- Oft to prevent the earliest dawn of day, [85]
- And walk thy ranges, at the noon of night?
- What tho’ no ills assail’d thy bunching sprouts,
- And seasons pour’d obedient to thy will:
- All, all must perish; nor shalt thou preserve
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Wherewith to feed thy little orphan-throng. [90]
- OH, may the Cane-isles know few nights, like this!
- For now the sail-clad points,1 impatient, wait
- The hour of sweet release, to court the gale.
- The late-hung coppers wish to feel the warmth,
- Which well-dried fewel from the Cane imparts: [95]
- The Negroe-train, with placid looks, survey
- Thy fields, which full perfection have attain’d,
- And pant to wield the bill: (no surly watch
- Dare now deprive them of the luscious Cane:)2
- Nor thou, my friend, their willing ardour check; [100]
- Encourage rather; cheerful toil is light.
- So from no field, shall slow-pac’d oxen draw
- More frequent loaded wanes; which many a day,
- And many a night shall feed thy crackling mills
- With richest offerings:3 while thy far seen flames, [105]
- Bursting thro’ many a chimney, bright emblaze
- The AEthiop-brow of night. And see, they pour
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Windmill sails. ↩︎
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In An Essay on the More Common West-India Diseases (1764), Grainger writes that enslaved laborers “should not only be allowed to drink what quantity of the cane juice they think proper, but even obliged to drink it” during crop time (10). However, planters sometimes inflicted severe punishments when the enslaved ate or consumed sugarcane. For example, the eighteenth-century Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood punished an enslaved African named Egypt for eating sugarcane by whipping him and giving him “Derby’s dose,” a phrase Thistlewood used to refer to the act of having one enslaved African defecate in another’s mouth (Hall 73). ↩︎
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Cane juice begins to spoil as soon as the plant is cut. As a result, planters preferred to run their mills and boiling houses around the clock during crop time. ↩︎