- HOWE’ER insensate some may deem their slaves,
- Nor ‘bove the bestial rank; far other thoughts
- The muse, soft daughter of humanity!
- Will ever entertain.—The Ethiop knows,
- The Ethiop feels, when treated like a man; [425]
- Nor grudges, should necessity compell,
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By day, by night, to labour for his lord.
- NOT less inhuman, than unthrifty those;
- Who, half the year’s rotation round the sun,
- Deny subsistence to their labouring slaves.1 [430]
- But would’st thou see thy negroe-train encrease,
- Free from disorders; and thine acres clad
- With groves of sugar: every week dispense
- Or English beans, or Carolinian rice;2
- Iërne’s beef, or Pensilvanian flour;3 [435]
- Newfoundland cod,4 or herrings from the main
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That howls tempestuous round the Scotian isles!
- YET some there are so lazily inclin’d,
- And so neglectful of their food, that thou,
- Would’st thou preserve them from the jaws of death; [440]
- Daily, their wholesome viands must prepare:
- With these let all the young, and childless old,
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This and the preceding two lines mark the beginning of Grainger’s description of food provisioning on plantations. Grainger begins by addressing planters and asking them to provide more imported foodstuffs for the enslaved, but he switches in the next stanza to a discussion of provision grounds or gardens cultivated by the enslaved. Provision grounds were an important source of food for the enslaved and others living in the Caribbean. They also laid the foundation for what is now called the counter-plantation. For more on counter-plantations and provision grounds, see “Provision Grounds” on this site. ↩︎
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Beans or peas, as they were often called in the Caribbean, were a major source of nutrition for the enslaved. English beans are also known as fava, broad, or horse beans (Vicia faba), which originated in Western Asia thousands of years ago and spread from there to Central Asia, Europe, and Africa. They were sometimes sent from England to the Caribbean to serve as provisions. They also formed part of the provisions of slave ships. The horse bean was not as central to the diets of the enslaved as other bean species, however, many of which were cultivated by the enslaved themselves. Rice did not make up a major part of the diets of the enslaved living in the Caribbean islands, but South Carolina was the major Atlantic exporter of the rice species known as Oryza sativa, which originated in Asia. There is also a species of rice indigenous to Africa known as Oryza glaberrima. Enslaved persons in the Caribbean islands may occasionally have grown both Oryza sativa and Oryza glaberrima in their provision grounds and gardens. ↩︎
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Iërne is a term for Ireland, which supplied Caribbean plantations with salted beef and other provisions. Beef also came from the North American colonies, as did flour. ↩︎
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The waters off the coast of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic constituted one of the major fisheries of the world for the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in the eighteenth century. Planters imported cod for enslaved laborers, who needed protein, but they imported what came to be known as “West India cod,” which was salted cod of the poorest quality. ↩︎