Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

[125]

THE

S U G A R - C A N E.

BOOK IV.

  • GENIUS of Africk!1 whether thou bestrid’st
  • The castled elephant;2 or at the source,
  • (While howls the desart fearfully around,)
  • Of thine own Niger,3 sadly thou reclin’st
  • Thy temples shaded by the tremulous palm, [5]
  • Or quick papaw,4 whose top is necklac’d round
  • With numerous rows of party-colour’d fruit:
  • Or hear’st thou rather from the rocky banks
  • Of Rio Grandê,5 or black Sanaga?6
  • Where dauntless thou the headlong torrent brav’st [10]
  • In search of gold, to brede7 thy wooly locks,
  • Or with bright ringlets ornament thine ears,

  1. Here, Grainger is using genius in the sense of a supernatural being or guardian spirit associated with a place, institution, or thing. “Genius of Africk” thus means something like the spirit of Africa. ↩︎

  2. The combination of an elephant and a castle (often with the castle on the elephant’s back) is an old heraldic sign. Grainger may be calling on the image of Hannibal’s elephants during the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE). ↩︎

  3. The Niger river. One of Africa’s largest rivers. Its source lies in modern Guinea, and it empties into the Atlantic Ocean in Nigeria. ↩︎

  4. Papaya. ↩︎

  5. Major estuary in modern Guinea-Bissau. ↩︎

  6. Most likely the Senegal river, which empties into the Atlantic ocean at St. Louis on Senegal’s northern border with Mauritania. There is a Sanaga river that empties into the Gulf of Guinea just south of Douala in modern Cameroon, but this appears to have been called the Cameroon or Camarones river prior to the mid-nineteenth century. ↩︎

  7. Braid. ↩︎