Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Debbie Lee

      3

      Distant Diseases

       Yellow Fever in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

      I

      Yellow fever of the West Indies, a plague that attacked like an army during the height of British colonial slavery, swept through the body with shocking symptoms. The fever came on suddenly, with fits of hot and cold and violent pain in the head, neck, and back. Not only would the patient’s eyes turn watery and yellow, but the whole face would change, appearing “unnatural,” denoting “anxiety” and “dejection of mind.”¹ Finally, it produced delirium and sometimes madness. During its progress, doctors noted changes “in the great mass of blood itself,”² which became putrefied and then oozed from the gums, nose, ears, and anus. The skin turned from flush to yellow or light brown. But it was in the final stages that patients underwent the worst of all symptoms: the black vomit, described variously by medical experts as resembling coffee grounds, black sand, kennel water, soot, or the meconium of a newborn child.

      Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, medical workers and lay people alike considered yellow fever a disease to which Africans were miraculously immune. Dr. Thomas Trotter, a naval doctor famous for implementing mandatory smallpox vaccination in the British armed forces, claimed in 1797 that “African negroes” appeared immune to “contagious fever[s],” while the poet Robert Southey explicitly stated that “yellow fever will not take root in a negro.”³ If yellow fever graciously spared Africans and slaves, it just as ferociously attacked white Europeans who visited Africa and the Caribbean. Yet it was not merely the “new-comers from Europe, in high health” that were “singularly affected with the yellow fever.”⁴ Many medical experts emphasized British susceptibility. “Britons,” noted Dr. William Hillary as early as 1766, were “by the great increased Heat of the Climate, usually not long after their Arrival” in the Caribbean “seized with a Fever.”⁵ The great Dr. John Hume, a late eighteenth-century expert on tropical medicine, even went so far as to create a catalog of likely British yellow fever candidates: “Strong muscular men are most liable to it, and suffer most.”⁶

      Yellow fever’s insistence on attacking the British body wreaked havoc with the nation’s military plans. Since the fever was considered one of Britain’s biggest obstacles to successful commerce with Africa and the Caribbean, it often was discussed using terms from military rhetoric. In 1797, for example, Dr. Trotter issued a pamphlet called Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen, where he wrote concerning the yellow fever:

      The ravages which this fatal Disease have made … in our fleets and armies, are beyond all precedent: the insidious mode of attack, the rapid strides by which it advances to an incurable stage, point it out as one of the most formidable opponents of medical skill. It has offered the severest obstacle to military operations, which the history of modern warfare can produce.⁷

      This fever turned the British body against itself by turning it into its own foreign enemy. And it did so on an epic scale. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, aggressive fever pathogens accounted for 71 percent of all European deaths in the Caribbean, and most of these by far were from yellow fever.⁸

      More than yellow fever’s military power, it was the geographical movement of this disease that determined its interpretive implications. Because these early medical studies nearly always referred to yellow fever as a Caribbean disease, and since the Caribbean was synonymous with the slave trade and colonial slavery, yellow fever itself became intimately tied to the physical and philosophical effects of slavery. Together, the medical study of yellow fever and the debate on the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery kindled a series of specific concerns—especially among British writers—about what happened when foreign matter, or foreigners, became part of the physical or political body.

      No one work from this period is more important for defining these concerns than Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”⁹ “The Ancient Mariner” opened the 1798 Lyrical Ballads and so established itself as a first in a new poetics. But when he composed the poem Coleridge himself was thoroughly engaged in the social and political issues of the day, from the latest theories of epidemic disease to the debates on abolition and slavery. Coleridge, along with Robert Southey, was an active abolitionist in Bristol from 1795 to at least 1797–98, the period when he wrote “The Ancient Mariner.” The poem, in fact, has frequently been interpreted in light of the slave trade by writers who, in the tradition of John Livingston Lowes, contextualize its major tropes using Coleridge’s material concerns with travel literature, colonialism, and the slave trade. J. R. Ebbatson is just one of a number of readers to view the poem as an indictment of British maritime expansion, where “the central act of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ the shooting of the albatross, may be a symbolic rehearsal of the crux of colonial expansion, the enslavement of native peoples.”¹⁰ Patrick J. Keane has traced many images in “The Ancient Mariner” to their sources in debates on abolition and emancipation.¹¹

      What has not been exposed in these studies is the extent to which “The Ancient Mariner” takes up issues of slavery and race along with the material conditions of fever, particularly the yellow fever.¹² For example, in the initial stages of the ballad—after the mariner’s albatross murder dislodges the ship from the icy fields of the South Pole—fever sets the poem afire. Coleridge takes the reader from climatic realities (the “broad bright Sun,” the standing water, and the western wave “all a-flame” [174, 171]) to bodily symptoms (“parched” throats and “cold sweat[s]” [144, 253]) to symbolic fever: the “charmed water” that “burnt always / A still and awful red” (270–71). But even more dramatic than this is the fever of the British imagination, the “uncertain hour” when “agony returns: / And till my ghastly tale is told, / This heart within me burns” (582–85).

      Coleridge was certainly not alone in setting fever to poetry. In 1797, William Roscoe, a Liverpool poet, described the effects of contagion during the slave voyage and in the “polluted islands” of the voyage’s destination. But this is nothing compared to Roscoe’s final warning. He insists that British consumption will result in both national stagnation and universal pain. Though the “copious stream / Of universal bliss” might seem to flow to every nation, it will “stagnate in its course” and spread “foul and putrid … corruption round.” British avarice—witnessed so clearly in the case of slavery—was, according to Roscoe, “in nature’s breast a dagger” that debilitated all of nature.¹³ In Bristol, Hannah More’s “Slavery” (1788) portrayed the voice of British liberty in a similar way: “Convulsed … and pestilent her breath, / She raves for mercy, while she deals out death.”¹⁴ Such writing emphasized how the consciousness of slavery as pestilence partly defined British identity during this time.

      But how was it that disease, slavery, and the consciousness of slavery as disease operated in early nineteenth-century British culture, only to be taken up by Coleridge in an extraordinary tale of guilt and redemption?