Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

151

  • And shrubby wilds, in bands will soon destroy

  • Thy labourer’s honest wealth; their loss and yours.

  • Perhaps, of Indian gardens1 I could sing,
  • Beyond what bloom’d on blest Phaeacia’s isle,2
  • Or eastern climes admir’d in days of yore: [490]
  • How Europe’s foodful, culinary plants;
  • How gay Pomona’s ruby-tinctured births;
  • And gawdy Flora’s3 various-vested train;
  • Might be instructed to unlearn their clime,
  • And by due discipline adopt the sun. [495]
  • The muse might tell what culture will entice
  • The ripened melon, to perfume each month;
  • And with the anana load the fragrant board.
  • The muse might tell, what trees will best exclude
  • (“Insuperable height of airiest shade”)4 [500]
  • With their vast umbrage5 the noon’s fervent ray.
  • Thee, verdant mammey,6 first, her song should praise:

VER. 502. mammey] This is a lofty, shady, and beautiful tree. Its fruit is as large as the largest melon, and of an exquisite smell, greatly superior to it in point of taste. Within the fruit are contained one or two large stones, which when distilled, give to spirits a ratafia flavour,7 and therefore the French call them Les apricots de St. Domingue:8 accordingly, the l’eau des noiaux, one of the best West-Indian cordials, is made from them.9 The fruit, eaten raw, is of an aperient10 quality; and made into sweet-meats,

  1. Early colonial reports from the Caribbean describe flourishing Amerindian gardens. Amerindians generally practiced conuco or mound cultivation, in which various plants were intercropped or cultivated together in ecologically sustainable fashion. ↩︎

  2. Phaeacia refers to Scheria, the island that Odysseus arrives at after his shipwreck; home of the Phaeacians. Whether Scheria corresponds to a real place is unclear, however. ↩︎

  3. Flora was the Roman goddess of springtime. ↩︎

  4. Gilmore identifies this quotation as an adaptation from Milton’s Paradise Lost. ↩︎

  5. Shade. ↩︎

  6. The mammee apple (Mammea americana) is a large fruit native to the Caribbean and northern South America. ↩︎

  7. An essence used as a flavouring for food and drink, typically extracted from almonds or the kernels of cherries, apricots, and peaches. ↩︎

  8. The apricots of St. Domingue. St. Domingue was a French colony, renamed Haiti after a revolution led by enslaved and free people of African descent succeeded in overthrowing colonial rule in 1804. ↩︎

  9. L’eau de noiaux refers to an alcoholic drink made by infusing a spirit with ratafia. Noyaux is the French term for the kernels of stone fruits. ↩︎

  10. Laxative. ↩︎