Rare. OCLC/COPAC record copies at BL, Bodley and National Trust in the UK; Stanford and University of California - Davis only in the USA. No copies recorded on Rare Book Hub.
A rare collection of verses published by the author’s widow after he died of a fever in the West Indies
Howard is best known as the translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English blank verse (2 vols., London, J. Hatchard, 1807), a version intended “to render the beauties of Ovid more accessible to English readers, and to chasten the prurience of his ideas and his language, so as to fit his writings for more general perusal.”
The poems collected here are described by his widow as largely “composed at an early age”,
Additional biographical evidence for the life of Howard is provided by Rev. Richard Caddy Thomas in his Letters from the Virgin Islands (1843) in which he describes Howard as, “a gentleman of considerable literary as well as professional achievements … at that date sailing as surgeon of a Guinea-man” (p. 190) and notes that he was one of the crew shipwrecked when the General Abercrombie struck a reef off the coast of Danish Saint Croix in 1803. The crew were mostly rescued from the ship but the 339 slaves in the hold were trapped overnight with many of them dying and others being extremely ill. Caddy Thomas notes that he was able to use Howard’s own manuscript “Notes of a Slaving Voyage” (lent to him by Howard’s widow - they may well have been neighbours on the Cornish coast) to fill in the details of his earlier career.
Howard had undertaken the voyage on the General Abercrombie in the full knowledge that he would be a surgeon on a slave ship first bound for Angola and then on to Trinidad. He is quoted in Caddy Thomas’s book as stating: “I do not expect a sum that will enable me to sit down quietly at home, it is true ; but a very moderate degree of success in our affairs will realise more than enough to answer those demands to which my untoward speculations have subjected me, the grand motive to my undertaking this unpleasant employment.” Howard goes on to provide detailed and shocking narrative of the night of 1st March 1803 when the ship was wrecked: “10 A.M. At the request of Mr. Kelly, the chief mate, counted ninety-nine slaves into a pilot-boat that came alongside, with which she was dispatched to Christiansted. At noon quitted the wreck in the jolly-boat, landing on Buck island, almost naked, with the last of the slaves.”
Howard was eventually returned home in September 1803 commenting: “The passage, besides its length [of nearly fourteen months], has been one of the most unpleasant experienced by me since I devoted the exercise of my profession to nautical adventures.”
Howard moved to London and married Margaret (or Margery) Plommer and set up as an apothecary and surgeon in Pimlico. During this time he also published his new edition of Ovid but it was met with little approval and may well have contributed to financial difficulties which ultimately forced him to sell his practice, house and its contents by auction in 1809. This presumably left Howard with no choice but to put to sea again which he did in 1810 when he set off for Berbice in the West Indies to practice as a surgeon abroad. Howard wrote in his final poem (published here):
Lo ! the bold tyrant of the sable toiler,
O’er the wide ocean tempest troubled flies,
Eager to share with Afric’s ruthless spoiler Gains,
which the sanguine sweat of slaves supplies.
Howard’s wife and his son were to join him once his practice was established but the child died soon after departure and when his wife reached Demerara she found that her husband had been taken seriously ill and removed to Barbados. She tried to reach him there but Howard died on the voyage and was buried at sea on the 13th July 1810.
Widowed and childless Margaret was left living as a temporary guest at the Kendalls Plantation on the East coast of the Bernice region, grateful for the “sympathy and humanity” she had found among the inhabitants, including the “benevolent” Lieutenant-General (latterly back in London, as a subscriber) to whom she would dedicate the Poems.
This remarkable small collection of poems highlights the horrifying and dangerous world of the West Indies in this period. Howard was clearly - through financial necessity - forced to try and make money by taking on the appalling job of ship’s doctor on a slave ship in the full knowledge that he would be complicit in the trafficking of human beings from Africa. Added to this Howard lost his own life in the challenging conditions in the West Indies.
