- With these attack the predatory bands;
- Quickly the unequal conflict they decline,
- And, chattering, fling their ill-got spoils away.
- So when, of late, innumerous Gallic hosts1 [55]
- Fierce, wanton, cruel, did by stealth invade
- The peaceable American’s domains,
- While desolation mark’d their faithless rout;
- No sooner Albion’s2 martial sons advanc’d,
- Than the gay dastards to their forests fled, [60]
-
And left their spoils and tomahawks behind.
- NOR with less waste the whisker’d vermine-race,3
-
A countless clan, despoil the low-land Cane.
- THESE to destroy, while commerce hoists the sail,
- Loose rocks abound, or tangling bushes bloom, [65]
- What Planter knows?—Yet prudence may reduce.
- Encourage then the breed of savage cats,
VER. 64. These to destroy] Rats, &c. are not natives of America, but came by shipping from Europe. They breed in the ground, under loose rocks and bushes. Durante, a Roman, who was physician to Pope Sixtus Quintus,4 and who wrote a Latin poem on the preservation of health, enumerates domestic rats among animals that may be eaten with safety. But if these are wholesome, cane-rats must be much more delicate, as well as more nourishing. Accordingly we find most field Negroes fond of them, and I have heard that straps of cane-rats are publicly sold in the markets of Jamaica.5
-
Hostile French forces. Here, Grainger makes an analogy between the vervet monkeys and the French during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the first truly global war that resulted in the establishment of Britain as the preeminent maritime and colonial power. ↩︎
-
Albion, a name of ancient Celtic origin for Britain or England. The term may also derive from the Latin word for white (albus) and refer to the white cliffs of Dover. ↩︎
-
Refers either to the black rat (Rattus rattus) or the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), two species of rats that arrived in the Caribbean from Europe and are now considered invasive species. There also was a rat known as the Nevis rice rat (Pennatomys nivalis) that was native to Nevis, St. Kitts, and St. Eustatius, but there are no definitive reports of its existence from the colonial era. The Nevis rice rat is now considered extinct. This line of the poem also relates to one of the most famous and perhaps apocryphal stories about the reception and publication of The Sugar-Cane. In his Life of Johnson, James Boswell recalls a reading of a manuscript draft of the poem that took place at the home of painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. The line, “Now, Muse, let’s sing of rats,” is supposed to have caused the audience to burst into laughter. In response, Grainger deleted the word “rats” from the poem and replaced it with “whisker’d vermine-race” (Irlam 390-391). ↩︎
-
Castore Durante da Gualdo (1529-1590), botanist and physician to the Popes Gregory XIII and Sixtus V. Author of Herbaria nuovo (1585) and Il tesoro della sanità (1586). ↩︎
-
Grainger may have been referring to a passage from Hans Sloane’s A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707, 1725) that reads, “Rats are likewise sold by the dozen, and when they have been bred amongst the Sugar-Canes, are thought by some discerning people very delicious Victuals” (1.xx). Sloane seems to imply that all Jamaicans, and not just the enslaved, ate rats. These may not have been black and brown rats from Europe, however, but Jamaican rice rats (Oryzomys antillarum), which are now considered extinct. ↩︎