- The earth’s dark surface; where sulphureous flames, [170]
- Oft from their vapoury prisons bursting wild,
- To dire explosion give the cavern’d deep,
- And in dread ruin all its inmates whelm?—
- Nor fateful only is the bursting flame;
- The exhalations of the deep-dug mine, [175]
- Tho’ slow, shake from their wings as sure a death.
- With what intense severity of pain
- Hath the afflicted muse, in Scotia, seen
- The miners rack’d, who toil for fatal lead?1
- What cramps, what palsies2 shake their feeble limbs, [180]
- Who, on the margin of the rocky Drave,3
-
Trace silver’s fluent ore?4 Yet white men these!
- HOW far more happy ye, than those poor slaves,
- Who, whilom, under native, gracious chiefs,
- Incas5 and emperors, long time enjoy’d [185]
- Mild government, with every sweet of life,
- In blissful climates? See them dragg’d in chains,
- By proud insulting tyrants,6 to the mines
- Which once they call’d their own, and then despis’d!
VER. 181. rocky Drave,] A river in Hungary, on whose banks are found mines of quicksilver.
-
Southwestern Scotland had produced lead since the Roman period. The Scottish Habeas Corpus Act of 1701 did not apply to those in servitude in the coal and lead mines of Scotland. As a result, they could be tied in serf-like bondage to employers by ancient custom. According to the terms of such bondage, they could be sold or leased with the undertaking of mining work and were counted as a part of employers’ inventory. Also, vagabonds and their families could be seized and returned to work. Born in Scotland himself, Grainger was aware of this history, and this stanza deliberately compares enslaved Africans to Scottish miners to mitigate the violence of the African slave trade. It would not be until 1774 that an emancipation act forbade mine owners from accepting new servitudes and provided for the emancipation of existing workers who had served for a certain number of years. Only in 1799 were all miners legally freed. ↩︎
-
Paralysis of the skeletal muscles. ↩︎
-
A river in central Europe that forms the boundary between Croatia and Hungary. ↩︎
-
Quicksilver or mercury, which was a major export of the region. Among the effects of continued exposure to mercury are palsies (line 180) and loss of teeth (line 193). ↩︎
-
The Incan Empire extended from modern Ecuador to Chile in the early sixteenth century, when Spanish conquistadors arrived and imposed colonial rule. In the fifteen lines that follow, Grainger relies on the trope of the Black Legend to suggest that the suffering of the Incas at the hands of the Spanish was far worse than anything experienced by enslaved persons working on British sugar plantations. In particular, the silver mines at Potosí in Upper Peru (modern Bolivia) drove Spanish settlement, and indigenous populations were subjected to the encomienda system, in which an encomendero accepted tribute and obligatory labor from natives in return for protection. In the early seventeenth century, this system gave way to a corregimiento system that established networks of provincial governors who managed the labor distribution and tributary arrangements. Enslaved Africans were also imported and put to work in mines when labor ran short and gradually surpassed the natives in population. Besides silver, gold deposits were found throughout the Andes from Venezuela to Chile, and European colonists greatly expanded the extant mining work of the indigenous Americans in scale. ↩︎
-
The Spanish conquistadors. ↩︎