Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

64

  • Feeds on the Indian fig; and, should it harm
  • The foster plant, its worth that harm repays:
  • But YE, base insects! no bright scarlet yield,
  • To deck the British Wolf;1 who now, perhaps, [175]
  • (So Heaven and George ordain) in triumph mounts
  • Some strong-built fortress, won from haughty Gaul!
  • And tho’ no plant such luscious nectar yields,
  • As yields the Cane-plant; yet, vile paricides!2

  • Ungrateful ye! the Parent-cane destroy. [180]

  • MUSE! say, what remedy hath skill devis’d
  • To quell this noxious foe? Thy Blacks send forth,
  • A strong detachment! ere the encreasing pest
  • Have made too firm a lodgment; and, with care,
  • Wipe every tainted blade, and liberal lave [185]
  • With sacred Neptune’s purifying stream.
  • But this Augaean toil3 long time demands,
  • Which thou to more advantage may’st employ:
  • If vows for rain thou ever did’st prefer,

VER. 171. Thus cochinille] This is a Spanish word. For the manner of propagating this useful insect, see Sir Hans Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica.4 It was long believed in Europe to be a seed, or vegetable production. The botanical name of the plant on which the cochinille feeds, is Opuntia maxima, folio oblongo, majore, spinulis obtusis, mollibus et innocentibus obsito, flore, striis rubris variegato. Sloane.

  1. The red coats of British officers were dyed with cochineal. James Wolfe (1727-1759) was an English army officer. Like Grainger, he served in the Netherlands during the War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and during the Scottish Jacobite Rising of 1745. Appointed Major-General in North America in 1758, Wolfe is perhaps best known for defeating French general Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Grozon, marquis de Montcalm, and the French army on the Plains of Abraham outside of Quebec city in September 1759. Wolfe was fatally wounded during the battle, but his victory brought an end to the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). ↩︎

  2. Father killer. Here, Grainger refers to parasites—and perhaps puns on the similarities between “paracide” and “parasite”—that kill the plants on which they feed (in this case, the sugarcane). Grainger may be referring to the sugarcane borer (Diatraea saccharalis), a moth native to South and Central America whose larvae bore holes in sugarcane plants and do great damage on plantations. ↩︎

  3. Augeas, king of Elis, owned the stables that Hercules cleaned in the course of completing one of his twelve labors. Grainger is comparing the labor of washing every leaf in a cane field with the labors of Hercules, who cleaned the stables by redirecting the Alpheus and Peneus rivers through them. ↩︎

  4. Sloane discusses the propagation of cochineal in his Voyage (2.208). ↩︎