Page 7 - Moravian Messenger August 2019

‘The West Indies’
Ice through his veins, and lightening through his heart? Ah! yes; beneath the beams of brighter skies,
His home amidst his father's country lies;
There with the partner of his soul he shares Love-mingled pleasures, love-divided cares:
There, as with nature's warmest filial fire,
He soothes his blind, and feeds his helpless sire; His children sporting round his hut behold
How they shall cherish him when he is old, Train'd by example from their tenderest youth To deeds of charity and words of truth.
From this idyllic scene the Christian trading ships come to transport the Negro away to face a perilous crossing of the Atlantic, a crossing in which many will die of illness or even murder (the poet refers to an event in 1783 when the captain of the Zong threw 132 sick slaves into the sea because the insurers would pay for the loss rather than the shipowners) and those that survive the journey suffer a life of cruelty and endless toil with death as their only hope, sometimes hastened by suicide. Incidentally Montgomery makes no mention of the transport of the African from his native village to the European's ship. Whether he was aware of the trading of slaves within Africa, often as prisoners of tribal conflicts, but felt it would detract from his thesis if he mentioned this is unclear. The poet's greatest wrath is saved for the 'Creole' planter. 'Creole' refers not to people of mixed race but to those of European descent born in the colonies, such people having more of a reputation for cruelty. Montgomery relies to some extent for his information on the treatment of slaves on Stedman's Account of Surinam published between 1773 and 1777. This book includes stomach- churning accounts of the cruelty meted out to slaves in Surinam and played an important part in the history of the abolitionist movement. His disgust of the slave owner is shown in the following excerpts:
- Greenland laid wrapt in nature's heaviest shade; Thither the ensign of the cross they bore;
The gaunt barbarians met them on the shore; With joy and wonder hailing from afar,
Through polar storms, the light of Jacob's star.
and North America:
Beneath the umbrage of eternal woods,
The Red Man roam'd, a hunter-warrior wild;
On him the everlasting Gospel smiled;
His heart was awed, confounded, pierced, subdued, Divinely melted, moulded, and renew'd;
[shade]
and, finally, to the African slaves of the West Indies. In the following lines he describes the first encounter between the slave and the Moravian missionaries:
- The captive raised his slow and sullen eye; [the slave] He knew no friend, nor deemed a friend was nigh,
Till the sweet tones of Pity touch'd his ears,
[given by the Moravian missionaries] And Mercy bathed his bosom with her tears:
Strange were those tones, to him those tears were strange; He wept and wonder'd at the mighty change,
Felt the quick pang of keen compunction dart,
And heard a still small whisper in his heart,
A voice from Heaven, that bad the outcast rise From shame on earth to glory in the skies!
He then turns to those Englishmen, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, William Pitt, George Fox and William Cowper who fought for the abolition of the slave trade. With the work of these men Pity, he tells us, overcame Mammon and Britannia. Britain was the last to be convinced of the case:
Her yielding heart confessed the righteous claim, [i.e. Britain] Sorrow had soften'd it, and love o'ercame;
Shame flushed her noble cheek, her bosom burn'd;
To helpless, hopeless Africa she turn'd; without hope
She saw her sister in the mourner's face,
And rushed with tears into her dark embrace: “All hail!” exclaim'd the empress of the sea, - “Thy chains are broken - Africa, be free!'
The poet finishes on two high notes: first that Africa will, with medicine and commerce, 'from Europe's yoke be freed' and secondly with a vision of the Second Coming when all humankind is one with God:
The reign of righteousness from heaven descends; Vengeance for ever sheathes the afflicting sword; Death is destroy'd, and Paradise restored;
Man, rising from the ruins of his fall,
Is one with GOD, and God is All in All.
Although the poet of The West Indies may have lacked the genius to survive his age, nonetheless, for those with an interest in Moravian history, the poem is a curiosity which I for one have found worthwhile reading. While the attitudes found within the poem are often, in the present age, the subject of criticism for their Eurocentric assumptions, white paternalism, moral righteousness, etc. The West Indies is, like most literature, a product of its time and is best approached in that light.
Adrian Wilsdon
Volunteer at the Moravian Church Archives, London
Loathsome as death, corrupted as the grave, See the dull Creole, at his pompous board, Attendant vassals cringing round their lord: Satiate with food, his heavy eyelids close, Voluptuous minions fan him to repose;
Prone on the noonday couch he lolls in vain, Delirious slumbers mock his maudlin brain;
He starts in horror from bewildering dreams;
His bloodshot eye with fire and frenzy gleams: He stalks abroad; through all his wonted rounds, The Negro trembles, and the lash resounds,
And cries of anguish, shrilling through the air, To distant fields his dread approach declare. ...
[table]
[self-pitying]
91
This is the veriest wretch on nature's face, [the Creole planter] Owned by no country, spurn'd by every race;
The tethere'd tyrant of one narrow span,
The bloated vampire of a living man;
His frame, - a fungous form, of dunghill birth, That taints the air, and rots above the earth; His soul; - has he a soul, whose sensual breast Of selfish passions is a serpent's nest;
Who follows, headlong, ignorant, and blind, The vague brute instinct of an idiot mind
In Part 4 we learn first of the Moravian brethren (many of his expected readers would not, of course, have known anything of Moravians) and their missions to the natives of Greenland: