Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  When the cone was turned back up and bumped gently, the result was a sugar loaf sitting on a clay base: a cone of sugar whitest at the bottom, and brownest at the top. The problem was that the home governments, always seeing the colonies solely as a source of delivering raw materials and potential profit to the home country, placed taxes on clayed sugar, which effectively reduced the profit to the plantation.

  Detailed as they were, du Monceau’s descriptions of the intricacies of sugar making, so urgently needed by the sugar growers, were nowhere near as memorable as the educational efforts to be found in the strange poetic outpourings of Dr James Grainger.

  THE GEORGIC DOCTOR

  James Grainger, poet, author, physician and educator of sugar planters, began his career as a surgeon in the 13th Foot during the Jacobite rising of 1745. He later set up practice as a doctor in London, and was a contributor to different literary journals.

  Perhaps to develop an image as a Renaissance man, he published a study of army diseases, but John Pringle’s study was superior, and came out the year before Grainger’s. That, and the fact that Grainger wrote in Latin, while Pringle had published in English, meant Grainger’s book lost by comparison. Still, he mingled with and was admired by the best literary people in London—the likes of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and Thomas Percy—and he had a famous battle with Smollett over his translation of the poems of Tibullus, among other things.

  In 1759 Grainger set sail with his patron, John Bourryau, to visit Bourryau’s sugar plantation on the island of St Kitts. There was a war going on with France at the time, so the ship sailed in convoy, and on the way out Grainger was transferred to another ship to treat a woman stricken with smallpox. So it was that he met the lady’s daughter, who went by the improbable name of Daniel Mathew Burt. Her name indicated nothing of her gender, but did serve to remind other Kittitians that she was connected to both the Daniel and Mathew families, both prominent on the island of St Kitts.

  Shortly afterwards, James Grainger, MD and literary lion, married to the former Daniel Burt, was practising medicine on St Kitts and looking for some activity suited to his talents, whereby to make his reputation and his fortune. It was clear that the planters needed instruction in the arts of sugar making, so this became his project. Rather than straightforward prose, however, he found a model in the Georgics of Virgil, which describe agricultural practices in Rome in the first century BC, including the keeping of bees.

  This style, common enough at the time, was shortly to go out of fashion (though Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, became famous when he used it to write about nature, classification and his views about the evolution of new species). Erasmus was highly rated as a poet, and influenced many of the poets of early nineteenth-century England, but he made it foolishly obvious that when writing Georgics, one does not call a spade a spade. Instead, it must be called the:

  Metallic Blade, wedded to ligneous Rod

  Wherewith the rustic Swain upturns the sod.

  After his squabble with Smollett, Grainger should have been more wary of giving people an easy chance to make fun of his style, but he appears to have learned only slowly. Sugar-Cane: A poem in four books, published in London in 1764, was a massive blank verse presentation on all aspects of cultivating the sugar cane, caring for slaves, making sugar and much more. Sad to say, the planters did not care for the elegant language, while many Londoners could not see the need to address in careful detail such important issues as the rats that destroyed the cane, the diseases that affected slaves, or manure. People like Dr Johnson got many a belly laugh at Grainger’s expense, according to Boswell:

  He spoke slightingly of Dyer’s Fleece.—‘The subject, Sir, cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets? Yet you will hear many people talk to you gravely of that excellent poem, The Fleece.’ Having talked of Grainger’s Sugar-Cane, I mentioned to him Mr. Langton’s having told me, that this poem, when read in manuscript at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s, had made all the assembled wits burst into a laugh, when, after much blank-verse pomp, the poet began a new paragraph thus:—

  ‘Now, Muse, let’s sing of rats.’

  And what increased the ridicule was, that one of the company, who slily overlooked the reader, perceived that the word had been originally MICE, and had been altered to RATS, as more dignified.

  That was almost certainly untrue. As Richard Ligon had made clear, rats have always been a problem in the cane fields, both because they damage the canes and because they spread a nasty disease called leptospirosis. Still, by twisting things a little, Johnson also had his fun with the work, as Boswell tells it:

  Johnson said, that Dr. Grainger was an agreeable man; a man who would do any good that was in his power. His translation of Tibullus, he thought, was very well done; but The Sugar-Cane, a poem, did not please him; for, he exclaimed, ‘What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the “Parsley-bed, a Poem”; or “The Cabbage-garden, a Poem”.’

  Grainger may have hoped that this work would make his literary reputation and earn him enough money to retire ‘home’ to enjoy his riches. On St Kitts he doctored slaves, attended to the plan-tocracy—the ‘Creoles’, as they were known locally—and sold medicines as well. He also travelled to nearby islands when called upon to treat the sick. His poem had a serious message, however—it was intended to enrich the new planter by teaching him all the necessary arts such as:

  What soil the Cane affects; what care demands;

  Beneath what signs to plant: what ills await;

  How the hot nectar best to christallize;

  And Afric’s sable progeny to treat:

  A Muse, that long hath wander’d in the groves

  Of myrtle-indolence, attempts to sing.

  Most amusement seemed to be aroused by his paean of praise to the marvels of good compost (which still finds favour with gardeners today):

  Of composts shall the Muse descend to sing,

  Nor soil her heavenly plumes? The sacred Muse

  Naught sordid deems, but what is base; nought fair

  Unless true Virtue stamp it with her seal.

  Then, Planter, wouldst thou double thine estate;

  Never, ah never, be asham’d to tread

  Thy dung-heaps, where the refuse of thy mills,

  With all the ashes, all thy coppers yield,

  With weeds, mould, dung, and stale, a compost form,

  Of force to fertilize the poorest soil.

  While compost and manure might have been important to the farmer and his plantation readership, they were unlikely to appeal to his potential London audience, and the sales of his work were poor. But there was more:

  Whether the fattening compost, in each hole,

  ’Tis best to throw; or, on the surface spread;

  Is undetermin’d: Trials must decide

  Unless kind rains and fostering dews descend,

  To melt the compost’s fertilising salts;

  A stinted plant, deceitful of thy hopes,

  Will from those beds slow spring where hot dung lies:

  But, if ’tis scatter’d generously o’er all,

  The Cane will better bear the solar blaze;

  Less rain demand; and, by repeated crops,

  Thy land improv’d, its gratitude will show.

  If compost was important, the slaves could not have been too enthusiastic about it. To prevent sheet erosion on the cleared ground, cane was planted in ‘holes’, squares about 1.5 metres across and 15 cm deep, which made it difficult or impossible to get carts in when the manure was needed, as the young cane shoots began to appear. The manure had to be carried in on the slaves’ heads in baskets, as Miss Schaw described it in her journal in 1774, a few years after Grainger died:

  Every ten negroes have a driver, who walks behind them, carrying in his hand a short whip and a long one . . . When they are regularly ranged, each has a little basket, which he carries up the hill filled with the manure and returns with a
load of canes to the Mill. They go up at a trot and return at a gallop . . .

  The ‘little basket’ with its contents probably weighed 35 kilograms (75 pounds or more), and its soggy contents would have been dripping down on the carrier the whole time. It was certainly the task most resented by the slaves who were interviewed after emancipation, so a nervous manager might be tempted, for fear of poison in his food, to forget about the manuring of the fields.

  It did not help the cause of scientific farming when, around 1816, Lord Dundonald wrote a ‘treatise on Chymistry as applied to agriculture’ which recommended peat as the best manure for cane. As Thomas Spalding commented, ‘He does nothing but what a mind heated to excess would have thought of, when he recommends that peat should be prepared in Scotland and sent to Jamaica for the purpose.’

  Like Dundonald, Grainger failed because he failed to stick to the simple facts. Many of the islands had poor soil, and without compost the cane eventually grew poorly because vital elements were not returned to the soil. In some parts of Brazil the planters could move to new land as the old land was exhausted, but on the smaller islands this was simply not possible.

  Whatever the reason, the sophisticated people of London laughed at Grainger’s attempts to instruct, and he never reaped the hoped-for reward from his efforts. English readers missed what he meant in his oblique descriptions, while those in the islands who might have benefited either thought they knew it all, or were far from bookish.

  The medical side of the poet comes to the fore when Grainger writes of caring for slaves. As far back as 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had written from Constantinople to describe how the Turks dealt with smallpox by infecting themselves when they were healthy:

  The small-pox, so fatal and so general among us, is here entirely harmless, by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox . . .

  The ingrafting, or variolation, was carried out with smallpox material from survivors, and so would have been a slightly weaker strain of the virus. This contributed to its successful use in Boston by Cotton Mather before his death in 1728—and he claimed to have learned about the practice from African slaves. Even George Washington arranged to have his troops variolated before they went into battle.

  Later, it was this practice of variolation which allowed Edward Jenner to test the effect of cowpox, when he first gave the young James Phipps the harmless cowpox and then followed the completely routine practice of variolation. The common modern claim that Jenner was in some way unethical in ‘deliberately giving a young boy smallpox’ is based on gross ignorance of the medical norms of his day.

  But if we have forgotten about ingrafting now, it was well known back in Grainger’s time, which makes it odd that he should feel the need to advise his readers of what they should have known:

  Say, as this malady but once infests

  The sons of Guinea, might not skill ingraft

  (Thus the small-pox are happily convey’d;)

  This ailment early to thy Negroe-train?

  Grainger also offered sound advice on industrial safety that might have helped Macandal a few years earlier:

  And now thy mills dance eager in the gale;

  Feed well their eagerness: but O beware;

  Nor trust, between the steel-cas’d cylinders,

  The hand incautious: off the member snapt

  Thou’lt ever rue, sad spectacle of woe!

  He also provided advice on allowing the slaves to drink cane juice during the harvest:

  While flows the juice mellifluent from the Cane,

  Grudge not, my friend, to let thy slaves, each morn,

  But chief the sick and young, at setting day,

  Themselves regale with oft-repeated draughts

  Of tepid Nectar; so shall health and strength

  Confirm thy Negroes, and make labour light.

  And he inveighed against wicked Frenchmen who adulterated their sugar, something no true Britisher would do (though G. K. Chesterton seemed to think English grocers did it all the time). According to Grainger:

  False Gallia’s sons, that hoe the ocean-isles,

  Mix with their Sugar, loads of worthless sand,

  Fraudful, their weight of sugar to increase.

  Far be such guile from Britain’s honest swains.

  If the planters had paid more attention to Grainger’s sound advice, or if Grainger had couched his sound advice in less complex terms, how many lives might have been saved? Grainger wrote on a variety of worms and their treatment, depression, nutrition and more, all directed at keeping slaves healthy and working—but above all, alive. Grainger even provided notes to the work, to explain, for example, that ‘[T]he mineral product of the Cornish mine’ was in fact tin, which he pointed out could be used as a vermifuge (a treatment for worms) in either powder or filings form.

  In the end, Grainger’s poem fell badly between two stools. By 1860 George Gilfillan could include Grainger among the ‘less-known poets’. In 1930 he was included in The Stuffed Owl, an anthology of bad verse. Neither of these was quite as damning as it sounds: Gilfillan’s list of lesser known poets included John Donne, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Smart and Jonathan Swift, and the alleged bad versifiers in The Stuffed Owl included Burns, Byron, Keats, Longfellow, Smart again, and Wordsworth.

  All in all, not bad company in which to find a Scottish doctor on the make.

  FOR WORMS

  Give a child one year old 15 drops of spirits of turpentine on sugar, fasting, for three mornings in succession; follow the last dose with a good dose of castor oil; this forms an excellent vermifuge. The dose of spirits of turpentine for a child two years old is 20 drops, three years old 25 drops, four years old 30 drops, &c.

  Daniel Young, Young’s Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets, Toronto, 1861

  7

  RUM AND

  POLITICS

  Approval given to Mr Waterhouse to supply King James’s ships at Jamaica with Rumm instead of Brandy, he takeing care that the good or ill effects of this proof, with respect as well to the good Husbandry thereof as to the Health and Satisfaction of our Seamen, be carefully inquired into by you and reported to us within a yeare or two (or sooner if you find it necessary for our further satisfaction in the same).

  Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Navy, 3 March 1688

  Throughout the ages, wherever people have looked to add some intoxicating interest to life, they have remembered or rediscovered the art of getting zing from sugar. When Captain Cook took his men to Hawaii in 1779, he described his way of treating cane juice:

  Having procured a quantity of sugar-cane, and finding a strong decoction of it produced a very palatable beer, I ordered some more to be brewed for our general use. But when the cask was now broached, not one of my crew would even so much as taste it. I myself and the officers continued to make use of it whenever we could get materials for brewing it. A few hops, of which we had some on board, improved it much. It has the taste of new malt beer; and I believe no one will doubt of its being very wholesome. Yet my inconsiderate crew alleged that it was injurious to their health.

  The ship had taken on four casks of rum at Rio, so maybe the men wanted none of the ‘beer’ because there was still rum left. Or maybe they thought it was just another of Cook’s cures for scurvy, like his ‘portable soup’ and ‘sour krout’. Christmas was approaching, and that was a time when Cook’s crew would normally make merry, as they did on his first voyage to the South Sea. Here is part of Joseph Banks’s journal entry of 25 December 1768, just ten years earlier, which suggests that on that voyage at least, Cook’s ship had enough liquor for all:

  Christmas day; all good Christians that is to say all hands get abominably drunk so that at night there was scarce a sober man in the ship, wi
nd thank god very moderate or the lord knows what would have become of us.

  Cook’s official account was more understated: ‘Yesterday being Christmas day the People were none of the soberest.’ Neither Banks nor Cook indicates what the liquor was; rum was used on ships earlier, but it was only in 1775 that it became the standard issue liquor for sailors in Britain’s navy. Before then, a variety of alcoholic drinks were in common use, so we find Banks recording that when the crew of Endeavour ‘crossed the line’ (passed over the equator for the first time), the first-timers could accept being ducked, or ‘give up 4 days allowance of wine which was the price fixd upon’. But standard or not, rum was a common tipple for British sailors for a long time.

  Distillation is the oldest chemical craft in the world—the earliest surviving piece of chemical equipment, a distillation apparatus for separating perfume ingredients, has been dated to 3600 BC. Islamic chemists knew all about distillation (we get our word ‘alcohol’ from Arabic), and had taken the knowledge to Spain. So while rum is usually associated with the Caribbean or the Americas, it is quite possible that an alert Spaniard had noted that sugar juice, left to stand, was in the habit of fermenting into Cook’s ‘beer’; from there it would be but a small step to producing some rum-like liquor on the quiet.

  Although the origin of its name is obscure, rum has been known since the English settled in Barbados in 1627, and the Spanish and Portuguese were possibly involved in distilling spirits on their sugar plantations even earlier than this. The art of distillation is often said to have come into the islands with the Jewish refugees from Brazil, who had learned to make cachaça, which is distilled from the raw cane juice rather than from molasses, as rum is. The only snag here is that the dates do not add up, since the Jews did not flee Brazil until around 1654, by which time rum was common on Barbados.