Review of a Book About a True Story on Which 'Benito Cereno' Was Based

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David S Reynolds, The Captain Held Captive. Benito Cerreño owas seized by the slaves he was transporting, who demanded he sail them to Africa. But he only pretended to comply. Wall Street Journal, Feb 6, 2014
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304691904579348583410384704
(book review Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity; Slavery, freedom, and deception in the New World. Metropolitan, 2014)

Note:
(a) "Herman Melville's 1855 novella 'Benito Cereno,' based on the true story of an early-19th-century slave revolt on a Spanish ship off the coast of Chile * * * In his engaging, richly informed 'The Empire of Necessity,' Greg Grandin probes the historical background [that was] dramatized so masterfully by Melville"
(i) Benito Cereno
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Cereno
(Published in 1855, 1856; The narrative of events in the novel closely follows the actual event; The story follows a sea captain, Amasa DELANO (the fictionalized version of a real-life adventurer by the same name) [who] recounts how in 1805 [real year; 1799 in the novella], his vessel Perseverance encountered the Spanish Tryal [both real names]; The primary source for the plot, as well as some of the text, was Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, chapter 18 (1817))(ii) Benedict (from the Latin benedictus, meaning "blessed") has as vernacular forms Benedetto (Italian), Benito (Spanish), Baruch (Hebrew) and Mubarak/Barack (Arabic).  Wikipedia
(iii) Herman Melville

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville
(1819-1891; born [as Herman Melvill] and died in New York City; "When he died in 1891, Melville was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the 'Melville Revival' in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick")

(b) Amasa Delano (1763-1823) "served in the American Revolution as a soldier at 15."  Columbia Encyclopedia
(i) Amasa Delano and Benito Cereno. Drew Archival Library of Duxbury Rural and Historical Society, Mar 31, 2010.
drewarchives.org/2010/03/31/amasa-delano-and-benito-cereno/
(ii) Henry Hughes, Seeing Unseeing: the Historical Amasa Delano and his Voyages. Drew Archival Library, March 2010.
drewarchives.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/henryhughespaper.pdf

For more about this essay, go to the next posting in this series.
(iii) Regarding the surname Delano (which is distinct from Delaney): "Respelling of French De la Noye, habitational name, with the preposition de, for someone from any of various places called La Noue or La Noë, for example in Marne, Charente, Maine-et-Loire, named with Gaulish nauda ‘moist or marshy place’, ‘swamp’"
(iv)
(A) Duxbury, Massachusetts
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duxbury,_Massachusetts
(in Plymouth County; two theories for the town name: (A) Pilgrim [e]lder William Brewster * * * may have named Duxbury after his possible home of Duxbury Hall, in Chorley, England; (B) Miles Standish owned large estates, including the two main family headquarters of Standish Hall and Duxbury Manor, in Lancashire)
(B) Duxbury Hall
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duxbury_Hall
(was a 19th-century country house in Duxbury Park estate in Duxbury Woods, Lancashire that has been demolished; The manor of Duxbury belonged to the Duxbury family before the 1300s)
(C) Duxbury Woods
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duxbury_Woods
("Duxbury has existed with this name (Deuksburie, Dokesbirie, etc) since an Angle named Deowuc settled there in 600-900 AD, before the arrival of Vikings at the latter date. He is believed during the rule of King Offa to have set up a fortified farm known as a burh on land near the present day Saw Mills on Wigan Lane")

(c) "The age of liberty, which brought the American, French and Haitian revolutions, was also the age of slavery. Mr Grandin explores many dimensions of this tragic paradox. The era's devotion to liberty unleashed freer trade, including the commerce in Africans who were captured in their homeland, imprisoned in ships and carried to the Americas, where they were sold into slavery. * * * Slavery, as Mr Grandin writes, was the flywheel on which the region's market revolution turned."
(i) The "age of liberty" is not a proper name.
(ii) Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) "culminated in the elimination of slavery there and the founding of the Republic of Haiti [Independence declared 1804; Recognized by France 1825]. The Haitian Revolution was the only slave revolt which led to the founding of a state."  Wikipedia
(iii) flywheel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel

(d) "Mr Grandin provides a vivid portrait of Alejandro de Aranda, a Spanish-descended merchant in the Argentine province of Mendoza, who in April 1804 purchased 64 blacks in Buenos Aires and took them, along with other slaves, hundreds of miles westward, across the pampas and the Andes, with the aim of shipping them north from Valparaiso to Lima, where he planned to sell them. Mr Grandin re-creates the torment of these overland marches, on which the blacks were transported over the vast plains in 'hide-covered, cane-ribbed, constantly rocking wagons' and then over the mountains 'on foot, linked together with neck chokers.'"
(i) Mendoza Province
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendoza_Province
(ii) Valparaíso
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valpara%C3%ADso
(a port of Chile; located 69.5 miles (111.8 km) northwest of Santiago; arrived in 1536 by ship, Spanish explorer Juan de Saavedra [] named the town after his native village of Valparaíso de Arriba in Cuenca, Spain)
(iii) "'hide-covered, cane-ribbed, constantly rocking wagons"
(A) The wagons were covered with animal hide.
(B) Regarding "cane-ribbed."

rib (vt):
"1: to furnish or enclose with ribs
2:  to knit so as to form vertical ridges in"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rib

(e) "Melville used these facts to
create a haunting palimpsest of tangled motives * * * His [Delano's] benign nature, ironically tinged with racism, represented, as Mr Grandin writes, 'a nation trapped inside its own prejudices, unable to see and thus avert the coming conflict [Civil War].' * * * Mr Grandin ranges so freely through history that his book has a zigzagging course, like a schooner tacking constantly with the wind."
(i) palimpsest (n; from Greek
palimpsēstos scraped again, from palin + psēn to rub, scrape):
"1:  writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased 2:  something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface <Canada … is a palimpsest, an overlay of classes and generations — Margaret Atwood>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palimpsest

Definition 1 is the original meaning, whereas definition 2 is the meaning in this context.
(ii) "Tacking" in sailing is derived from its original meaning: fastening.
(A) tack (vi): "(technical) to change the direction of a sailing boat so
that the wind blows onto the sails from the opposite side; to do this several times in order to travel in the direction that the wind is coming from"
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, undated.
oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/tack_2

What is the definition trying to say? See next.
(B) tacking (sailing)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacking_(sailing)

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Henry Hughes, Seeing Unseeing: the Historical Amasa Delano and his Voyages. Drew Archival Library, March 2010.
drewarchives.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/henryhughespaper.pdf

Quote:

(a) "Delano's experience in the Pacific Islands and China"  page 2

(b) "In Voyages, Delano offers a rich story of a life at sea, beginning with his experiences on a British East India expedition (1791-1893) where his encounters with Pacific natives led him to overturn presumptions of Christian superiority, sharply challenge missionary projects, and foster a 'liberal acquience' toward various world religions. His narrative and the authorized appended biography also offer fascinating and astonishingly objective discussions of cannibalism--drawn from interviews with castaways and from his own family history."  pp 2-3

(c) "Delano is also a valuable reporter on the early American China trade. He describes friendly relations with the Cantonese and boasts of the Middle Kingdom's greatness, though not without critically observing troubling practices such as capital punishment, foot-binding and infanticide. Like many Western traders in the Pacific, Delano misses a lot, but he is often conscious of his blindness, and his seeing and unseeing leads him to powerful relations about the human condition."  p 3

(d) "His first voyage to China was made as the navigator aboard the Massachusetts,the largest American ship of its day. The Massachusetts was sold shortly after its arrival in Canton in the fall of 1790, and Delano took a position in Whampoa supervising repairs on a vessel belonging to the Danish East India Company.
After completing the job, he sailed to Macao where he caught the eye of British commodore John McClure."  p 14

(e) "The experiences of the McClure expedition awaken Delano's interest in the Chinese and the flourishing China trade. Visiting the Philippine Islands in 1792, Delano finds that 'the Chinese particularly are the most active and successful merchants and mechanics.' In contrast, 'the Spaniards are indolent, and have been long in the habit of relying upon the returns of the vessels, which they annually send to Acapulco.'  Although a generalization in itself, Delano's comparison places East
Asians above the Spanish in the measure of honest hard work. Critics such as Edward Said and Malini Johar Schueller speak repeatedly of the western-made Orientalist dichotomy of the ancient, dissipated East and the young, vital West. Delano's pattern, however, sets the Spanish on the Old World cushions of pelf and depicts the Chinese as energized, unbounded entrepreneurs. Outbound on his own entrepreneurial endeavors, Delano captains the family-built Perseverance in November 1799, rounding Cape Horn, and joining many Americans in coasting South America and taking fur seals for trade in China."  p 20
(f) p 22-27

(g) pp 33-34


Note:
(a) The quotation above are the major reference to China or Chinese/Cantonese in this essay.

(b) The essay first mentioned Delano's Chinese buddy "Consequa" in page 21--it is unclear how THE Cantonese merchant--there was only one--got that name, though "consequa" is a Latin adjective meaning "following." (Throughout the essay, that word was used, with an explanation in footnote 38: "Consequa (Pan Zhangyao 1759-1823) was Delano's Hong merchant, representing the Li-chuan trading house."

In the West, he is known mainly for two things.
(i) Consequa gave Wisteria to John Reeves (1774-1856) who was an employee of the British East India Company.

Biography pf Consequa, in John Claudius Loudon (ed), The Gardener Magazine and Register of Rural and Domestic Improvement. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green (1835) vol 11, page 111.
books.google.com/books?id=zsoZ_yKRXakC&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=consequa+Reeves&source=bl&ots=zuRVFX0vzY&sig=tjjun_Ov9Uz048C6IxQ9EZyzHWE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iYX2UoHfHaW50gHEpIDACw&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=consequa%20Reeves&f=false
(ii) China, House of Consequa, a Merchant in Canton, 1843. Ancestry Images ("free image archive for antiqueprint.com"), undated
www.ancestryimages.com/proddetail.php?prod=g8513
("'House of Consequa, a Chinese Merchant in the Suburbs of Canton' engraved by S Bradshaw after a picture by Thomas Allom, published in China Illustrated, 1843. Steel engraved antique print with recent hand colouring. Extremely slight soiling in lower margin, otherwise good condition. Size 19.5 x 15.5 cms including title, plus margins. Ref G8513")