Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

150

  • THIS tract secure, with hedges or of limes, [465]
  • Or bushy citrons, or the shapely tree
  • That glows at once with aromatic blooms,
  • And golden fruit mature. To these be join’d,
  • In comely neighbourhood, the cotton shrub;
  • In this delicious clime the cotton bursts [470]
  • On rocky soils.—The coffee also plant;
  • White as the skin of Albion’s lovely fair,
  • Are the thick snowy fragrant blooms it boasts:
  • Nor wilt thou, cocô,1 thy rich pods refuse;2
  • Tho’ years, and heat, and moisture they require,3 [475]
  • Ere the stone grind them to the food of health.4
  • Of thee, perhaps, and of thy various sorts,
  • And that kind sheltering tree, thy mother nam’d,5
  • With crimson flowerets prodigally grac’d;
  • In future times, the enraptur’d muse may sing: [480]

  • If public favour crown her present lay.

  • BUT let some antient, faithful slave erect
  • His sheltered mansion near; and with his dog,
  • His loaded gun, and cutlass, guard the whole:
  • Else negro-fugitives,6 who skulk ‘mid rocks [485]

VER. 466. the shapely tree] The orange tree.

VER. 478. thy mother nam’d] See Book I p. 43.

  1. Another name for cacao. ↩︎

  2. Cacao trees produce large pods that contain the cacao seeds, also known as cacao beans or nuts. ↩︎

  3. Cacao trees take several years to produce pods that can be harvested. ↩︎

  4. Cacao seeds are ground up to produce chocolate, which was branded as early as the seventeenth century as a kind of miracle food that would give its consumers health and strength. For instance, see the title of Henry Stubbe’s 1662 treatise on chocolate, entitled The Indian Nectar, which portrayed chocolate not only as a health food but also as an aphrodisiac. There were also reports from seventeenth-century Jamaica that sailors and others who had to perform hard labor consumed it regularly. It is possible that maroons living in the mountains of Jamaica consumed chocolate as a subsistence food, too (Hughes, The American Physitian 131). ↩︎

  5. Madre de Cacao (Gliricidia sepium). Its native range includes Mexico, Central America, and South America, and it is used as a shade tree for cacao and other plants. ↩︎

  6. Grainger refers here to enslaved persons who have run away from plantations. ↩︎