ELH 65.3 (1998) 675-700 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/v065/65.3lee.html

Debbie Lee 

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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 attacked 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," which became putrefied and then oozed from the gums, nose, ears, and anus. 2 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 newborn children.

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 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. Hillary, 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. Hume, 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 was often 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:
 

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 seventy-one percent of all European deaths in the Caribbean, and most of these 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 is more important for defining the poetic as well as the political concerns for British writers during this period than Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Ancient Mariner opened the 1798 Lyrical Ballads and so established itself as a first among 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 until at least the year he wrote The Ancient Mariner. The poem, in fact, has frequently and convincingly been interpreted as a poem about the slave trade by writers who, in the tradition of John Livingstone Lowes, contextualize the poem's major tropes using Coleridge's material concerns with travel literature, colonialism, and the slave trade. J. R. Ebbotson 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." 9 Patrick Keane, in a recent book on Coleridge, has traced most of The Ancient Mariner's images to their sources in debates on abolition and emancipation. 10

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. 11 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. 12 Coleridge takes the reader from climatic realities (the "broad bright sun," the standing water, and the Western wave "all aflame") to bodily symptoms ("parched throats and "cold sweat[s]") to symbolic fever: the "charmed water" that "burnt always / A still and awful red" (3.174, 3.171, 3.144). 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" (7.582-85).

Coleridge was certainly not alone in setting fever to poetry. William Roscoe's "The Wrongs of Africa" (1797) 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." 13 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. 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? The Ancient Mariner, like abolitionist and emancipation literature of the period, draws on early nineteenth-century medical and ecological models used to analyze yellow fever--the most deadly and widespread disease for British seamen on slave voyages. But discussion of fever within the discourse of slavery, and discussion of slavery within the discourse of yellow fever, really addresses a wider question: could Britain establish a social system free from the diseases of tyranny and subjection?

I. Fever and the Proximity of Cultures

When reading Coleridge's various writings, one has the sense that he could actually imagine a process where British "self" and foreign "other" could unite in harmony. He certainly contemplated the philosophic working out of such a process. In his Marginalia, for instance, he wrote that "the copula" of "identity" and "alterity" meant "losing self in another form by loving the self of another as another." 15 It was in the context of British masters and African slaves, however, where the concepts of "identity" and "alterity" took on a blatant, material reality, and where "losing self in another" by taking on the alterity of that other had complex consequences for both British and African subjectivity. If The Ancient Mariner is read through the lens of this potent topic, it must be read as a process where the mariner tries to reconcile identity and alterity in a political, as well as a philosophical, way. 16

In both medical literature and abolitionist poetry, the intersection of slavery and disease nearly always ended in a rethinking of philosophical definitions of identity and alterity. The work of Julia Kristeva provides some help in understanding this rather complex phenomenon. 17 Taken together, Kristeva's work on the abject in Powers of Horror and on foreigners in Strangers to Ourselves and Nations Without Nationalism offer a compelling theory linking bodily disease and foreign travel through the category of alterity.

Kristeva's writings revolve around a fundamental distinction between "self" and "not-self." Everything that is horrifying, everything that signals our possible inhumanity, everything that reminds us of our mortality, is not-self. As Kristeva has it, the diseased, decaying body (the yellow fever victim's black vomit and bleeding orifices, for example) is the most potent form of the not-self, or what she calls "the abject." And the abject itself, because it is the ultimate expression of the flesh, is an explicit manifestation of sin (at least from the perspective of dominant culture). Blood, urine, excrement, and the human corpse, these are the raw materials of the abject:
 

We constitute ourselves, according to Kristeva, through abjection by excluding what is not-self. Yet the abject is always part of us, even though it must constantly be ignored, buried, or thrown over the edge of consciousness. The abject is, in this way, the cornerstone of personal subjectivity.

The process by which an individual constitutes personal subjectivity is, for Kristeva, also worked out on a national level. Just as the individual tries to evade death as symbolized in the corpse, so national character shies away from that which is foreign to it:
 

Foreigners, like Coleridge's mariner, who transgress borders and break taboos, who identify with and touch otherness, are culturally abject. Kristeva maintains a distinctly Coleridgean position by arguing that the unity of the self, though impossible, may be glimpsed by realizing we are all, in some sense, "strangers to ourselves." She sees the encounter with foreigners very like Coleridge's notion of "losing self in another," a process that involves self-alteration and loss of direction:
 

Throughout her writings, Kristeva describes the marriage of identity and alterity as a boundary-dissolving process, whether those boundaries are individual or national, material or metaphysical.

If nineteenth-century systems of medicine and slavery were about anything, they were about boundaries, or boundary-dissolving processes. In fact, it might be said that these systems of medicine and slavery were designed to reestablish borders that were in the process of dissolving with the increased foreign travel that the slave trade instigated. Dissolving both personal and national borders, after all, is how yellow fever first gained attention. Medical writers warned that epidemics in the Caribbean could spread throughout Europe, conjuring up images of the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, which wiped out one third of the European population. 21 In the meantime, European heads of state put doctors in the service of deflecting national panic. Dr. Blane reported that Britain, Russia and Prussia, had held conferences to dispel the public and medical fear of "importation of this pestilential epidemic [yellow fever], which in the end of last century, and beginning of this, had so afflicted the West Indies, North America, and Spain." 22 In 1797, Dr. Trotter likewise assured a potentially panicky British audience that there was no danger whatsoever of yellow fever "becoming active on this side of the Atlantic." 23

The presence of yellow fever could not only disintegrate national borders, it could also redefine political alliances. Dr. Blane recounted an example of French war ships that had captured British frigates carrying crews seized with yellow fever. The epidemic spread quickly among the French crews who were then quarantined with British prisoners, despite their status as French enemies. 24  In times of epidemic, it seemed, national identity was as unreliable as the body itself. Unlucky victims were the embodiment of alterity, no matter what their skin color or national status. Not surprisingly, slaves in the Caribbean were even more aware of fever's ability to cross boundaries and render Europeans powerless. In 1799, Robert Renny recalled being greeted on the shore of Jamaica by a canoe full of slave women sarcastically chanting:
 

Yellow fever often killed European individuals who were involved in the slave trade, but what seemed worse to legislators and plantation owners was the imminent death of the slave system itself. With increased pressure from abolitionists like Southey and Coleridge, British culture faced the possibility of a social system that no longer divided itself neatly into masters and slaves. This heightened national anxiety about economic consequences existed most vocally among Caribbean proprietors, many of whom owned failing plantations as it was. But underneath this fiscal fear lay a deeper worry over how the change in  the status of African slaves--from foreigners to citizens--would not only infect Europeans, but deplete any differences between the races. Coleridge would later confront this fear in his planned lecture on the "Origins of the Human Race." In this lecture, he opposed Blumenbach's implication that Africans resembled orangutans. 26 But this changing view of the slave from inferior to moral equal threatened to dissolve the fragile border of the British self. For there was nothing quite like the abjection of the African slave against which British national character defined itself in the early part of the nineteenth century.

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Coleridge merges this fear of miscegenation with the fear of fever. The poem, which would have been more widely read than either the discourse of medicine or the debate on slavery, expresses anxieties about dissolving borders. For example, at the very beginning of the poem, the mariner relates in his story to the unhappy wedding guest how the ship set sail from a British port. But as soon as it moved "below the kirk, below the hill, / Below the lighthouse top" (1.23-24) and thus beyond Britain's geographical borders, other borders turned suddenly fragile. The result of this movement into the waters of foreignness and abjection is a narrative standstill when mariner and crew encounter "Nightmare Life-in-Death" upon her "spectre bark" (3.193, 202), a vessel William Empson (among others) calls "the premonition of a slaver." 27 This encounter turns the crew into a feverish image of the living dead, "for a charnel dungeon fitter" (6.435), and so has them dancing on the most unbreakable and abject boundary in human experience, that between life and death.

By marrying the tropes of fever and slavery, The Ancient Mariner also explores slippages between the walled-off categories of self and otherness. In the heat of the poem's fever, the mariner is identified with Englishmen and slaves, even though yellow fever underscored what were perceived as natural differences between Britons and Africans in how their bodies weathered forces of nature. 28 The mariner's implied nationality and the wedding guest's response to his "long, and lank, and brown" body (4.226) links him to British sailors who had been yellow fever victims. Because these victims were (according to the Caribbean traveler Robert Renny) "exposed to the burning sun, and a sultry atmosphere by day; chilling dews, and unhealthful employments, new food, and new clothing," their bodies took on a ghostly, unnatural appearance. They became "irritable and weak" and were thus "readily affected" with the fever. 29 During this time, there was also an acute awareness that yellow fever (or "imported contagion") traveled by way of sun-scorched mariners and soldiers from one tropical shore to another. 30 When mariners arrived home, people seemed naturally afraid of touching these potentially unclean victims of seafaring diseases. It is thus not surprising to find this fear openly erupting in the beginning lines of The Ancient Mariner. Who can blame the wedding-guest for voicing an immediate prohibition against bodily contact, ordering the mariner to "Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!" (1.11) Like the British seaman whose body changed color in the heat of a yellow fever outbreak, the ancient mariner's shadowy weakness and brown "skinny hand" emerge repeatedly throughout the poem, as if to remind readers that yellow fever took its name from its ability to change the skin color of European victims.

But in the poem's infected environment, the very markers that identify the mariner as a British sailor (the "brown hand"), also designate him a slave. He is linked to the bodies of Africans not only through his color, but also through his health. When the mariner assures his listener, "Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding Guest! / This body dropt not down" (3.230-31), he acknowledges his own immunity to the fever that struck down all two hundred shipmates, an immunity that implicitly aligns him with the alterity of the slave. For when medical writers, such as Henry Clutterbuck M.D., observed that infectious fevers were "communicable from one individual to another, either by actual contact, or by the effluvia escaping from the bodies of the sick," they were referring to communication between European and European, not European and African. 31 The wedding guest's fear of touching the Mariner's "skinny hand, so brown" (3.229), then, also demonstrates a fear of "losing self in another," of being infected and thus profoundly changed by the alterity carried in the blood under dark skin.

This boundary-dissolving process that The Ancient Mariner articulates so powerfully was also a central issue in the early nineteenth-century medical search for the origin of yellow fever. Medical experts agreed that every disease had its own geographical habitat. For example, Dr. Thomas Beddoes--Coleridge's friend and correspondent--represented a common opinion when he said "small-pox, yellow fever, and the plague" came from a certain "effluvia" produced in the air of hot regions. 32 Tropical climates--Africa and the Caribbean particularly--were thus carriers of disease, and natives of Britain and America who came in contact with these climates could carry the disease back with them and so become foreigners in their homeland. The search for yellow fever's origin could help reestablish borders between "self" and "other," between "us" and "them," between British and African, which yellow fever itself obliterated. 33

The search for origins, it seems, was everybody's business. In 1802, a writer named William Deverell published a book proposing to locate yellow fever's origin through a study of Milton, Virgil, and "thence to [the poetry] of Homer, and to the times when the temples of Egypt were founded; and I think it will be seen that the same or a similar disease, arising from the same causes and in the same places, prevailed in each of those ages." 34 Using the Aenied, Deverell established a one-to-one correspondence between Ortygia and Britain, Cycladas and the Caribbean, and "the tabida lues, affecting both animate and inanimate nature" was "most clearly a West Indian or American fever." 35 Coleridge also had an interest in the origin of epidemic disease. He located the origin of smallpox--the seafaring disease most closely associated with yellow fever--and demonstrated its coincidence with commerce, war, and the movement of Africans:
 

Coleridge's theory supports the period's belief that, though the instigators of most diseases came from nature, from heaps of putrefying Locusts, from "effluvia" of hot climates, or from "decomposing vegetable matter," the growth of disease turned truly epidemic only through cross-cultural interaction. 37

II. The Contagion of Consumption and Guilt

During the early part of the century, a radical change took place in the interaction between Britons and Africans. Up until the late eighteenth century, most segments of society accepted, without too many questions, racial hierarchies that placed white Europeans in a superior position to people of color. These hierarchies naturalized the slave system. Africans were considered inferior, and so slavery was justified. But things changed in the 1780s and 90s. Largely because of the abolitionist movement, but also because of increased slave uprisings, the majority of British people, for the first time in centuries, began to consider Africans as moral others instead of "things." Coleridge articulated a fairly common opinion in an article intended for the Courier where he wrote, "A slave is a Person perverted into a Thing; Slavery therefore is not so properly a deviation from Justice as an absolute subversion of all morality." 38 As one can imagine, this "subversion of all morality" by the British brought with it an overwhelming sense of guilt. Coleridge and other writers began to see European guilt in the same way doctors saw yellow fever's black vomit: as a primary symptom.

Guilt defined Britain as a sick society. And nowhere is the guilt of slavery and the punishment of disease more apparent than in abolitionist literature. Helen Maria Williams's 1788 "Poem on the bill lately passed" presents a vision of slavery where the "beams direct, that on each head / The fury of contagion shed." 39 The "beams" in this case radiate from the "guilty man" in charge of a slave vessel. While Williams located the origin of contagion in the guilt of British slave traders, Coleridge located the origin of slavery in the guilt of the British consumer. Slavery, he contended, was "evil in the form of guilt." 40 Those who consumed the products of the trade were just as guilty as slave traders and plantation owners themselves. After all, Coleridge argued, the trade's "final effect" and "first Cause" was "self-evidently the consumption of its Products! and does not the Guilt rest on the Consumers? and is it not an allowed axiom in Morality that Wickedness may be multiplied but cannot be divided and that the Guilt of all attaches to each one who is knowingly an accomplice?" 41 Wickedness multiplied and spread through the social body, like so many germs, leaving the collective British consumer with an all-consuming guilt.

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. 42 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 more to the deathly-ill state of the crew than it does to the killing of the bird. Similarly, what arrests the ship "day after day, day after day" (2.115) 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's sons" who invaded the coasts of Africa "with murder, rapine, theft,--and call it Trade!" 43 The poem builds towards a genuine Old Testament plague, put into the modern context of contagion emanating from stagnant waters:
 

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" (2.123-26). A slave vessel stuck without "breath" or "motion" beneath a "hot and copper sky" (2.116; 2.111) was especially vulnerable from a medical as well as a moral point of view. Yellow fever was God's just punishment for the atrocities of the slave trade in James Montgomery's 1807 poem The West Indies:

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." 46

In The Ancient Mariner's diseased climate, 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 and death. 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 (2.132; 2.136; 3.157; 3:146; 2.112; 2.128). 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 infeasible 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 average almost a fourth of the whole crew" (W, 238). The slave trade, he said, turned British mariners into "rather shadows in their appearance than men" (W, 238), just as in The Ancient Mariner disease changes the mariners into a shadowy, "ghastly crew."

But Coleridge emphasizes this point 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" (3.192; 3.171), and the sailors drop dead:

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 and down by a frightful pale woman who, I thought, wanted to kiss me, and had the property of giving a shameful Disease by breathing on the face" (CNB, 1:1250). 47 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 anti-slavery literature. When Coleridge called the slave trade "a commerce which is blotched all over with one leprosy of evil" (W, 236), he drew on the same theme as Thomas Pringle did in an anti-slavery sonnet, which suggested that sugar "taints with leprosy the white man's soul." 48 Sugar sifted down English channels and dissolved in their tea-cups, but it remained symbolically as a disease of white culture. 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 whiteness and its 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 been in no instance so dreadfully exemplified as in the Slave Trade and West India Commerce! We receive from the West Indias Sugars, Rum, Cotton, log-wood, cocoa, coffee, pimento, ginger, mahogany, and conserves--not one of these are necessary--" (W, 236) 49

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:
 

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 militaristic fashion, the "troops of wan disease begin their march":
 

The guilt that bleeds through the lines of poems like Stanfield's, Southey's, and Coleridge's is in some sense a logical response to the horrors of slavery. 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. Though it would still be hundreds of years until the British and Americans truly changed their behavior towards others, guilt reflected a new social ethos that eventually altered Britain's relations with peoples from other parts of the world.

III. Disease and the Ecology of Slavery

Interestingly enough, recognition of slaves as more than "things" coincided with recognition that slavery created a biological and 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 migration of people in human history. It was clear to medical writers of the period that the movement of millions of people from native to foreign shores disturbed the atmosphere. When Dr. 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," he was saying that the slave trade disturbed environmental balances, which in turn produced yellow fever. 52

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 the yellow fever pathogen A. aegypti needed groups of non-immune subjects "concentrated within the flight range" of the virus in order to survive. 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. 53 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 at some level yellow fever's mode of existence. They knew that the disease stemmed from the European encounter with the tropics. Dr. Thomas Dancer, for one, observed 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." 54 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." 55 The "great number of strangers" referred to the interaction of different nationalities--French, Spanish, British, African, and every miscegenized variation in between.

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 towards the cultural suspicion that yellow fever was the result of environmental trauma. 56 Although Britain had its own socio-environmental 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 Quantock Mountains, where Coleridge and Wordsworth first conceived of The Ancient Mariner, the abolitionist poet William Hutchenson wrote of the Caribbean in 1792:
 

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 widely discussed and terrifying nineteenth-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." 58 The Americans insisted that this "imported" fever had transgressed the national boundary and thus altered the American environment. Jackson and 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." 59 Redman traced the infection to "imported clothing of persons who died in the West Indies"; at the very least, the disease stemmed directly form "the neighbourhood of shipping or among persons connected with vessels." 60 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 seen as 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. The unnatural system of slavery, according to Helen Maria Williams:

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:
 

Wordsworth also spoke of slavery in ecological terms. It was, he said, the "most rotten branch of human shame" that ought to "fall together with its parent tree." 63 From what came to be seen as the center of the Romantic poetic tradition, Wordsworth called the structures of slavery a disease that could out-rot the worst atrocities of the French Revolution. Medical experts reinforced this view. "Since the abolition of the slave-trade," wrote Dr. Henderson, "some disorders of African origin, and highly contagious, have almost disappeared." 64

In The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge captures sharply the ruination of the universe that the slave trade instigated. His mariner finds disease and thus nightmarish deformation everywhere: it appears not just in the rotting bodies of birds, men, and a white woman, but in heavenly bodies as well, such as the "bloody Sun . . . with broad and burning face (2.111). Even the body of the ship is diseased: "The planks look warped and see those sails, / How thin they are and sere!" (7.529-30). The Hermit--who is also a figure for decay as he prays at a "rotted old oak stump" (7.522)--likens the ship to the rotting skeletal leaves of the forest, decaying like the planks of the vessel, which Coleridge had already designated as a feature of a slave ship. In his "[Lecture] on the Slave Trade," he noted that slaves were "crammed into the hold of a ship with so many fellow-victims, that the heat and stench arising from [their] diseased bodies [would] rot the very planks" (W, 248-49).

Surrounded as he is by disease and deformation, it is no wonder that when the mariner and his ship pull up to the British bay, only the mariner is alive. By this time, the bay does not seem as pure as it did at the voyage's beginning. Described as "white with silent light," the bay swallows up the mass of contagion that is now practically synonymous with the doubly-identified mariner. Yet the ship settles in an ambiguous space, neither this side or nor that side of Britain's national boundary. It sinks just below the surface of the water. But, like the mariner's tale of guilt, or like the slave population itself, it could emerge at anytime.

Just as the outbreak on the ship coincides with a catastrophic deformation of nature, the rift between the mariner and his environment increases during the journey itself. Coleridge's gloss to the poem indicates how "horror follows" the mariner's meeting of the spectre-bark. And indeed, the mariner is horrified most of all by the living-death of the crew and the quarantined solitude the mariner himself experiences after the crew dies. His hollow repetition, "Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!" (4.232-33) echoes back through the poem as through a chasm. He is both nowhere and nothing--neither self nor other. He is disconnected from his environment, from himself, and from other people.

This kind of disconnection is truly a nightmare, and Coleridge uses a fairly standard catalog of Gothic images to reinforce slavery's horror. J. R. Ebbotson traces The Ancient Mariner's use of Gothic imagery--the spectre-bark, the living-dead crew--to Coleridge's reading of M.G. Lewis's play The Castle Spectre. For Lewis, the Gothic symbolized various forms of subjection: Each and every character in the play endures the "shame of servitude." 65 The enslaved include the noble Percy, who is imprisoned in a guarded room for just a few hours, and the poor Reginald, who is secretly chained in the castle's subterraneous dungeon for years. Even the evil Osmond, who sets himself up as the master, refers to himself as the "slave of wild desires." 66 Lewis's play was so popular not least because it appealed to the early nineteenth-century British audience's own feelings of subjection.

But if British audiences saw in The Castle Spectre's Gothic atmosphere the buried truth of their own slavish condition, Lewis makes it clear that the enslavement of Africans is the real buried secret facing the nation. He does this through two principle characters: a white person and a black one. In contrast to the castle spectre, who appears as a "figure" in "white and flowing garments spotted with blood" stands Hassan, an African slave. 67 Hassan implies that the castle's inhabitants unwittingly find themselves in subjection because of the subjection they impose on Africans: "Vengeance!" he cries, "Oh! How it joys me when the white man suffers!--Yet weak are his pangs, compared to those I felt when torn from thy shores, O native Africa!" 68 Slavery is experienced as both a painful reality and a metaphysical condition. "Oh! When I forget my wrongs, my I forget myself!" wails Hassan. The mammoth irony of all this is, of course, that Lewis later wrote the Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, an account of his own slave-labor plantation in Jamaica.

Though Colerdige was influenced by Lewis's long-running play, the aspect of "losing self in another" within a Gothic slave story was solely Coleridge's idea. As "Life-in-Death" begins her work on the ancient Mariner, he tries to reconcile his split identity. His experiences with emblems of the slave trade--the spectre-bark, Life-in-Death, fever victims, diseased ships--results in a psychological disease that takes him to several levels of self-confrontation. His blessing of the slimy water snakes, linked by their "flash of golden fire" to the epidemic waters, is a move to acknowledge what is radically "alter." It is a move to attempt on a material level Coleridge's idea of "losing self in another form by loving the self of another as another." It is also a move to release himself from what the wedding guest comes to recognize as the "plague" of Western seafaring missions (1.80). Who can forget this truly strange moment in the poem when the albatross falls from the mariner's neck:
 

 James McKusick has recently suggested that the mariner's ecological enlightenment involves learning to "cross the boundaries that divide him from the natural world, through unmotivated acts of compassion between 'man and bird and beast.'" 69 But it is more than that. This sudden, uncanny recognition of the water snakes as "self-same" initiates him in a process of ever-deeper questioning of himself and of the assumption underlying his culture.

Coleridge's doubly-identified mariner tells his listener early on about his feverish mission. Through the simple telling of a tale, he feels he must introduce this two-sided sense of individual self into the British national body. The tale that "burns" within him aligns him with the "storyteller" who, as Michael Taussig explains, has the crucial cultural job of bringing alterity home. In his book Mimesis and Alterity, Taussig suggests that Coleridge's ancient mariner is the quintessential storyteller. He brings
 

Readers find the mariner again and again trying to convince the wedding guest of his own need to recognize the "other" as a moral being, trying to plunge the listening self "forward into and beyond itself." The mariner's dramatic and final claim that "He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small" is more than a simple moral to a seafaring tale (7.614). It is a statement about how to relate to what is outside or other than self.

Yellow fever putrefied or dissolved the body's vital organs and thus confounded definitions of the self and its alterity (or abjection) in a biological and completely empirical sense. The abolition of the slave trade, on a much more complex level, demanded that the British face questions about their national identity with the changing status of slaves to citizens. Like yellow fever, which wiped out fleets and armies by dissolving individual bodies, a realignment of Africans would redefine British identity and thus individual selfhood by dissolving a certain self-construction. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner appeared in the midst of these changes. Although Coleridge referred to the poem as a work of "pure imagination," its diseased climate points out just how obsessed he was with questions of contamination and purity. 71 His dream of a Pantisocrasy--a government of self-rule that emphasized the equality of all its members--was the dream of a society based on moral, political, and social purity. Most of all, it was the dream of a society free from "the contagion of European vice," as he called slavery and the political structure that supported it (W, 240).

Given Coleridge's interest in the nature of disease and the debate on slavery at the time he wrote The Ancient Mariner, it is not at all surprising that the poem is heavy with images of disease and nuances of slavery. For both disease and slavery concerned, at a fundamental level, questions of how foreign matter and foreigners became part of the physical or political body. Coleridge would use these materials to contemplate ways in which the British could dissolve their personal and national borders, yet still maintain their identity. What we do not know is if this double identity, this "loving the self of another as another" really worked for the ancient mariner, since he never finishes telling his story. But we do know that it would be a long time before the rest of the culture would even come close.

Washington State University

Notes
 

* I would like to thank Tim Fulford, Jerry Hogle, Jim McKusick and Raimonda Modiano for the various contributions they made to this article.

1. Charles Powell, A Treatise on the Nature, Causes, & Cure, of the Endemic, or Yellow Fever of Tropical Climates, as it occurs in the West Indies (London: John Callow, 1814), 24; James Clark, A Treatise on the Yellow Fever as it Appeared in the Island of Dominica, in the years 1793-4-5-6 (London: J. Murray and S. Highley, 1797), 8.

2. Powell, 23.

3. Thomas Trotter, Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen (London: T. Cadell, 1797), 184; Robert Southey, Selections from the letters of Robert Southey, ed. J. W. Warter, 4 vols. (London, 1856), 1:317. The full quotation from Southey is as follows: "I have a sort of theory about such diseases [smallpox], which I do not understand myself,--but somebody or other will one of these days. They are so far analogous to vegetables, as that they take root, grow, ripen, and decay. Those which are eruptive blossom and seed; for the pustules of the smallpox is, to all intents and purposes, the flower of the disease, or the fructification by which it is perpetuated. Now these diseases, like vegetables, choose their own soil; as some plants like clay, others sand, other chalk, so the yellow fever will not take root in a negro, nor the yaws in a white man."

4. Clark, 63.

5. William Hillary, Observations on the Changes of the Air and the Concomitant Epidemical Disease, in the Island of Barbadoes, 2nd. ed., (London: Hawes, W. Clarke and R. Collins, 1766), iii.

6. John Hume, "Letter VII, An Account of the True Bilious, or Yellow Fever; and of the Remitting and Intermitting Fevers of the West Indies," Letters and Essays on The Small Pox and Inoculation, The Measles, The Dry Belly-Ache, and Yellow, and Remitting and Intermitting Fevers of the West Indies (London: J. Murray, 1788), 237.

7. Trotter, 322.

8. Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 18. For other contemporary books on the subject, see Francois Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris (1832), tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), and Francois Delaporte, The History of Yellow Fever: An Essay on the Birth of Tropical Medicine, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

9. J. R. Ebbotson, "Coleridge's Mariner and the Rights of Man," Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972): 198. A number of writers have interpreted the poem by looking at it alongside Coleridge's writings on the slave trade and slavery. Jonathan Livingstone Lowes (The Road to Xanadu, [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964]) established Coleridge's use of travel reports and ship logs in many of the tropes and descriptions used in The Ancient Mariner. Ebbotson's classic article establishes a logical link between the poem, voyages of discovery, colonialism, slavery, and abolitionist poetry, the most important of which is Robert Southey's 1799 "From a Sailor Who had Served in the Slave Trade."

10. See Patrick Keane, Coleridge's Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1994). Keane uses an approach similar to Ebbotson, arguing that slavery is the hidden politics under The Ancient Mariner's surface. Keane's study is especially useful in his rigorous bibliographic unearthing of Coleridge's references to the slave trade and related topics. Coleridge's involvement in the slave trade and its application to The Ancient Mariner is also discussed by Joan Baum, Mind Forg'd Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets (New Haven: Archon Books, 1994); Eva Beatrice Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought (Washington: Associated Publishers Inc., 1942); James McKusick, "'That Silent Sea': Lee Boo, and the Exploration of the South Pacific," The Wordsworth Circle 24 (1993): 102-6; William Empson, "The Ancient Mariner: An Answer to Warren," The Kenyon Review 15 (1993): 155-77. See also Anthea Morrison, "Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Greek Pride Ode on the Slave Trade," An Infinite Complexity: Essays in Romanticism, ed. J. R. Watson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1993).

11. For critics who see the mariner's experience shaped by Coleridge's concerns with political and historical issues, see Jerome G. McGann, "The Meaning of The Ancient Mariner," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 63-86; Daniel P. Watkins, "History as Demon in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Papers in Language and Literature 24 (1988): 23-33; and Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr., "'Unmeaning Miracles' in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,'" South Atlantic Review 46 (1981): 16-26. Among critics who also offer psychological explanations for the poem's mysteries are Raimonda Modiano, "Words and 'Languageless' Meanings: Limits of Expression in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977): 40-61; Paul Magnuson, Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974); and Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr., "'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and Freudian Dream Theory," PLL 18 (1982). Readers who, like Lowes find contextual sources for the poem include Martin Bidney, "Beneficent Birds and Crossbow Crimes: The Nightmare-Confessions of Coleridge and Ludwig Tieck," PLL 25 (1989): 44-58; James B. Twitchell, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as Vampire Poem," College Literature 4.2 (1977): 21-39; Bernard Smith, "Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Cook's Second Voyage," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1956): 117-54; Donald P. Kaczvinsky, "Coleridge's Polar Spirit: A Source," English Language Notes 24.3 (1987): 25-28; Arnd Bohm, "Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World as a Source for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: A Reconsideration," ELH 50 (1983): 363-77. Alan Bewell delivered an unpublished paper on yellow fever called "'Voices of Dead Complaint': Colonial Military Disease Narratives." His paper is part of an unpublished chapter of the same title, which will appear in his forthcoming book Romanticism, Geography, and Colonial Disease Environments.

12. For the text of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I use Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson, (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by stanza and line number.

13. William Roscoe, The Wrongs of Africa (London: R. Faulder, Part 1, 1787; Part 2, 1788). Reprinted in William Roscoe of Liverpool, ed. George Chandler, introduction by Sir Alfred Shennan, preface by Vere E. Cotton, (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1953), 378.

14. Hannah More, "Slavery" (1788), Women Romantic Poets, ed. Jennifer Breen (London: Everyman, 1992), 11, ll. 37-38.

15. Marginalia in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 12, ed. George Whalley, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1980), 1:680. Marginalia is hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated M.

16. Although it is difficult to tell exactly what Coleridge means by "alterity," in one place at least, he defines it as "the healthful positiveness of compleat polarity, instanced in that chasm between the Subjective and the Objective" (The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 4 vols. [New York: Pantheon, 1957], 4:5281 f.33; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated CNB). Tim Fulford has pointed out to me that The Ancient Mariner often portrays the physical body as a "slave" to some other force than its own soul (Fulford, personal communication to the author). The zombie-like state of the crew, for instance, parallels a state of slavery, where the body is controlled by some force external to it.

17. Although I do not explore Kristeva's theory of the alterity that stems from the maternal, this is an important component of her philosophy. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has been insightfully interpreted using Kristeva's ideas on the maternal and the symbolic by Diane Lon Hoeveler ("Glossing the Feminine in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," European Romantic Review 2 [1992]: 145-62) and Anne Williams ("And I for an Eye: 'Spectral Persecution' in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," PMLA 108 [1993]: 1114-27). Hoeveler sees the mariner "trapped forever in the realm of the linguistic, in patriarchal language, in contrast to the recognition of the power of the 'good' maternal that he has ostensibly experienced" (158-59). The mariner longs for unity (experienced through the maternal), which he cannot have as a result of being a speaking subject, telling his tale again and again. Williams employs Kristeva to examine how The Ancient Mariner "provides a genealogy of Coleridgean Imagination . . . it traces the means by which meaning is constructed out of separation, need, fear, guilt, and the need to repair the primal break" (1117).

18. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), 3.

19. Julia Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), 2-3.

20. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), 187.

21. For a fascinating account of the cultural meanings of the Black Death, see Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Harper, 1969).

22. Gilbert Blane, Elements of Medical Logick . . . including a statement of evidence respecting the contagious nature of yellow fever (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1819), 158.

23. Trotter, 333.

24. Blane, 205.

25. Robert Renny, A History of Jamaica with observations on the climate, scenery, trade, productions, negroes, slave trade, diseases of Europeans . . . (London: J. Cawthorn, 1807), 241.

26. Shorter Works and Fragments in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 11, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1995), 1409-10. James McKusick (Coleridge's Philosophy of Language [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986]), makes a connection between Coleridge and Lord Monboddo, who first believed the orangutans had the physiological ability to articulate language but could not because of intellectual inferiority. Monboddo implicitly established a link between African man and ape.

27. Empson, 167. Empson states, "The Mariner, at this first magical event in the poem, has a premonition of a Slaver, with its planks rotted off by the insanitary exudations of the dying slaves--that was going to be the final result of his heroic colonial exploration, and well might his heart beat loud."

28. Raimonda Modiano has pointed out to me that Ebbotson inadvertently sees the mariner as doubly-identified as well. Just when Ebbotson states that the mariner represents European culture's involvement with slavery when he kills the albatross and guiltily hangs it around his neck, Ebbotson adds a footnote identifying the mariner as a slave. Ebbotson says, "The act of hanging the albatross round the Mariner's neck, though probably derived from religious allegory, might also be an image of the slave laden with ball and chain; and what has usually been dismissed as an absurdly large crew of 200 becomes less remarkable when one recalls that a slave ship would carry double the crew of a normal vessel" (201, n76).

29. Renny, 192-93.

30. John Redman, Proceedings of the college of Physicians of Philadelphia relative to the prevention of the introduction and spreading of contagious diseases (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1789), 30 ("imported contagion").

31. Henry Clutterbuck, Observations on the Prevention and Treatment of the Epidemic Fever (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819), 39.

32. Thomas Beddoes, A Lecture Introductory To A Course of Popular Instruction on the Constitution and Management of the Human Body (Bristol: N. Biggs, 1797), 48.

33. Besides, the search for origins was thus central to understanding the fever's most terrifying feature: uncontrollability. For the British who had been used to controlling the way cultures interacted, yellow fever's uncontrollability was particularly unsettling because it highlighted just how susceptible British physical and political bodies were to the invisible and invidious forces of foreign climates. In 1772, Dr. Charles Blicke (An Essay on the Bilious of Yellow Fever of Jamaica [London: T. Becket and Co., 1772]) insisted that the first step toward containing yellow fever was "to know its origin" (11).

34. William Deverell, Andalusia; or, Notes tending to shew that the yellow fever of the West Indies . . . was a Disease Well Known to the Ancients (London: S. Gosnell, 1803), 2.

35. Deverell, 71-72,

36. Coleridge, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 2:455.

37. Beddoes, 48; and John Wilson, Memoirs of the West Indian Fever (London: Burgess and Hill, 1827), 139. Coleridge's interest in the origin of disease and the notion of "alterity" can be traced to German Romantic philosophy and the medicine of Schelling, Schiller, and Fredreich Schlegel, as Hermione De Almeida (Romantic Medicine and John Keats [New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991], 139) and many other Coleridge scholars have pointed out. Coleridge applied his interest in the philosophical "other" to certain contemporary debates on disease and to the debate on slavery, both of which sought out classifications and origins.

38. Quoted in Keane, 71.

39. Helen Maria Williams, Poem on the bill lately passed for regulating the slave trade (London: T. Cadell, 1788), ll. 107-9.

40. Coleridge's Review of Thomas Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the Edinburgh Review 24 (1808): 357. Coleridge actually wrote that this "evil in the form of guilt" was "evil in its most absolute and most appropriate sense, that sense to which an impression deeper than could have been left by mere agony of body, or even anguish of mind, in proportion as vice is more hateful than pain, eternity more awful than time."

41. Coleridge, "[Lecture] on the Slave Trade," The Watchman in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 2, ed. Lewis Patton (London: Routledge, 1979), 130-40; hereafter cited parenthetically by page and abbreviated W.

42. McKusick, 106.

43. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden; A Poem in Two Parts (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 7.29-30.

44. Darwin, 7.168-73.

45. James Montgomery, The West Indies, in The Poetical Works of James Montgomery, 5 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company), 1:165. In a footnote to this passage, Montgomery writes, "For minute and afflicting details of the origin and progress of the yellow fever in an individual subject, see Dr. Pinkard's Notes on the West Indies . . . in which the writer, from experience, describes its horrors and sufferings."

46. Renny, 192-93.

47. Molly Lefebure (Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage to Opium [New York: Stein and Day, 1974], 371-73) explains this passage in the context of Coleridge's guilt-ridden opium dreams.

48. Thomas Pringle, "Sonnet on Slaver," in The Anti-Slavery Album: Selections in verse from Cowper, Hannah More, Montgomery, Pringle (London: Howlett & Brummer, 1828), 3, l. 3.

49. Coleridge, of course, would go on to see his dependence on opium as one of these imported addictions that acted not just as relief to the pain of disease, but as disease itself, as Roy and Dorothy Porter point out (In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650-1850 [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 218-19). See also The Popularization of Medicine 1650-1850, ed. Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1992).

50. Robert Southey, "A Tale of Paraguay," Southey's Poetical Works (London: Longman, 1866), canto I, stanza 1, 487.

51. James Stanfield, The Guinea Voyage (London: James Philips, 1789), 18.

52. Clark, 63.

53. Curtin, 69.

54. Thomas Dancer, The Medical Assistant; or Jamaica Practice of Physic designed chiefly for the use of families and plantations (Kingston: Alexander Aikman, 1801), 70-71.

55. Redman, 29.

56. Clark, 63.

57. William Hutchenson, The Princess of Zanfara (London: B. Law & Son, 1792), 11.

58. Trotter, 323.

59. Robert Jackson, An Outline of the History and Cure of Fever . . . vulgarly the yellow fever of the West Indies (Edinburgh: Mundell & Son; London: Longman, 1798), 219.

60. Redman, 28.

61. Williams, ll. 111-14.

62. Montgomery, 1:165-66.

63. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press), Book X:224-36.

64. Stewart Henderson, A Letter to the Officers of the Army . . . on the means of preserving health and preventing that fatal disease the Yellow Fever (London: John Stockdale, 1795), 43.

65. Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Castle Spectre (1797), in Seven Gothic Dramas, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1992), 186. Coleridge referred to the play in a 1798 letter to Wordsworth.

66. Lewis, 175.

67. Lewis, 163, 206

68. Lewis, 199.

69. James McKusick, "Coleridge and the Economy of Nature," Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 375-92, 387.

70. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge, 1993), 41.

71. Table Talk in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 14, ed. Carol Woodring, 2 vols. (London: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 1:149.