The Great Columbus

His hands were full of ropes, which he was working into a large knot. Some blacks were about him obligingly dipping the strands for him, here and there, as the exigencies of the operation demanded.

Captain Delano crossed over to him and stood in silence surveying the knot, his mind, by a not uncongenial transition, passing from its own entanglements to those of the hemp. For intricacy, such a knot he had never seen in an American ship, nor indeed any other. The old man looked like an Egyptian priest making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon. The knot seemed a combination of double-bowline-knot, treble-crown-knot, back-handed-well-knot, knot-in-and-out-knot, and jamming knot.

At last, puzzled to comprehend the meaning of such a knot, Captain Delano addressed the knotter: "What are you knotting there, my man?"

"The knot," was the brief reply, without looking up.

"So it seems; but what is it for?"

"For someone else to undo..."

-- Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno"

Captain Delano is surrounded by symbols he doesn't understand. On board Don Benito's Spanish vessel, the ancient balustrades of which are literally collapsing beneath Delano's heavy-handed touch, all is a mystery to the American -- because he is blinded by American sunshine, deluded into an unshakable feeling of American Exceptionalism, and entirely convinced about the cleanliness of his own conscience.

The situation the capatin fails to decipher is a slave revolt. The Africans have seized command of the San Dominick, killed most of the crew, and demanded to be returned to Senegal. Babo, the leader of the revolt, is an expert manipulator of symbols. The name of the vessel, after one of Columbus's "discoveries," is already rather loaded with meaning. Babo does not go so far as to rename the ship, but offers up a terrifying symbolic gesture, which is explained to us only at the end, in the form of a legal document, containing the testimony of Benito Cereno to the authorities. After killing the Spanish slave master, Babo uses the body as a warning:

...the Negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been substituted for the ship's proper figurehead -- the image of Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World; that the Negro Babo asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's, that, upon discovering his face, the Negro Babo, coming close, said words to this effect: "Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body, follow your leader," pointing to the prow.

Babo does the same with the rest of the Spanish crew, parading them one at a time to the bowsprit, to ask if the whitness of the bones might suggest the whiteness of the man to whom they once belonged. What Babo has done here is, in fact, not symbolic but literal -- he has removed the myth and replaced it with the reality: that Spain is not a nation of "New World Discovers," but a nation of slaveholders, dying slowly under the weight of its own spiritual corruption. The symbolism of this collapse and the moral decadence and degeneracy that causes it is what is on display for Delano, who steadfastly resists seeing it, no matter how obvious the signs. Delano's major mistake is that he sees the illness but misunderstands the import -- he sees degeneracy in the sickly figure of the Spaniard and pities him. Delano's approach to the world is one of "benevolent condescension." "This slavery," he thinks to himself, "breeds ugly passions in man" -- and he thinks this without a moment's reflection upon the irony of it. The comprehending position is left for us to occupy -- we see the irony, and surely the audience, in mid-1850's American, could see that this was not a story about the Spaniards, but about themselves.

I only bring all this up because today is a holiday, on which we commemorate the arrival of that mythic figurehead in the "New World." Christoforo Columbo, the man who set the world on fire with his own ambition, who let loose, along with other upstanding Spaniards, and, later, Englishmen, the rape and destruction of an entire continent. The first thing the Europeans did when they arrived in this "New World" was to establish the brutal practice of human slavery. When they found their indigenous slaves dying by the thousands, from overwork and disease, another benevolent condescender, Bartolomeo de las Casas, helped the collective Spanish conscience feel OK about the wholesale importation of African slaves, to replace the indigenous ones they seemingly couldn't kill fast enough. And the rest, as they say, is history: a dark and ugly history, one that Melville addressed without flinching, in this story and others, questioning, as Cornel West has suggested, not the nature of the American soul, but its very existence.

Some people no longer celebrate Columbus Day, but Indigenous Peoples Day. Such things often draw the accusation of "political correctness," which West accurately calls "a term coined by those who tend to trivialize the scars of others and minimize the suffering of victims while highlighting their own wounds." At any rate, we don't really celebrate this holiday no matter what we call it -- we commemorate, which usually takes the simple form of an extra day off of work. But the names in which we do such things carry an ethical weight. And while the destruction of the indigenous cultures of the Americas was more or less complete hundreds of years ago, we still live with the repercussions; and if perhaps there is no satisfactory way to redress the devastation wrought against entire peoples, one can at least begin by clearing the excrement of our own mythology from our eyes, by recognizing the questionable assignation of the names of cities and holidays that, as for Delano, helps keep our collective conscience clear.