Sabin 21240. Rare. OCLC/COPAC record copies at BL Cambridge, Glasgow and St Andrews in the UK; Stanford and Texas only in the USA. No copies recorded for sale on Rare Book Hub.
An eye-witness account of the West Indies in verse - with highly detailed supplementary notes - which celebrate the beauty and romance of the islands alongside their troubling history of violence, slavery, colonial rule and the challenging weather conditions.
Robert Nugent Dunbar (d.1866) lived for many years in the Antilles and he signs his preface to this poem from the, “seldom sufficiently estimated” Antilles in March 1843. Dunbar complains that the Antilles are, “little known to the generality of European readers…every body is aware that they produce sugar, rum and molasses; but, beyond this, very slight information is current in Europe concerning them” (viii).
This narrative poem, in ninety-seven Spenserian stanzas, presents a shipboard and exploratory overview of the Antilles from Curaçao, Barbados and Trinidad, through Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Saint Martin, Saint Kitts and Nevis, to Saint Thomas in the Virgins (with Tortola and Virgin Gorda), and finally Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica.
Generally the descriptions of the different islands are positive and celebrate the landscape and people with Dunbar using the area as many of the Romantic poets might have used Italy as an idealised muse, but Dunbar does not shy away from the darker aspects of the West Indies:
“Barbadoes! from thine annals blot one page!
No fouler blackens history: - the wrongs
Of Yarico shall ring through every age;
And, long as sympathy to man belongs,
The nations shall proclaim them in new tongues.
Would that indignant England could disclaim
That son, most abject ’mid degraded throngs!
The climax of all perfidy and shame,
Base avarice and guilt centres in Inkle’s name“ (p.44)
Dunbar also describes the destruction caused by La Grande Soufrière, the volcano on the island of Guadeloupe:
“Bracelet of France! twin jewels silver-clasp’d!
Bisected Guadaloupe! thy sulphur-cone,
His rugged waist by clinging vapours grasp’d,
Scaling the heavens majestically lone,
Pours the black smoke-wreath from his cloudy throne.
Thy face how changed! since the fierce Carib laugh’d
With fiendish glee o’er mangled victim’s groan;
And gorged on human flesh, and horrid quaff’d
From the dismember’d skull the execrable draught!“ (p.48)
Towards the end of the poem Dunbar also describes the challenging past of the island of Haiti:
“Haiti! once smiling land, - fruitful no more!
Transcendent beauty’s fatal gift was thine.
Phantoms of horror flit along thy shore,
Beneath the silver moon: how Havoc’s shrine
Has smoked with gore, since o’er thy vale divine
Columbus, from thy mountains’ golden veins
Look’d down, and saw a richer prospect shine…“ (p.52)
Dunbar is though clearly proud of the West Indies and encourages other European settlers:
“The climate too, that great bugbear with my countrymen, is only to be feared by the imprudent and intemperate: I have lived many years in the West Indies with a finger-ache, and so many any other European with ordinary are. We must not judge of the morality in a West India island by the deaths of transient persons, and particularly sailors, who drink themselves into fevers with new rum, and are constantly exposed during the day to the burning sum, and at night to heavy dews. Among the permanent residents, the morality is not greater than the average throughout the world; and instances of great longevity, among both Creoles and Europeans, are very common. The abolition of negro slavery will probably open a field for the emigration of white labourers; and if they can only eschew the archenemy rum, I think I can promise them as uninterrupted health as under their native skies” (x)
