In his sketches of the Encantadas, Melville seems to be reacting in direct opposition to writers like James Fenimore Cooper and other Romanticists, who saw nature as the purest form of being. For Melville, nature is a dark and sinister force that man is destined to grapple with and be defeated by. In the last sketch, for example, he names the several marginalized members of society who have ended up there. When these individuals encountered the islands, they were forced to drop all the moral trappings associated with human society and become savage, primitive beings. This seems to indicate that when it comes to nature, there is no "good" and "bad", or "right" and "wrong", but mere survival.
In "Benito Cereno" Melville experiments with appearances versus reality, especially in regards to our expectations. Captain Amasa Delano would never dream that a group of blacks from Africa could be smart enough or efficient enough to take over a whole ship, let alone devise such a clever scheme to hide their mutiny. Noticing only the odd licentiousness of the slaves and the erratic behavior of Benito Cereno, Captain Delano assumes that the white man must be performing his role poorly and the blacks taking too much freedom on their part, rather than realize that the normal social roles have been reversed. Delano is certainly written to be an "innocent" character, and his innocence in this case blinds him to the truth and forces him to justify unjustifiable things. Just as Melville wanted us to realize the true darkness of Nature in "The Encantadas," so he wanted us to come to terms with the darkness of the human being in "Benito Cereno."
Interesting concept. For Melville, nature is inscrutable. Emerson loves to see it as a benign symbol for the spirit, but if it is a symbol of the spirit, Melville's spirit is much more complex and contrary than Emersons' view. Melville's The Confidence Man is a parody of Emerson.
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