I began this project because I was struck by the continuing references to the West Indies in the texts we were reading for our class. It seemed that in almost every book there was at least one reference to the "West Indies" generically, or to a specific island or location. I also noticed that in general, there was no information given about a location, just the reference to it. Most of our authors did not seem to have personal knowledge of the West Indies, but easily referred to the islands collaterally in the texts. For instance, in Polly, John Gay's sequel to The Beggar's Opera, the play is set "In the West Indies," and concerns the adventures of Polly in catching up with Macheath after his "transportation" there as a convicted felon, but mentions nothing specific about the locale, except vague references to "Indian country." He uses Indian characters, along with colonists and "pyrates." Gay does use an air entitled "The Jamaica" as the music for an aria (99). I don't know whether this is a coincidence or not.
The history of the Caribbean and its huge implication in the building of the wealth of the modern capitalist Western world led me to conclude that these references were perfectly natural to the authors, just as those references were constantly made in everyday conversation and journalism in England. Many English convicts were sentenced to "transportation" as a punishment for their crimes, which served as a convenient means to supply labor in the new colonies. When that source of labor proved insufficient, the mass importation of African slaves began. Gay obviously had knowledge of this practice of transportation, as we can surmise did the rest of the English population.
The history of the Caribbean and its huge implication in the building of the wealth of the modern capitalist Western world led me to conclude that these references were perfectly natural to the authors, just as those references were constantly made in everyday conversation and journalism in England. Many English convicts were sentenced to "transportation" as a punishment for their crimes, which served as a convenient means to supply labor in the new colonies. When that source of labor proved insufficient, the mass importation of African slaves began. Gay obviously had knowledge of this practice of transportation, as we can surmise did the rest of the English population.
In the 18th and 19th centuries so much of the commerce of England flowed to or through the West Indies and the sugar trade that the term was a byword in the British culture. In fact, the port city of Liverpool is a monument in stone and architecture to the wealth created by the slave trade. “By the end of the eighteenth century, nearly half the African trade of Europe was being carried on in ships clearing the port of Liverpool” (Phillips, 40-44, 104). There is even an "African dock" in the seaport, and figures of Africans adorn the municipal buildings.
There were two types of colonies in the New World. They are called "settler" colonies and "exploitation" colonies. The basic difference was whether the Europeans who went to those colonies went to settle and create communities, or whether they intended only to supervise the creation of wealth through mining, agriculture or other activities (Franklin 74 et seq.) If the former, wives would move with their husbands. In the latter, men generally went alone to work. These Europeans did not work in the physical sense of the term. They were not laborers. Rather, they supervised plantations which were worked by slaves.
Most of our texts, in their brief references to the West Indies, refer to someone who has gone to the islands. So when we read that a man "went out" to the islands, it would be to look after the holdings of himself or his employer, to oversee the enterprise and its profits. They were in essence "management." When a woman went, she would be visiting or rarely, settling there. For instance, in The Governess, Fielding refers to an aunt "being obliged to go to Jamaica to settle some Affairs relating to an Estate she is possessed of there (67), and later to an uncle "who was gone to the West Indies" (106). Aphra Behn, the author of Oroonoko, had herself visited Surinam for a period of about two years, and one presumes built her tale of The Royal Slave upon information gained during that visit. In her Dedication, Behn says that she in fact knew Oroonoko: "The Royal Slave I had the Honour to know in my Travels to the other World..." (7). One cannot tell, of course, if the narrative is fact or fiction or a mixture, but certainly her account of the exotic flora, fauna and natives of Surinam is squarely in accord with Stephen Greenblat's rendering of the European experience in the Caribbean (Behn 8,9; Greenblatt 76,78).
After the initial flush of discovery, however, the Caribbean was no longer considered a glamorous tropical paradise. It was felt to be unhealthy, immoral, and debilitating for European sensibilities. We see this disgust in Pope's Dunciad, in his reference "...to sail...to ape and monkey climes, Where vile mundungus...(tobacco, one of the early crops in the colonies)" (451, lines 233, 234). Unhealthy because of the fevers caused by tropical diseases, immoral because the European population was primarily male. Since they had no families there, they tended to have extramarital sexual relationships with women of other ethnicities -- at first Amerindians or later, African slaves. These relationships naturally resulted in offspring, and these "mulattos" were scorned by Europeans. Later, as the colonies became more settled, Europeans had children within their marriages, and these children, born in the islands, were referred to as "creoles" -- Europeans born and raised away from Europe. They also were looked down upon by the metropolitan Europeans. The young woman who was ruined by Mr. B in Pamela in fact goes out to Jamaica to escape the scandal after giving up his child to be raised by Lady Davers until she could be put in boarding school. There she married an officer and lived quite happily (482 et seq).
One other role that Europeans played in the West Indies was that of military invader, either in conquest of aboriginal territory or later, in wars over the colonies between European countries. We see a reference to this in Joseph Andrews, where Cartagena (there spelled Carthagena) is mentioned when by a "Gentleman," in conversation with Mr. Adams, who refers scornfully to those soldiers who were not brave enough to die in the attempted invasion of the Spanish fortress city (114). In the second, the same "Gentleman" says, "Sir...I have disinherited a Nephew who is in the army, because he would not exchange his Commission, and go to the West-Indies. I believe the Rascal is a Coward, tho' he pretends to be in love forsooth. I would have all such Fellows hanged, Sir, I would have them hanged" (118). Cartagena, incidentally, comes up again in Equiano's Interesting Narrative, where he says that a captain sails "nearly as far as Carthagena" (215).
Oulahda Equiano is the only one of our authors intimately familiar with the West Indies. In his narration of his life (or purported life, depending on how one reads the evidence about his birthplace), he relates his life as a sailor and an overseer in the West Indies. He mentions many places, and gives detailed accounts of several. We find references to Barbados, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Bermuda, Guadeloupe, Grenada, St. Eustatia, Carthagena, the Bahamas (Bahama Banks, New Providence, now Nassau, and Abbico, now Abaco,) Martinique, Jamaica, and the "Musquito shore" (now the Mosquito Coast, which is the intersection of Nicaragua and Honduras in Central America, and Virginia, Philadelphia and Georgia in North America. His book is almost a travelogue of the New World, with vivid descriptions of life as it was lived, and is quite a contrast to the casual references to the West Indies found in most of our texts. This is not a negative criticism of those texts, but rather proves out my theory that the West Indies and the commerce thereof was an integral part of the consciousness of the average Londoner, or any necessarily elite reader of our authors -- necessarily elite because he or she had the time, money, and literacy necessary to keep up with the printed word. We can find a corollary today when people who have never had and never will have a Swiss or "offshore" bank account refer to them in casual conversation.
A final reference is to another text that we did not read in class, and one not about the West Indies, but so related I feel compelled to mention it. I say related because all of the New World of the Western Hemisphere was conflated in European eyes -- the "Americas" included North America as well as the Caribbean, and South and Central America. We see this in Equiano's mention of Georgia, Virginia and Philadelphia. These regions were not separated in the minds of Europeans as they are in our thinking. The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield, published in London in 1767, is the dramatic tale of the daughter of an Englishman and an Indian princess. The woman is cast away on a deserted island during a voyage from Virginia to England, and her adventures ensue. According to scholar Michelle Burnham, who has resurrected this text, the author, purportedly Ms. Winkfield, is unknown. Burnham agrees with other critics who see Unca as a female Robinson Crusoe. I found Unca by reading C.M. Owen, an Australian scholar, who has written a fascinating study of female castaway adventure tales which became popular in Europe in the 18th century, and their relationship to Robinson Crusoe, entitled The Female Crusoe: Hybridity, Trade and the Eighteenth-Century Individual.
We can see from all of these texts that 18th century British literature was replete with references to the Americas, and that the reader of the time was interested in the New World and saw it as a familiar, though unfamiliar, part of his or her everyday life in England.
