Coleridge was just one of many writers to move the medical to the political level by designating slavery a European disease. Robert Southey’s vaccination poem, “A Tale of Paraguay,” imagined smallpox as an act of African reprisal. According to the poem’s opening lines, Edward Jenner—who had pioneered work on cowpox inoculation to combat smallpox the same year that Coleridge wrote “The Ancient Mariner”—defeated epidemic disease and thus the vengeance of slavery:
Jenner! for ever shall thy honour’d name
Among the children of mankind be blest,
Who by thy skill hast taught us how to tame
One dire disease, ‥ the lamentable pest
Which Africa sent forth to scourge the West,
As if in vengeance for her sable brood
So many an age remorselessly oppresst.48
But if smallpox was a scourge from Africa that could be conquered through British medical technology, yellow fever could not. And so it was most often that abolitionists used the symptoms of yellow fever, as opposed to those of smallpox or other contagious diseases, to demonstrate the interminable vengeance Africa would have on European bodies. In James Stanfield’s The Guinea Voyage (1789), for instance, yellow fever eats the crew alive. It leaves behind putrid bodies as spoils of war, as condemnation for the “remorseless oppression” of slavery. In military fashion, the “troops of wan disease their march begin”:
Now droops the head in faint dejection hung,
Now raging thirst enflames the dry parch’d tongue;
In yellow films the rayless eye is set,
With chilling dews the loaded brow is wet.49
The guilt that bleeds through the lines of Stanfield’s, Southey’s, and, most powerfully, Coleridge’s poem is the logical response of the sympathetic imagination, and it is the only response of the distanced imagination. For the culture at large, guilt signaled the beginnings of a dismantling of the slave system that had been in place for so many hundreds of years. Guilt was nothing less than the initial pangs of remorse felt upon recognizing the inhumanity of the British self against the humanity of the African other.
IV
Interestingly enough, recognition of slaves as more than “things” coincided with recognition that slavery created a biological and a psychological rift in the natural environment. From its beginnings in the fifteenth century to its peak in the early nineteenth century, the slave trade represented the largest movement of people in history to that point. It was clear to medical writers of the period that this dramatically disturbed the atmosphere. When Dr. James Clark noted that the activity of the slave trade caused “a deranged state of the atmosphere” and thus “excited this mortal disease in our island,”50 he was saying that the slave trade disturbed environmental balances, which in turn produced yellow fever.
Moving bodies turned the earth in a dangerous and often fatal direction. Since Africans and slaves appeared to be immune to yellow fever, the only way epidemics spread was among gatherings of freshly arrived Europeans in a tropical locale. As Philip Curtin explains in his book Death by Migration, in order to survive, the yellow fever vector A. aegypti needed groups of nonimmune subjects “concentrated within the flight range” of the virus. If not, the disease would creep back into the recesses of the tropical jungle, where animals kept it active until a new crop of Europeans arrived.51 Of course, early-nineteenth-century medical workers did not have germ theories, and they did not even consider the mosquito as a carrier of the virus. But they did understand yellow fever’s mode of existence at some level. They knew that the disease stemmed from the European encounter with the tropics. Dr. Thomas Dancer, for one, observed in 1801 how yellow fever “first visits the abodes of wretchedness and squalor, and disappears for a season, or diminishes in virulence to return again and expend its fury over the community at large.”52 American doctors, reporting on the yellow fever epidemic of Philadelphia, recognized that the fever “exists in the West Indies particularly in times of war, when great numbers of strangers are to be found there.”53
These early medical men clearly believed that the breakdown of the Caribbean ecosystem caused yellow fever to break out. When Dr. Clark insisted in 1799 that yellow fever ran rampant in the Caribbean the more it was “crowded with strangers,” he gestured toward the cultural suspicion that yellow fever was the result of environmental trauma. Although Britain had its own socioenvironmental problems (the poverty of the city, the fear of French invasion), nothing of the sort was happening at home. In contrast to the environment of the Quantocks, where Coleridge and Wordsworth first conceived of “The Ancient Mariner,” the abolitionist poet William Hutchenson wrote of the Caribbean in 1792:
New cargoes crowd our shores, and on the beach
The squalid multitudes are pouring forth,
From over-loaded ships, which, like the curse
Of vile Pandora’s box, bring forth disease,
With misery, and pallid want,
Crippled and maim’d, whose ulcerating sores
Cling to the canker’d chains, that rankle deep.54
If the yellow fever outbreaks of the Caribbean frightened Europeans, outbreaks in America created real alarm. The 1793 outbreak in Philadelphia was by far the most referenced and terrifying eighteenth-century yellow fever epidemic precisely because it proved that the disease could be imported like so many slaves and goods. Dr. Trotter blamed the fever on “damaged coffee, that was left to rot on the wharfs, and from which noxious exhalations were spread that first affected the neighbourhood, and afterwards more distant parts of the city.”55 The Americans insisted that this “imported” fever had transgressed the national boundary and thus altered the American environment. Robert Jackson and John Redman, two prominent American doctors, led public opinion in the matter. Yellow fever, said Jackson, had been “imported into Philadelphia from some foreign country” and was “propagated afterwards solely by contagion.”56 Redman traced the infection to “imported clothing or persons who died in the West Indies”; at the very least, the disease stemmed directly from “the neighbourhood of shipping or among persons connected with vessels.”57 So it was that doctors blamed commerce for destroying environmental balances that otherwise kept epidemics at bay. People who carried on the national dirty work of commerce brought fever home. Those, like the mariner, “connected with vessels” were literally on the national border and were somehow held responsible for importing the wrong thing. On the one hand, countries like England and America relied heavily on people associated with the seafaring industry, yet on the other, these individuals were diseased, disturbing, and abject, because of their inevitable contact with foreign cultures.
Many bystanders, however, could not help but use the outbreak of European contracted disease in tropical climates to condemn the slave trade for deforming the environment. Helen Maria Williams asks how slave traders can, in good conscience:
Deform creation with the gloom
Of crimes that blot its cheerful bloom?
Darken a work so perfect made,
And cast the universe in shade?—58
Though the moral universe condemned the British slavery system with plagues of yellow fever, the natural universe ultimately paid the price. In James Montgomery’s abolitionist poem, yellow fever destroys the British body and thus the entire cosmos:
Foreboding melancholy sinks his mind,
Soon at his heart he feels the monster’s fangs,
They tear his vitals with convulsive pangs
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Now frenzy-horrors rack his whirling brain,