of death in life, an enchantment, a problem upon the ship which Delano cannot understand and now apparent madness; these are all elements which Poe uses to much effect. Poe is ten years younger than Melville. I don’t know if Melville read Poe, but this idea was something “in the air.”]

His mind appeared unstrung, if not still more seriously affected. Shut up in these oaken walls, chained to one dull round of command, whose unconditionality cloyed him, like some hypochondriac abbot [There is a lot of imagery around monks.] he moved slowly about, at times suddenly pausing, starting, or staring, biting his lip, biting his finger-nail, flushing, paling, twitching his beard, with other symptoms of an absent or moody mind. This distempered spirit was lodged, as before hinted, in as distempered a frame. He was rather tall, but seemed never to have been robust, and now with nervous suffering was almost worn to a skeleton. A tendency to some pulmonary complaint appeared to have been lately confirmed. His voice was like that of one with lungs half gone—hoarsely suppressed, a husky whisper. No wonder that, as in this state he tottered about, his private servant apprehensively followed him.

[Again, Melville writes an extremely ironic description. Delano apparently can only think of the Africans as subservient, even though this is not true.]

Sometimes the negro gave his master his arm, or took his handkerchief out of his pocket for him; performing these and similar offices with that affectionate zeal which transmutes into something filial or fraternal acts in themselves but menial; and which has gained for the negro the repute of making the most pleasing body-servant in the world; one, too, whom a master need be on no stiffly superior terms with, but may treat with familiar trust; less a servant than a devoted companion.

[The true antagonist is Babo – he has been introduced as subservient and is introduced only in connection with the Spanish captain. Delano’s inability to understand Babo is one of the keys to the plot.]

Marking the noisy indocility of the blacks in general, as well as what seemed the sullen inefficiency of the whites it was not without humane satisfaction that Captain Delano witnessed the steady good conduct of Babo.

But the good conduct of Babo, hardly more than the ill-behavior of others, seemed to withdraw the half-lunatic Don Benito from his cloudy languor. Not that such precisely was the impression made by the Spaniardon the mind of his visitor. The Spaniard’s individual unrest was, for the present, but noted as a conspicuous feature in the ship’s general affliction. 

[This is like the Fall of the House of Usher, where the a place is associated with the mental disturbance of the character who inhabits the space.]

Still, Captain Delano was not a little concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito’s unfriendly indifference towards himself. The Spaniard’s manner, too, conveyed a sort of sour and gloomy disdain, which he seemed at no pains to disguise. 

But this the American in charity ascribed to the harassing effects of sickness, since, in former instances, he had noted that there are peculiar natures on whom prolonged physical suffering seems to cancel every social instinct of kindness; as if, forced to black bread themselves, they deemed it but equity that each person coming nigh them should, indirectly, by some slight or affront, be made to partake of their fare.

But ere long Captain Delano bethought him that, indulgent as he was at the first, in judging the Spaniard, he might not, after all, have exercised charity enough. At bottom it was Don Benito’s reserve which displeased him; but the same reserve was shown towards all but his faithful personal attendant. Even the formal reports which, according to sea-usage, were, at stated times, made to him by some petty underling, either a white, mulatto or black, he hardly had patience enough to listen to, without betraying contemptuous aversion. His manner upon such occasions was, in its degree, not unlike that which might be supposed to have been his imperial countryman’s, Charles V., just previous to the anchoritish retirement of that monarch from the throne. [Charles V retired to a monastery. An anchorite is a monk]