1 Preliminary Remarks in a Historical Vein

1‘Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs. Et voici que je m’apprête à raconter mes expéditions’. ‘I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing the story of my expedition’. This famous quote stands at the beginning of an outstanding French anthropologist’s classic study on indigenous societies in central Brazil, in Tristes Tropiques.1 It reflects Claude Lévi-Strauss’s reticence to bring his insights before a public and his deeply melancholy recognition that a world, that entire cultures are waning, and unretrievably so.

2Why do people travel, and why do they write about it? Who asks them to? And why do people wish to read these accounts? In virtually all of the national epics in the Western tradition, movement in connection with heroic deeds, battles and conquest play a decisive role. The opening lines of one of the pinnacles of medieval European literature, Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (written 1303-8, published in the 1490s) go like this: ‘Nell mezzo del camino di nostra vita/Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura./Chè la diritta via era smarrita.’In Dorothy L. Sayer’s translation: ‘Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, /I woke to find my self in a dark wood, /Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.’2 We have here at the very beginning of the first Canto the protagonist’s imminent symbolic journey in a spiral movement down the 24 great circles of Hell. The road, a life’s journey, the direction one takes or not, has symbolic, and above all, moral dimensions. The dark wood means of course a life in Sin or Error, just as the beasts he later encounters are the symbols of lust, pride and avarice. Remember what John Bunyan did in his allegorical masterpiece Pilgrim’s Progress. Traveling meant in medieval times and way into the Baroque not just moving from one spot to another, with adventures galore, but was part of a teaching effort. These were exemplary ethical journeys that lead to damnation or salvation. Space is thus not just a physical, natural, ‘real’ phenomenon but becomes also psychological, forms an intrinsic part of a symbolic world and is part of theologically defined ethical structures.

3The genre of the picaresque novel, since its anonymous beginnings with La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus Fortunas y Adversidades (1554) to contemporaries like Saul Bellow, Günter Grass and others, depends on travel, on movement and rhythm, on a string of episodes engineered by its authors and their protagonists who then, from a frog’s eyes view, look satirically at their respective societies. The picaresque novel’s structure is inseparable from these episodes created by movement and space.

4Certain travelers, especially if they are professional writers (or would like to be) take notes on the way which they later formulate into printable matter. In that case, they have from the start, a public (and a much desired income) in mind. Others take notes as a mere exercise that will hopefully lead to greater, more coherent forms, or as a sort of private pleasure. For certain authors the taking of notes during travel is a semi-magic, slightly neurotic way of keeping fears at bay, of not being able to keep up the continuity of writing. It is interesting to read the travel diaries or notes of established authors: often enough you can note how stylistic idiosyncracies, obsessive interests, a personality emerges from them. Franz Kafka and his Reisetagebücher (Travel Diaries) would be a case in point. What exactly does an author see or not see, what does he or she choose to record or omit? And why? How conscious are they of their role as voyeurs?

5We can distinguish between several categories of travel in relation to the traveler. Traveling is, if we ignore a truly nomadic existence, a partial, a temporary, not a continuous life-long endeavor, it can be voluntary or forced. At one point the traveler does come home (in which shape ever); and if he or she is not truly a moron, he or she returns a changed individual (to which degree ever). So we have transformative journeys. André Gide’s travels to (North) Africa and his coming out as an otherwise self-repressed gay man would be a good example for that category. Traveling can be muscular, a considerable physical effort, it can also be relaxed, or quite passive in the case of the armchair traveler; traveling can be an escape, a mere luxury, systematic, or a random occurrence. There is the type of the Fortunate Traveler that Walcott used in the title for his 1981 poetry collection, and there is the unfortunate, the miserable traveler. Travel can cause disruption, uprooting, alienation. If you travel enough, you move in continuous expanding borderlands, and at one point the question looms large: where is home, where is your center? I tend to agree with Julia Kristeva’s notion that a contemporary person ‘can exist honestly only as a foreigner’.3 How far can transculturation go? Where, then, is ‘fixity’, to use Homi Bhabha’s term?4 Traveling can be private, a lonely movement. It can also be semi-private, if several persons ride in a private car, for example. And it can be communal, with barely a remnant of privacy, as on crowded subways, public buses or aeroplanes. The possibility of traveling often meant potential rites of passage, acts of initiation, as anthropologists and ethnologists such as James Clifford would claim (Clifford 1997: 17-46). Traveling like the Grand Tour served as a confirmation of class coherence and education, of social reconstruction. And travel also meant that man could and would domesticate raw nature, would conquer it. It was, apart from the pleasure it could produce, perceived as a civilizational tool. And, unfortunately, there have been travels of no return, travels of a tragic, sinister kind, into exile, to Gulags and extermination camps.

6Let me just briefly allude to the ancient concept of stabilitas loci, according to which you can, by reading or viewing, travel and stay put, and the traditions of the Judaic Cabbala, of Christian mysticism and the Muslim Sufi tradition, all of which are complex, prescriptive meditations that can be defined as spiritual movements of inwardly travels.

7In the typology of the travel writer we find a stereotype of the travel writer from the earliest accounts: that of the professional liar, a Baron von Münchhausen. Whether expeditions of the late 14th until the 16th centuries were financed by the House of Fugger in Augsburg, by the Reyes Católicos in Spain, by Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, or by share holders in companies—they all wanted results, accounts that justified their trust, their expenses, hopes of colonial possession, and the propagation of the Christian faith. Hardly any of the early explorers and travel writers, be it the Venetian Marco Polo (1254-1324), who in Il Milione wrote of his visit to China and the mighty Kublai Khan, or the Genovese in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, Christopher Columbus, or Hernán Cortéz who conquered Mexico, let alone Sir John Mandeville, or Ibn Battutta (1304-1377), the 14th century Muslim traveler, who ‘had seen more of the world than any man before him’,5 none had escaped attacks and humiliations based on the reproach that they told untruths. In the 17th century the book titles attain baroque dimensions, due to the authors’ urge to inform, sell, and justify the novelty of their exploits and ensuing publication. Richard Ligon’s title of his 1657 history of Barbados may serve as an example:

A TRUE & EXACT HISTORY Of the Island of BARBADOES Illustrated with a Map of the Island, as also the Principal Trees and Plants there, Set forth in their due Proportions and Shapes, drawn out by their several and respective Scales. Together with The Ingenio that makes the Sugar, with the Plots of the several Houses, Rooms, and other places, that are used in the whole process of Sugar-making; viz. The Grinding-room, the Boyling-room, the Filling-room, the Curing-house, Still-house, and Furnaces; All cut in Copper.... LONDON, Printed, and are to be sold by Peter Parker, at his Shop at the Leg and Star over against the Royal Exchange, and Thomas Guy at the corner Shop of Little Lumbard-street and Cornhill, 1673. (Second ed.).

8The need to emphasize the veracity of the accounts and to justify the respective venture by all persons and institutions concerned with the colonial enterprise and its economic future explains the category of ‘promotional literature’. Robert Beverley (ca.1673-1722) and his 1705 History and Present State of Virginia are a case in point. Here is an amusing example of the New World Edenic myth combined with business interests of the nascent Southern plantocracy:

... I believe this is as healthy a Country, as any under Heaven: but the extraordinary pleasantness of the Weather, and the goodness of the Fruit, lead People into many Temptations. The clearness and brightness of the Sky, add new vigor to their Spirits, and perfectly remove all Splenetick and sullen Thoughts.... Their Eyes are ravished with the Beauties of naked Nature. Their Ears are serenaded with the perpetual murmur of Brooks..., the merry Birds, too, join their pleasing Notes to this rural Consort, especially the Mock-birds, who love Society so well, that whenever they see Mankind, they will perch upon a Twig very near them, and sing the sweetest wild Airs in the World.... Have you pleasure in a Garden? All things thrive in it, most surprisingly; you can’t walk by a Bed of Flowers, but besides the entertainment of their Beauty, your Eyes will be saluted with the charming colors of the Humming Birds... Upon these Flowers, I have seen ten or a dozen of these Beautiful Creatures together, which sported about me so familiarly, that with their little Wings they often fan n’ed my Face.6

9No wonder that Beverley was a fan of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been a favorite of Queen Elizabeth (and a victim of her successor, James I). Raleigh was one of the proponents of El Dorado, and of visions of cities with streets made of solid gold, in Guiana (1596)—heterotopias, counter-spaces, that Michel Foucault dealt with in his recently published radio talk for Radio France of December 7th, 1966.7

2 On Discoveries and Expansions

10There have been various attempts to categorize travelogues; apparently scholarship has given up on that in the 1990s. Usually the categorizations imply a value system, with practical travel handbooks, guide books, and popular travelogues from the 16th century to the present resting on the bottom, and novelistic fictional treatments on the top.8 Fiction, fictionality as a deeper reality of the soul and as a poetologically valuable product is in this typology clearly preferred over fact, over what is understood as a mere rendering of reality. This model is, of course, rather naïve in many of its assumptions, beginning with the functions of language, its speakers, writers and recipients in various epochs. What is avidly embraced as truth, or argumentative logic, or acceptable embellishment, or poetic license is rejected as a blatant lie in another context or time or by different people even from within the same society. We have already in the late 16th century, especially from German and Dutch humanist scholars, such as Theodor Zwinger and Hugo de Bloote, attempts to come to terms with this new genre of the travel account. They wanted to furnish a methodology, to give advice how to write a serious travel book.9 The enormous amount of books of exploration and travel that have come upon us and their popularity, their acceptance as a serious genre that sells and can be used as textbooks, becomes evident when anthologies are being compiled. In 2002 we note in the series The Faber Book of...: The Faber Book of Exploration, edited by Benedict Allen. Unfortunately the numerous entries are too short to be of much use.

11The Caribbean space was, as we know, the first theatre of vigorous English and Spanish westward expansion, the Portuguese having preceded these two nations with the formidable exploits of Vasco da Gama (ca. 1460-1524) who reached East Africa, southwest India and Indonesia, and Fernando Magellan (ca.1480-1521) who had shown that the oceans were interrelated and ‘the Americas were... shown... to be a separate land-mass from Asia’ (Allen, ed. 1988: 40).

12The four voyages of Columbus, who to his end believed that he had followed Marco Polo and had reached Asia with Hispaniola alias Cipango alias Japan, mark the beginning of ‘the discovery of the Other through the I’, to quote from Tzvetan Todorov’s study La conquête de l’Amérique.10 They also mark the beginning of conquest, greed, enslavement, and genocide in the Caribbean and in Mesoamerica, ordered and ordained by Christian European monarchs. The image of the Other in the conquerors’ and colonists’ minds is of utmost importance in this context, and in the following I will concentrate on this aspect of the texts considered. European culture and values were from the very beginning of contacts felt as essentially superior, and Eurocentrism was inseparable from the issue of power. Columbus as almost every other author of travelogues seems to have harbored a preconceived image of the savage which he expected to serve his purposes. In his logbook entry of October 13th, 1492, he notes when he had met the Arawaks:

The people are very gentle and anxious to have things we bring. ... But they will give all they do possess for anything that is given to them, exchanging things even for bits of broken crockery or broken glass cups.11

13And one day later we read:

... these people are very unskilled in arms, as your Majesties will discover from seven whom I caused to be taken and brought aboard so that they may learn our language and return.... with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we wish. (Columbus 1969: 58f.)

14The most succinct statements of Columbus’s insights can be found in his Letter to the Spanish Court ‘Describing the Results from his first Voyage and written on the Return Journey’. He had read Sir John Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1357), a book which was originally written in Norman French and got quickly translated into many languages. The wonders of nature told are intimately linked with their usefulness, with possibilities of exploitation, and so are the human beings he encountered. The savages remain abstractions, thus making a footing on equal terms impossible—a pattern that perpetuated itself in all future colonizing effort and made a discourse of difference and superiority feasible. The measurements of conquest, of subjugation were taken from the very start: ‘They have no iron or steel or arms and are not capable of using them, not because they are not strong and well built, but because they are amazingly timid’ (Columbus 1969: 117). That proved a misjudgment on Columbus’s side, as his son would live (and regret) to see in the island of Hispaniola. Cristóbal Colón, who in all probability was a converso, a converted Jew turned a devout and messianic Catholic, does not fail to mention another argument that became a topos in most travelogues way into the 19th century and appears in virtually all colonizers’ accounts: he gives thanks to the Lord whom he knows to be a friend and ally who is surely approving of Christianizing thrusts westward:

Fig. 1. — How Sir Cavendish arrives in a region where many seals of a strange kind lived. Copper engravings from Thomas de Bry, Sammlung von Reisen in das westliche Indien, Frankfurt, 1590.

Fig. 2. — How some peoples dwell in winter on trees and high rocks, also, what ceremonies they have with their dead.

Fig. 3. — How the Guyanians make their idols and pictures mostly from small grains of gold.

Fig. 4. — How Indians with more than 60 canoes met Sir Thomas Cavendish near the Ladrones Islands.

Thus the eternal God, Our Lord, grants to all those who walk in his way victory over apparent impossibilities, and this voyage was pre-eminently a victory of this kind.... So all Christendom will be delighted that our Redeemer has given victory to our most illustrious King and Queen and their renowned kingdoms... (Columbus 1969: 122).

15One important aspect in the early conquering traveler’s ethnological and ideological make-up must be mentioned: that of the absencia, of absence. Michel de Montaigne mentioned it in his 1580 essay ‘Des Cannibales’: ‘nulle connaissance de lettres, nulle science de nombres, ... nul usage de service de richesse ou de pauvreté....’12 The absence of language, of the written word, was considered a defining characteristic of the savage who could become an object of desire and a potential obstacle to the possession of precious materials like gold. The ability to describe, define, report, classify, to name, and to distance oneself was a mighty tool for self-elevation and domination—and remains so to this very day.

3 Two Naturally Subjective English Travel Accounts to the Island of Jamaica

16‘Where the remote Bermudas ride/In th’ Oceans bosome une-spy’d, /From a small Boat, that row’d along, /The listning Winds receiv’d this Song’.

17Thus begins Andrew Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’, a praise poem that he wrote in 1653 and which contains elements of promotional literature of the westward expansion:

He gave us this eternal Spring, /Which here enamells every thing, .../And does in the Pomgranates close/Jewels more rich than Ormus shows./He makes the Figs our mouths to meet/And throws the Melons at our Feet.... From Lebanon, he stores the Land./And makes the hollow Seas, that roar, /Proclaime the Ambergris on shoar.... Oh let our Voice his Praise exalt, /Till it arrive at Heavens Vault.... Thus sung they, in the English boat, /An holy and a cheerful note, /And all the way, to guide their Chime, /With falling Oars they kept the time.13

18The Lord receives praise for the safe journey to Edenic abundance encountered across the dangerous sea. Derek Walcott drew the title of his volume In a Green Night from this poem by Marvell.

19In Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, we have a rather rare document that testifies to the polymorphous character of travel literature. It is the diary of the English Governor’s wife that was not meant for publication and was printed, ‘for private circulation only, five years after the death of its author, in 1839’.14 It possesses an immediacy, an intimacy and a frankness that we hardly find in other texts that deal with a voyage to or a stay in Jamaica. Maria Nugent was par la force des choses on the one hand much concerned with a large, semi-private household, on the other with a demanding public role. Her views of the Africans in Jamaica, of slavery, are of interest in our context. The terms she uses for black Jamaicans change in the course of the diary. Having to leave Ireland that she disliked, she mentions that she would have preferred to stay there ‘instead of playing the Governor’s lady to the blackies’ (Nugent 1966: 2); in Barbados, after a strenuous trip, she mentions the ‘naked men and women’ without any racial qualifier (8). After a most opulent state dinner, she notes the ‘black servants’ and, the day after, on August 4th, 1801, when things seem quiet and pleasant:

... the house is put into as good order as we could prevail upon the poor blackies to do it. They are all so good-humored, and seem so merry, that it is quite comfortable to look at them. I wish, however, they would be a little more alert in clearing the filth of this otherwise nice and fine house. (Nugent 1966: 13)

20Blacks are a convenience, quaint at best, and never individualized. It is when she travels inland, to Hope Estate, where she meets the overseer that Lady Nugent moves more closely to New World plantation realities. The very English horror at miscenegation, along with class consciousness and a certain reticence to openly embrace bodily pleasures appears in her vivid description of the following scene, which reminds me of Theodor W. Adorno’s remark made in his Minima Moralia according to which prostitutes in the Anglo-Saxon countries invariably look as if ‘they furnish, along with sin, hell’s punishment’.15 Let me add that since the British colonies in the Caribbean were not settlement colonies like their Spanish counterparts, race mixing was much less common (be it by sheer numeric possibilities), and that English obsessions with purity, with cultural and racial definitions of Englishness, remained a touchy issue in Empire rhetoric way into the 19th century. I recommend a reading of John Ruskin’s ‘Inaugural Lecture’ of 1870 at Oxford, and Joseph Chamberlain’s famous speech ‘The True Conception of Empire’ given in 1897.16 Here is Lady Nugent:

The overseer, a civil, vulgar, Scotch officer, on half-pay, did the honours to us; but, when we got to the door of the distillery, the smell of the rum was so intolerable, that, after a little peep at the process, I left the gentlemen, and went to the overseer’s house, about a hundred yards off. I talked to the black women, who told me all their histories. The overseer’s chère amie, and no man here is without one, is a tall black woman, well made, with a very flat nose, thick lips, and a skin of ebony, highly polished and shining. (Nugent 1966: 29)

21In order to appreciate her remarks, we should recall that Lady Nugent was very small, and very slim, with a very small head (Nugent: 1966: XIV). To continue with Lady Nugent’s insights:

She showed me her three yellow children, and said, with some ostentation, she should soon have another. The marked attention of the other women, plainly proved her to be the favorite Sultana of this vulgar, ugly, Scotch Sultan, who is about fifty, clumsy, ill made and dirty. He had a dingy, sallow-brown complexion and only two yellow discoloured tusks, by way of teeth. (Nugent 1966: 29)

22What in the colonies appears to the visitor as ‘peripheral sexuality’,17 is by no means peripheral in situ and leads to a more or less admitted sexualized discourse in combination with the recognition of racialized difference. Her irrepressible racism comes to the fore when she states on December first, 1801: ‘One of the black women produced [sic] two boys this morning. Went to see them, and they were exactly like two little monkeys’ (Nugent 1966: 42). That Lady Nugent behaved to some extent naively in the Jamaican context becomes evident in her faux-pas, when she opened a dance at a dinner given for the house slaves by inviting ‘an old Negro’ to dance with her, as she would have done ‘at a servants’ hall birthday in England’. Her English colonial hosts were profoundly shocked: ‘They told me afterwards, that they were nearly fainting, and could hardly forbear shedding a flood of tears, at such an unusual and extraordinary sight.’ Nugent realizes, with some help, that hierarchies meant power structures that should not be disturbed:

... they seemed to think the example dangerous; as making the blacks of too much consequence, or putting them at all on a footing with the whites, they said, might make a serious change in their conduct, and even produce a rebellion in the island. (Nugent 1966: 136)

23This was written on May 26th, 1803. The taboo word—rebellion—was out. The shadow of the horrific events of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s St. Domingue was hovering over Jamaica, and even more so, when French refugees arrived in Kingston and Spanish Town (Nugent 1966: 40, 46, 180ff.). Here is an example, how immediately the Haitian revolution affected her and her class’s daily life under the Peculiar Institution. She voices her fears after dinner table conversation, with black servants standing by:

Go to bed with a thousand apprehensions, and in low spirits. People here are so very imprudent in their conversation. The splendour of the black chiefs of St. Domingo, their superior strength, their firmness of character, and their living so much longer in these climates, and enjoying so much better health, are the common topics at dinner; and the blackies in attendance seem so much interested, that they hardly change a plate, or do anything but listen. How very imprudent, and what must it all lead to! (Nugent 1966: 198)

24To conclude my remarks on this text, I would like, in all fairness, to quote Lady Nugent from an entry, in which she laments the utter disregard many whites have for the blacks (whom she increasingly now terms ‘negroes’) and says, not without a bit of mordant irony:

... I have found much difficulty to persuade those great people and superior beings, our white domestics, that the blacks are human beings or have souls. I allude more particularly to our German and our other upper-men-servants. (Nugent 1966: 98)

25Her Ladyship seems, after all, to have undergone a certain humanizing process.

26Of the twenty-odd travel accounts into the Caribbean space that I am familiar with, I have chosen another journal, Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, and this for several reasons. It was written also by an English subject, falls into the same sub-genre within the autobiographical, and deals with the island of Jamaica. It came into being, chronologically speaking, not too far from Lady Nugent, during two relatively short stays, 1815-16 and 1817. Neither Nugent nor Lewis were daring explorers nor had they been directly exposed to enslaved Africans before. Both journals got published after the respective authors’ death. Similarities, or what seem similarities, end here. In Lewis’s case, the appearance of his Journal in print in 1834 coincides with the first phase of the slaves’ emancipation in the English colonies, with the so-called ‘apprenticeship’. Lewis was not a governor’s spouse, he was a professional writer of considerable standing, best known today for his Gothic novel The Monk: A Romance (1796). But in his lifetime he was one of the most successful dramatists in England, and a member of Parliament. After the passing of his father, in 1812 (one year after slave-trading was made a felony in England), he inherited two large plantations in Jamaica. His Journal is thus an account of a ‘new’ absentee owner on visit. It is fraught with literary allusions, motti, quotes from literary works in various languages, interspersed with poems (mostly of questionable quality) from his own pen, and quips that we associate with 18th century wit. I would like to concentrate mainly on two facets of this complex text. First some remarks on the experience at sea, which is inescapably the first and last structural phase of all maritime exploration and travel.

27Just as Lady Nugent, Lewis writes of the hardships of maritime traveling, of storms, the sailors and other company, of death as a fellow traveler aboard. But in addition to complaints about personal comfort, he can joke about it, often enough taking refuge in quotes from classical literature. On a rather rocky November 21st, 1815, he records: ‘Everything is in a state of perpetual motion. “Nulla quies intus (nor outus indeed for the matter of that), nullaque silentia parte”’. The quote from Ovid reads: ‘No quiet within and nowhere silence’; the term outus is, of course, a macaronic antonym for the Latin intus). Or, to quote from the same entry: ‘... and nobody on board can doubt the truth of the proverb, “Many things fall out between the cup and the lip.”’18 As in the earliest accounts of seafaring, Lewis mentions the wonders of nature, the changing colors of the water, the birds, the fish, the much awaited landfall, the first tropical fruit—and he does it with considerable literary skill. On December 13th, he marvels at the beauty of the dolphin:

Imagination can picture nothing more beautiful than the colours of this fish: while covered by the waves he was entirely green; and as the water gave him a case of transparent crystal, he really looked like one solid piece of living emerald; when he sprang into the air, or swam fatigued upon the surface, his fins alone preserved their green, and the rest of his body appeared to be of the brightest yellow, his scales shining like gold wherever they caught the sun.... (Lewis 1999: 21)

28His aesthetic appreciation of this beautiful creature did not keep Lewis from having the dolphin for dinner that same day.

29Since the 18th century, probably with Linaeus, virtually all exploration vessels to the New World had a botanist on board to collect and systematize, a phenomenon which culminated in Alexander von Humboldt’s and his French lover Aimé Bon-pland’s phenomenal results. Lewis is not a systematic botanist, but he does notice the beauty of the Jamaican landscape and eagerly informs us about trees and shrubs he just discovered.

30Noteworthy in Matthew Lewis’s Journal are his reaction to and his participation in the institution of slavery, his remarks on the ‘negro character’. One can group Lewis’ interest, observations and obsessions with Afro-Jamaicans into three clusters that are closely interrelated. I should mention right away that Lewis seems to have been a relatively mild slave owner, so much so that he was taken by fellow planters to the Assize-court of Cornwall county, Jamaica, on March 15th, 1816, charged with ‘calling the peace on the island in question’ and using ‘insiduous practices’. The latter referred to an ‘over-indulgence to my negroes and my endeavoring to obtain either redress or pardon for those belonging to other estates’. The offense of spreading ‘dangerous doctrines’ pointed to ‘my being of opinion, that the evidence of Negroes ought at least be heard against white persons’ (Lewis 1999: 135). The use of the possessive indicates a fundamentally paternalistic owner’s attitude towards his chattel. He did build a hospital in each of his two plantations, and was amused, disappointed and furious when he found out that a substantial portion of his work force liked to congregate there under false pretenses. Because Lewis expects gratitude from persons living under a system that he does not doubt. He is content when during feasts where he seems to have dealt out pork and rum quite generously, the slaves dance and shout and sing and thank him. And he wonders ‘what Mister Wilberforce would say now! ’ (Lewis 1999: 40). No sign of gratitude from the slave population is omitted in his diary—it serves as a sort of moral palliative (Lewis 1999: 59, 207)—, and any lack of it is vehemently deplored (Lewis 1999: 69f., 125ff., 203). The asymmetrical power relations are, naturally, omnipresent and unrelieved. While Lady Nugent was unable or unwilling to mention one black person’s name and thus none of the black Jamaicans possesses a voice, Lewis does call every slave he mentions by his or her somewhat ludicrous New World name, and he does give individual traits to his slaves and tries to understand them. He furnishes (flawed) accounts of dances and songs, the figure of John-Canoe, Myalism, of Afro-Caribbean lore such as duppy (ghost) and Nancy (Anansi) stories (36, 156f., 184ff.). Lewis shows himself puzzled by examples of intra-racial racism and differentiation, which made it difficult to objectify the Other as a mass. The black Creoles apparently detested the newcomers which they call Ebos [sic] or Africans or Guinea men and women (Lewis 1999: 218), and he realizes early on the rigid caste structure existing between mulattos and blacks (Lewis 1999: 52f.). He had read one of the prominent planter historians, Edward Long and his History of Jamaica (1774), but disagrees with Long’s notion that mulattos don’t ‘breed together just as well as blacks and whites’ (Lewis 1999: 68). Our author is not totally immune to the charms of black women as we can gather from his entry of January 15th, 1815:

Beautiful as are their forms in general, and easy and graceful as are their movements..., still the women of colour are deficient in one of the most requisite points of female beauty.... Young or old, I have not yet seen such a thing as a bosom. (Lewis 1999: 69)

31The comment can be read as an example of the colonizer’s erotization with the underlying comparison with what he is familiar with (or assumes he is). And near the end of his stay, we are able to see an example for his use of ‘dehistoricizing allegory’,19 when he alludes to the impossibility of blacks to achieve civilization or inferring that a civilizing process will be endless— a view which was shared by eminent contemporaries such as the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel in Volume Three of his influential Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften of 1817.

32So while Matthew Lewis may be called a meliorist (and a timid, conservative one at that), who leaves a set of written rules behind for his administrators and overseers to follow in order to curtail abuses, he certainly does not qualify as an abolitionist. Blacks remain clearly outside the ‘imagined community’ of the British to use Benedict Anderson’s term. And his interest in the slave’s character recalls our prototype Columbus’s approach: getting to know enough in order to be able to subjugate. Lewis is obsessed by apparently frequent cases of Obeah, African witchcraft and knowledge to concoct medicines, which he quite lucidly connects with rebellion and attempts at poisoning the master. One of the longest and most coherent passages that Clifford Geertz would list under his category of a ‘thick description’, deals with Plato, the rebel and powerful Obeah man (Lewis 1999: 59-62, passim), whom he would have liked to see burned but who is, unfortunately, just ‘transported’ (Lewis 1999: 62), i.e. sold off to another island or to the United States. The rule of law and the status quo must be upheld for the commercial enterprise of the plantation to function.

33We do not know to which extent Lewis was a changed man after his stays in the ‘contact zone’.20 He died during his return trip to England on May 16th, 1818, and was buried at sea.

34Something distinctly obscene emanates from these autobiographical texts as revelatory as they are. Their offensiveness resides in the callous negation of full humanity to other human beings, in the facetious assumption of Anglo-Saxon or Spanish superiority, in the hegemonic intention of silencing the Other, in imperially grounded, abysmal greed. I do wish to uphold the idea that with all the wonderfully rich cultural, racial and political differences on our globe, it is an ethical imperative of the first order that there be ONE mankind and that Liberté, Fraternité, and Egalité are transnational and transcultural concepts that need to be respected. We have in the Anglophone Caribbean, for obvious reasons, until the ex-slave Mary Prince’s narrative,21 virtually nothing in writing, and until the 1920s very little, from behind the veil. To rise—despite V. S. Naipaul’s unfortunate ambiguous judgment in Middle Passage on ‘West Indian futility’ according to which ‘nothing was created’ in the Caribbean22—to rise from so many tainted fragments, to remember, to admit, to conjure, to creolize, to create, as Caribbean writers and intellectuals have been striving to do, is no easy task. Derek Walcott’s superb poem, ‘Ruins of a Great House’ and his seminal essay, ‘The Muse of History’, like many other works in the Caribbean counter-discourse, testify to that. We all have much reason to celebrate them.