Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

152

  • Thee, the first natives of these Ocean-isles,
  • Fell anthropophagi,1 still sacred held;
  • And from thy large high-flavour’d fruit abstain’d, [505]
  • With pious awe; for thine high-flavoured fruit,
  • The airy phantoms of their friends deceas’d
  • Joy’d to regale on.——Such their simple creed.
  • The tamarind likewise should adorn her theme,
  • With whose tart fruit the sweltering fever loves [510]
  • To quench his thirst, whose breezy umbrage soon
  • Shades the pleas’d planter, shades his children long.
  • Nor, lofty cassia, should she not recount
  • Thy woodland honours! See, what yellow flowers
  • Dance in the gale, and scent the ambient air; [515]
  • While thy long pods, full-fraught with nectared sweets,
  • Relieve the bowels from their lagging load.
  • Nor chirimoia,2 though these torrid isles
  • Boast not thy fruit, to which the anana yields
  • In taste and flavour, wilt thou coy refuse [520]

&c. is truly exquisite. This tree, contrary to most others in the New World, shoots up to a pyramidal figure: the leaves are uncommonly green; and it produces fruit, but once a year. The name is Indian. The English commonly call it Mammey-sapota. There are two species of it, the sweet, and the tart.3 The botanical name is Achras.

VER. 509. tamarind] See Book I. p. 44.

VER. 513. cassia,] Both this tree and its mild purgative pulp are sufficiently known.

  1. A term used in the ancient and medieval periods to signify man-eaters. It is now much less used than the term cannibal, which Columbus invented to name the Carib peoples that he encountered in the Americas. Columbus suggested that the Caribs were “Caniba” or subjects of the Great Khan, whose lands he was hoping to find. He also suggested that the Caribs ate human flesh, although there is little to no evidence that they actually did. ↩︎

  2. Annona cherimola, a fruit that originated in South America and is perhaps native to Ecuador. ↩︎

  3. The mammee sapota is actually different from the mammee apple (the fruit Grainger describes in lines 502-508). The mammee sapota (Pouteria sapota) is a sweet fruit whose native range is Mexico and Central America. Another fruit commonly confused with both the mammee sapota and the mammee apple is the nasebery (Manilkara zapota), also known as the sapodilla or the nispero. It is a sour or tart fruit whose native range is Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (Higman 196-197). ↩︎