“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” struggles with guilt through disease, too. The poem suggests that it is possible to atone for the commerce of slavery, wipe out European guilt, and therefore stop disease from wiping out Europeans. “The Ancient Mariner,” according to James McKusick, sails in the shadow of guilt associated with the Western “civilizing” mission. McKusick suggests that the albatross is “an emblematic representation of all the innocent lives destroyed by European conquest,” including the guilt associated with the slave trade.39 But the albatross is just one emblem of guilt. Although the poem does not pinpoint any one source for the mariner’s guilt, it seems related as much to the deathly ill state of the crew as to the killing of the bird. Similarly, what arrests the ship “day after day, day after day” (115) is not so much the storm blast or the navigational disaster at the South Pole as it is the outbreak of disease and death. If the ship is on a commercial mission, especially one dealing in slaves, Coleridge implies a moral cause for the epidemic.
Coleridge was well aware of the natural causes of epidemics. But he, like many other writers, turned these natural causes into moral ones. For example, according to many medical experts of the day, stagnant waters combined with the torrid climate of the tropics to produce the yellow fever infection so common to slave vessels. The physician-poet Erasmus Darwin imported this well-known medical tidbit into his exotically charged diatribe The Botanic Garden. The poem rails against “Britannia” who invaded the coasts of Africa “with murder, rapine, theft,—and call it Trade!”40 The poem builds toward a genuine Old Testament plague, put into the modern context of contagion emanating from stagnant waters:
Sylphs! with light shafts you pierce the drowsy FOG,
That lingering slumbers on the sedge-wove bog,
With webbed feet o’er midnight meadows creeps,
Or flings his hairy limbs on stagnant deeps,
You meet CONTAGION issuing from afar,
And dash the baleful conqueror from his car.41
Not just contagion, it was believed, but yellow fever in particular, targeted those like the mariner and his crew, floating on an ocean where “the very deep did rot … Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (123–26). Slave vessels, stuck without “breath” or “motion” beneath a “hot and copper sky,” were especially vulnerable from a medical as well as a moral point of view (116, 111). For instance, yellow fever was portrayed as God’s just punishment for the atrocities of the slave trade in James Montgomery’s 1809 poem The West Indies:
The eternal makes his fierce displeasure known;
At his command the pestilence abhorr’d
Spares the poor slave, and smites the haughty lord.42
Similarly, one British traveler to the Caribbean said that “the new world, indeed, appears to be surrounded with the flaming sword of the angel, threatening destruction to all those, who venture within its reach.”43
In the diseased climate of “The Ancient Mariner,” then, it is not just the albatross murder that prompts the crew to hang the bird around the mariner’s neck as a symbol of guilt. It is the outbreak itself, the “Spirit that plagued” them with suffocating symptoms: tongues “withered at the root” and “choked with soot,” “throats unslaked, with black lips baked,” “glazed” eyes reflecting the “bloody Sun” and “death-fires” of the stagnant waters (132, 136, 138, 157, 146, 112, 128). In fact, before he wrote the poem, Coleridge explained how, by way of disease, the slave trade destroyed the British national body by destroying individual bodies. Following Thomas Clarkson, who argued that the slave trade was unfeasible because of the diseases to which crews were exposed, Coleridge said that from “the unwholesomeness of the Climate through which [crews] pass, it has been calculated that every Slave Vessel from the Port of Bristol loses on an average almost a fourth of the whole Crew” (Lects 1795, 238). The slave trade, he said, turned British mariners into “rather shadows in their appearance than men,” just as in “The Ancient Mariner” disease changes the mariners into a shadowy, “ghastly crew” (Lects 1795, 238).
But Coleridge really drives this point home when he locates the source of the disease in the skin of a ghostly white woman. As soon as the crew hangs the dead, white bird around the mariner’s neck, the woman-specter, who is “white as leprosy” emerges on a “western wave,” and the sailors drop dead (192, 171):
One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With a heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one. (212–19)
Coleridge thus deviates from the medical community’s indictment of the African and Caribbean atmosphere as a carrier of disease for Westerners. In a dramatic reversal, he places foreignness in a white, western woman, who becomes the expression of alterity through disease.
In his notebooks, Coleridge also pictured a white woman as a carrier of disease and moral depravity. In what is now a well-known account of one of his dreams, he told of being “followed up & down by a frightful pale woman who, I thought, wanted to kiss me, & had the property of giving a shameful Disease by breathing on the face” (CN, 1:1250).44 In this case, the diseased white woman is quite clearly the cargo of his fevered mind. But the link between this diseased woman and the pale woman of “The Ancient Mariner” is the link between Western seafaring diseases and sexually transmitted, morally reprehensible diseases such as syphilis.
For Coleridge, at least, there was more to whiteness than met the eye. In “The Ancient Mariner,” he folds disease in the envelope of whiteness and thus highlights the extent to which he was conversant with the operations of disease and guilt within antislavery literature. Besides yellow fever, the other disease trope used by abolitionists was leprosy. Thomas Pringle, for instance, in an antislavery sonnet, said sugar “taints with leprosy the white man’s soul.”45 Sugar sifted down English channels and dissolved in their teacups, but it remained a disease of white culture.46 Its cultural twin, leprosy, poisoned instead of sweetened, rotted away white flesh instead of increasing it. Thus, abolitionist writers began to see sugar’s deceptive sweetness, like the illusive whiteness of European skin, as something that tainted rather than purified. No wonder that in “The Ancient Mariner,” the two apparent hosts of contagion—the leprous white woman and the decaying white bird—destroy the myth of white purity that the British bride symbolizes. The poem, after all, opens in the epithalamic tradition, with the promise of a wedding image of purity, but the mariner’s tale nervously disrupts the wedding story. He replaces it with the “Life-in-Deathness” of white disease. The wedding, in fact, is not just contaminated, but completely obliterated from view by the mariner’s tale of rot, slime, sickness, and death.
It is not at all surprising that writers like Coleridge and Pringle brought sugar and disease together in literature, given sugar’s economic position as the country’s foremost slave-produced import. In its refined whiteness, sugar was synonymous with the addiction of the British consumer. And according to Coleridge, guilt sprang not just from consumption of slave products, but from addiction to them. By funneling a variety of such substances into Britain, international trade fed what Coleridge saw as the addictive British personality. “Perhaps from the beginning of the world,” he wrote, “the evils arising from the formation of imaginary wants have