Benito Cereno is based directly on historical accounts drawn from the real-life maritime memoirs of an American sea captain named Amasa Delano, specifically chronicled in his 1817 travel book Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Melville closely followed the broad historical outlines of the 1805 slave mutiny aboard the Spanish ship Tryal off the coast of Chile, while significantly altering characters, adding symbolic weight, and introducing profound psychological ambiguity.