Don Benito Cereno is the fictionalized Spanish captain of the distressed slave ship San Dominick in Herman Melville's classic 1855 novella. Physically emaciated, traumatized, and psychologically broken by a violent slave mutiny that forced him to act as a puppet under the constant watch of his enslaved captors, Don Benito represents the paralyzed conscience, despair, and tragic psychological toll experienced by those complicit in the machinery of human bondage.