Conclusion

Abstract

The nautical metaphor that closes the last chapter brings us to another source centrally, and perhaps most strikingly, concerned with the figure of Charles V: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, which appeared in three installments in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1855, that is, exactly the same year as Prescott’s first version of the last days of the emperor in his Philip the Second. The story, it may be recalled, begins when the good-natured but colossally naive captain Amasa Delano encounters by chance, off the coast of Chile, the ship that will launch a harrowing tale of coercion, psychological terror, and murderous violence in the high seas. Melville described the ship as follows:

Upon gaining a less remote view, the ship, when made signally visible on the verge of the leaden-hued swells, with the shreads 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. But it was no purely fanciful resemblance which now, for a moment, almost led Captain Delano to think that nothing less than a shipload 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 portholes, other dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters.¹