- Oft chalk prefer to the most poignant cates:)
- Such, dropsy bloats, and to sure death consigns;
- Unless restrain’d from this unwholesome food,
- By soothing words, by menaces, by blows:
- Nor yet will threats, or blows, or soothing words, [155]
- Perfect their cure; unless thou, Paean, deign’st
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By medicine’s power their cravings to subdue.
- TO easy labour first inure thy slaves;
- Extremes are dangerous.1 With industrious search,
- Let them fit grassy provender collect [160]
- For thy keen stomach’d herds.—But when the earth
- Hath made her annual progress round the sun,
- What time the conch2 or bell resounds, they may
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All to the Cane-ground, with thy gang, repair.
- NOR, Negroe, at thy destiny repine,3 [165]
- Tho’ doom’d to toil from dawn to setting sun.
- How far more pleasant is thy rural task,
- Than theirs who sweat, sequester’d from the day,
- In dark tartarean caves,4 sunk far beneath
VER. 163. the conch] Plantations that have no bells, assemble their Negroes by sounding a conch-shell.
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Here, Grainger makes a specific recommendation about the “seasoning” of newly transported enslaved Africans. Seasoning was a term used during the eighteenth century to describe the process of acclimatization that it was believed all individuals went through when moving from one climate to another. Physicians believed that patients were more susceptible to illness and death in the weeks and months after they first arrived in new climates. This observation was broadly true for those who were new to the Caribbean but not because there was something inherently harmful about its climate. Instead, travel across long distances often meant coming into contact with new and potentially fatal diseases like yellow fever or typhus. Grainger recommends that enslaved Africans be seasoned for a year and given easy versus strenuous labor. Such a practice was uncommon, however. ↩︎
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Family of marine molluscs best known for their large shells, which can be used as musical horns when properly blown. ↩︎
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This and the following forty lines are the only ones in the poem where the narrator addresses the enslaved directly. Despite this direct address, the passage is framed by a set of rhetorical questions that help the planter justify his actions to himself. The justifications that follow were standard to pro-slavery tracts. ↩︎
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Having to do with Tartarus, the part of the Greek underworld reserved for the wicked. Here, Grainger refers to the work of miners. Improved technology in the seventeenth century facilitated the construction of deeper coal mines in Scotland, where coal became a major domestic export. Deep mines, sometimes extending hundreds of feet into the earth, were necessary because the rising demand for coal quickly exhausted accessible deposits. ↩︎