Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

156

  • Project enormous; of impurpled hue
  • Its frequent clusters glow. And there, if thou [565]
  • Would’st make the sand yield salutary food,
  • Let Indian millet1 rear its corny reed,
  • Like arm’d battalions in array of war.
  • But, round the upland huts, bananas plant;
  • A wholesome nutriment bananas yield, [570]
  • And sun-burnt labour loves its breezy shade.
  • Their graceful screen let kindred plantanes join,
  • And with their broad vans shiver in the breeze;
  • So flames design’d, or by imprudence caught,

  • Shall spread no ruin to the neighbouring roof. [575]

  • YET nor the sounding margin of the main,

circular;) and succeeds best in sandy places. It bears large clusters of grapes once a year; which, when ripe, are not disagreeable. The stones, seeds, or acini, contained in them, are large in proportion; and, being reduced to a powder, are an excellent astringent. The bark of the tree has the same property. The grapes, steept in water and fermented with sugar, make an agreeable wine.

VER. 567. Indian millet] Or maise. This is commonly called Guinea-corn, to distinguish it from the great or Indian-corn, that grows in the southern parts of North-America.2 It soon shoots up to a great height, often twenty feet high, and will ratoon like the other; but its blades are not so nourishing to horses as those of the great corn, although its seeds are more so, and rather more agreeable to the taste. The Indians, Negroes, and poor white people, make many (not unsavoury) dishes with them. It is also called Turkey wheat. The turpentine tree3 will also grow in the sand, and is most useful upon a plantation.

  1. By Indian millet, Grainger means Guinea corn (Sorghum bicolor). Often planted in the provision grounds of the enslaved and a key source of food, as indicated by an eighteenth-century song sung by the enslaved that declares, “Guinea Corn, I long to see you/Guinea Corn, I long to plant you/Guinea Corn, I long to mould you/Guinea Corn, I long to weed you…Guinea Corn, I long to eat you” (qtd. in Higman 231). ↩︎

  2. Maize, great corn, and Indian corn are all different names for Zea mays. ↩︎

  3. Likely Bursera simaruba, a tree whose native range is the Caribbean and Mexico to Brazil. ↩︎