Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

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  • (Which nature to the soursop1 had resign’d,)
  • With ginger, and with Raleigh’s pungent plant,2
  • Gave wealth; and gold bought better land and slaves. [600]
  • Heaven bless’d his labour: now the cotton-shrub,
  • Grac’d with broad yellow flowers, unhurt by worms,
  • O’er many an acre shed its whitest down:
  • The power of rain, in genial moisture bath’d
  • His cacao-walk,3 which teem’d with marrowy pods; [605]

VER. 598. to the soursop] The true Indian name of this tree is Suirsaak. It grows in the barrenest places to a considerable height. Its fruit will often weigh two pounds. Its skin is green, and somewhat prickly. The pulp is not disagreeable to the palate, being cool, and having its sweetness tempered with some degree of an acid. It is one of the Anonas, as are also the custard, star, and sugar-apples.4 The leaves of the soursop are very shining and green. The fruit is wholesome, but seldom admitted to the tables of the elegant. The seeds are dispersed through the pulp like the guava. It has a peculiar flavour. It grows in the East as well as the West-Indies. The botanical name is Guanabanus. The French call it Petit Corosol, or Coeur de Boeuf, to which the fruit bears a resemblance. The root, being reduced to a powder, and snuffed up the nose, produces the same effect as tobacco. Taken by the mouth, the Indians pretend it is a specific in the epilepsy.

VER. 601. cotton] The fine down, which this shrub produces to invelope its seeds, is sufficiently known. The English, Italian, and French names, evidently are derived from the Arabic Algodon, as the Spaniards at this day call it. It was first brought by the Arabians into the Levant, where it is now cultivated with great success. Authors mention four species of cotton, but they confound the silk-cotton tree, or Ceiba, among them. The flower of the West-India cotton-shrub is yellow, and campanulated.5 It produces twice every year. That of Cayenne is the best of any that comes from America. This plant is very apt to be destroyed by a grub within a short time; bating that, it is a profitable production. Pliny mentions Gossipium, which is the common botanical name of cotton. It is likewise called Zylon. Martinus, in his Philological Lexicon,6 derives cotton from the Hebrew word קטן Katon, (or, as pronounced by the German-Jews, Kotoun.)

VER. 605. cacao-walk] It is also called Cocao and Cocô. It is a native of some of

  1. The soursop (Annona muricata) is a fruit of tropical American origin. ↩︎

  2. Refers to tobacco, which Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) was sometimes credited with introducing to England. Raleigh was an English courtier during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, as well as an explorer and author who obtained a patent for and helped to organize the expeditions to Roanoke in 1585 and 1587. He set out for South America in 1595, exploring the Orinoco River in present-day Venezuela, and again in 1617 to search for the famed city of El Dorado. He was executed for treason in 1618. He is the author of Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596). ↩︎

  3. A grove of cacao trees. The cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) is the source of chocolate, which is made from the seeds of the cacao tree. Cacao is native to Central and South America and was first cultivated by Amerindians thousands of years ago. Europeans first encountered cacao in Mexico, where the Aztecs placed a high value on it: cacao was prepared into chocolate drinks that were consumed by the Aztec elite, as well as during religious rituals, and cacao seeds were used as currency and tribute. Cacao was first brought to the Caribbean by Spaniards, who established plantations to supply Europe with chocolate. Although some Europeans initially found the taste of chocolate off-putting (the Aztecs did not add sugar to their chocolate), it was being consumed in Europe in significant quantities by the seventeenth century. ↩︎

  4. The custard apple (Annona reticulata) is the fruit of a tree whose native range is Mexico to northeastern Venezuela. The star apple (Chrysophyllum cainito) is the fruit of a tree native to the Greater Antilles (Higman 202). Sugar apple (Annona squamosa), also known as sweetsop, is the fruit of a tree native to lowland Central America. ↩︎

  5. Bell-shaped. ↩︎

  6. According to Gilmore, Matthias Martinius (1572-1630) authored the Lexicon Philologicum (1623). ↩︎