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“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 intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.”
This passage, which occurs at the very start of the novella, is the first real account that the reader is afforded of Delano’s character. In these few lines, Melville characterizes Delano as a good-natured individual who is both exceedingly trusting of his fellow men and not prone to paranoia. This is a crucial piece of characterization because it provides the context for Delano’s obliviousness while he is aboard the San Dominick.
“There now, do you mark that? again thought Captain Delano, walking the poop. What a donkey I was. This kind gentleman who here sends me his kind compliments, he, but ten minutes ago, dark-lantern in hand, was dodging round some old grind-stone in the hold, sharpening a hatchet for me, I thought. Well, well; these long calms have a morbid effect on the mind, I’ve often heard, though I never believed it before. Ha! glancing towards the boat; there’s Rover; good dog; a white bone in her mouth. A pretty big bone though, seems to me.”
The above quote is one of the many instances in which Delano laughs off and dismisses his suspicions about Cereno and the San Dominick in general. Here, he chides himself for questioning Cereno’s motives and blames his brief period of distress on his own imagination. The passage then concludes with Delano noticing that the ship’s dog is carrying a very large bone. Given what readers learn by the end of the text, it is likely that the dog is carrying a human bone from one of the murdered sailors. However, the sight of the dog does not arouse any suspicion and it becomes just another example of Delano being blind to the situation that is unfolding right under his nose.
