- With double night brood o’er them; thou dost throw, [350]
- O’er far-divided nature’s realms, a chain
- To bind in sweet society mankind.
- By thee white Albion, once a barbarous clime,
- Grew fam’d for arms, for wisdom, and for laws;
- By thee she holds the balance of the world, [355]
- Acknowledg’d now sole empress of the main.
- Coy though thou art, and mutable of love,
- There may’st thou ever fix thy wandering steps;
- While Eurus rules the wide atlantic foam!
- By thee, thy favourite, great Columbus found [360]
- That world, where now thy praises I rehearse
- To the resounding main and palmy shore;
- And Lusitania’s chiefs those realms explor’d,
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Whence negroes spring, the subject of my song.
- NOR pine the Blacks, alone, with real ills, [365]
- That baffle oft the wisest rules of art:
- They likewise feel imaginary woes;1
- Woes no less deadly. Luckless he who owns
- The slave, who thinks himself bewitch’d; and whom,
- In wrath, a conjurer’s snake-mark’d staff2 hath struck! [370]
VER. 370. snake-mark’d] The negroe-conjurers, or Obia-men, as they are called, carry about them a staff, which is marked with frogs, snakes, &c. The
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Grainger suggests that the symptoms he lists in the following lines (moping, silence, solitude, loss of appetite) are not real and perhaps feigned. One should be cautious about diagnosing historical illnesses retrospectively, but these same symptoms would come to be described as fixed melancholy in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Often associated with longing for friends and family, fixed melancholy became a common diagnosis for the enslaved, and physicians expressed concern that the illness would lead to suicide. ↩︎
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This and the preceding five lines mark the beginning of Grainger’s description of obeah, a complex of religious and medical practices designed to help the enslaved negotiate the hardships and demands of living and working on the plantation. By a conjurer, Grainger means an “obeah man” or obeah practitioner, who frequently were associated with snakes, lizards, and other creatures in colonial and European accounts. For more on obeah and how it was portrayed, see “Obeah” on this site. ↩︎