- For cooling vast impenetrable shade?
- The muse, alas, th’ experienc’d muse can tell: [570]
- Oft hath she travell’d, while solstitial beams,
- Shot yellow deaths1 on the devoted land;
- Oft, oft hath she their ill-judg’d avarice blam’d,
- Who, to the stranger, to their slaves and herds,
- Denied this best of joys, the breezy shade. [575]
- And are there none, whom generous pity warms,
- Friends to the woodland reign; whom shades delight?
- Who, round their green domains, plant hedge-row trees;
- And with cool cedars, screen the public way?
- Yes, good Montano;2 friend of man was he: [580]
- Him persecution, virtue’s deadliest foe,
- Drove, a lorn exile, from his native shore;
- From his green hills, where many a fleecy flock,
- Where many a heifer cropt their wholesome food;
- And many a swain, obedient to his rule, [585]
- Him their lov’d master, their protector, own’d.
- Yet, from that paradise, to Indian wilds,
VER. 572. yellow deaths] The yellow fever, to which Europeans of a sanguine habit of body, and who exceed in drinking or exercise, are liable on their arrival in the West Indies. The French call it Maladie de Siame, or more properly, La Fievre des Matelots. Those who have lived any time in the islands are no more subject to this disease than the Creoles,3 whence, however, some physicians have too hastily concluded, that it was of foreign extraction.
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Yellow fever, a viral disease transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, occurs mostly in tropical climates and is characterized by aches, fever, jaundice, nausea, vomiting, and bleeding. This disease was extremely deadly to newcomers from Europe. Eighteenth-century physicians did not understand the mechanisms via which yellow fever was caused or transmitted, but they took note of immunological patterns in which people who had lived in the Caribbean seemed immune to the disease, while those who had not were susceptible. They further believed, erroneously, that Africans and Afro-Caribbeans had an innate immunity to yellow fever. ↩︎
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Grainger spends the next few pages describing Montano, a fictional planter whom he lauds for treating the enslaved laborers on his plantation humanely. Montano serves as proof of Grainger’s belief in amelioration or the reform (versus abolition) of slavery. Although Grainger presents Montano’s behavior as virtuous, he ultimately justifies it on economic grounds. ↩︎
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In the eighteenth century, the term creole was used to refer to individuals born in the Americas, regardless of ancestry. ↩︎