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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? “The Ancient Mariner,” like antislavery 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. In this sense, the diseases of slavery were brought intimately home to the British body, just as the guilt of slavery was brought home to the British psyche. But discussion of fever within the discourse of slavery and discussion of slavery within the discourse of yellow fever also address a wider question: with this new proximity of cultures, could Britain establish a social system free from the diseases of tyranny and guilt?

II

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 the self would “lose itself in another form by loving the self of another as another” (CM 1:680). 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 viewed as a process where the mariner tries to reconcile identity and alterity in a political, as well as a philosophical, way.¹⁵

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 aspect of the distanced imagination.¹⁶ Taken together, Kristeva’s discussions of the abject in Powers of Horror and of 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:

corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border…. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything.¹⁷

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:

Hatred of those others who do not share my origins … affront me personally, economically, and culturally: I then move back among “my own,” I stick to an archaic, primitive “common denominator,” the one of my frailest childhood, my closest relatives, hoping they will be more trustworthy than “foreigners.”¹⁸

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.” Her view of the encounter with foreigners is similar to Coleridge’s notion of “losing self in another,” a process that involves self-alteration and loss of direction:

Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container, the memory of experiences which I had abandoned overwhelm me, I lose my composure. I feel “lost,” “indistinct,” “hazy.”¹⁹

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 who warned that epidemics in the Caribbean could spread throughout Europe conjured up images of the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, which wiped out one-third of the European population.²⁰ In the meantime, European heads of state put doctors in the service of deflecting national panic. Dr. Gilbert Blane reported in 1819 that Britain, Russia, and Prussia had actually 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.”²¹ In 1797, Dr. Trotter had likewise assured a potentially panicky British audience that there was no danger whatsoever of yellow fever “becoming active on this side of the Atlantic.”²²

The presence of yellow fever could not only disintegrate national borders, it could also redefine political alliances. Dr. Blane recounted an example of French warships 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.²³ 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, the traveler Robert Renny recalled being greeted on the shore of Jamaica by a canoe full of slave women sarcastically chanting:

New come buckra,

He get sick,

He tak fever,

He be die,

He be die, &etc.²⁴

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. 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 the implications being proposed by race theorists, such as Lord Monboddo, that Africans resembled orangutans (SWF, 1:1409–10).²⁵ 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 the fear of racial equality with the fear of fever. 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” and thus beyond Britain’s geographical borders, other borders turned suddenly fragile (23–24). 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,” a vessel which the William Empson (among others) calls “the premonition of a slaver” (194, 202).²⁶ This encounter turns the crew into a feverish image of the living dead, “for a charnel dungeon fitter,” and so has them dancing on the most unbreakable and abject boundary in human experience, that between life and death (435).

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,²⁷ even though yellow fever underscored what were perceived as natural differences between Britons and Africans in how their bodies weathered forces of nature. The mariner’s implied nationality and the wedding guest’s response to his “long, and lank, and brown” body links him to British sailors who had been yellow fever victims (226). 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 vapours by night; obliged to conform themselves to new manners, new 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.²⁸ 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.²⁹ When mariners arrived home, people were naturally afraid of touching these potentially unclean victims of seafaring diseases. It is thus not surprising to find this fear erupting in the opening 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!” (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,” he acknowledges his own immunity to the fever that struck down all two hundred shipmates, an immunity that aligns him with the alterity of the slave (230–31). 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.³⁰ The wedding guest’s fear of touching the Mariner’s “skinny hand, so brown,” 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 (229).

Boundary-dissolving, a process that “The Ancient Mariner” articulates so powerfully, is the vehicle by which the poem arrives at the distanced imagination. But the proximity of disease and the recognition of how easily national and personal boundaries could break down 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—voiced 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.³¹ 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.³²

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.”³³ Using the Aeneid, Deverell established a one-to-one correspondence between Ortygia and Britain, Cyclades and the Caribbean, and “the tabida lues, affecting both animate and inanimate nature” was “most clearly a West Indian or American fever.”³⁴ 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:

Small pox … was first introduced by the Abyssinians into Arabia when they conquered the Province of Hemyen [Yemen]; & they called it the Locust-plague, believing it to have originated in the huge heaps of putrefying Locusts in the Desart.—From Arabia it was carried by Greek merchants to Constantinople—& from thence by the armies of Justinian in his Gothic War to Italy, Switzerland, & France. (CL, 2:455)

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.³⁵

III

During the early part of the nineteenth century, a radical change took place in the cross-cultural 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 1790s. 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.”³⁶ 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.”³⁷ 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 in his 1808 review of Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was “evil in the form of guilt; evil in its most absolute and most appropriate sense.” Guilt, wrote Coleridge, because of its psychological proximity, “will make an impression deeper than could have been left by mere agony of body” (SWF, 1:219).³⁸ Further, guilt was national, and authorized by acts of legislature (SWF, 1:219–20). When it came to matters of slavery, Coleridge saw the British nation as a body. “Great Britain is indeed a living body politic,” he wrote. “London is the true heart of empire. No pulse beats there, which is not corresponded to proportionally through the whole circulation” (SWF, 1:236).

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?” (Lects 1795, 247). 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.³⁹ 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 as much to the deathly ill state of the crew as to the killing of the bird. Similarly, what arrests the ship “day after day, day after day” (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” who invaded the coasts of Africa “with murder, rapine, theft,—and call it Trade!”⁴⁰ The poem builds toward a genuine Old Testament plague, put into the modern context of contagion emanating from stagnant waters:

Sylphs! with light shafts you pierce the drowsy FOG,

That lingering slumbers on the sedge-wove bog,

With webbed feet o’er midnight meadows creeps,

Or flings his hairy limbs on stagnant deeps,

You meet CONTAGION issuing from afar,

And dash the baleful conqueror from his car.⁴¹

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” (123–26). Slave vessels, stuck without “breath” or “motion” beneath a “hot and copper sky,” were especially vulnerable from a medical as well as a moral point of view (116, 111). For instance, yellow fever was portrayed as God’s just punishment for the atrocities of the slave trade in James Montgomery’s 1809 poem The West Indies:

The eternal makes his fierce displeasure known;

At his command the pestilence abhorr’d

Spares the poor slave, and smites the haughty lord.⁴²

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.”⁴³

In the diseased climate of “The Ancient Mariner,” 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. 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 (132, 136, 138, 157, 146, 112, 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 unfeasible 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 an average almost a fourth of the whole Crew” (Lects 1795, 238). The slave trade, he said, turned British mariners into “rather shadows in their appearance than men,” just as in “The Ancient Mariner” disease changes the mariners into a shadowy, “ghastly crew” (Lects 1795, 238).

But Coleridge really drives this point home 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,” and the sailors drop dead (192, 171):

One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,

Too quick for groan or sigh,

Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,

And cursed me with his eye.

Four times fifty living men,

(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)

With a heavy thump, a lifeless lump,

They dropped down one by one. (212–19)

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 & down by a frightful pale woman who, I thought, wanted to kiss me, & had the property of giving a shameful Disease by breathing on the face” (CN, 1:1250).⁴⁴ 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 antislavery literature. Besides yellow fever, the other disease trope used by abolitionists was leprosy. Thomas Pringle, for instance, in an antislavery sonnet, said sugar “taints with leprosy the white man’s soul.”⁴⁵ Sugar sifted down English channels and dissolved in their teacups, but it remained a disease of white culture.⁴⁶ 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 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 & 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” (Lects 1795, 236).⁴⁷

Coleridge was just one of many writers to move the medical to the political level by designating slavery a European disease. Robert Southey’s vaccination poem, “A Tale of Paraguay,” imagined smallpox as an act of African reprisal. According to the poem’s opening lines, Edward Jenner—who had pioneered work on cowpox inoculation to combat smallpox the same year that Coleridge wrote “The Ancient Mariner”—defeated epidemic disease and thus the vengeance of slavery:

Jenner! for ever shall thy honour’d name

Among the children of mankind be blest,

Who by thy skill hast taught us how to tame

One dire disease, ‥ the lamentable pest

Which Africa sent forth to scourge the West,

As if in vengeance for her sable brood

So many an age remorselessly oppresst.⁴⁸

But if smallpox was a scourge from Africa that could be conquered through British medical technology, yellow fever could not. And so it was most often that abolitionists used the symptoms of yellow fever, as opposed to those of smallpox or other contagious diseases, to demonstrate the interminable vengeance Africa would have on European bodies. In James Stanfield’s The Guinea Voyage (1789), for instance, yellow fever eats the crew alive. It leaves behind putrid bodies as spoils of war, as condemnation for the “remorseless oppression” of slavery. In military fashion, the “troops of wan disease their march begin”:

Now droops the head in faint dejection hung,

Now raging thirst enflames the dry parch’d tongue;

In yellow films the rayless eye is set,

With chilling dews the loaded brow is wet.⁴⁹

The guilt that bleeds through the lines of Stanfield’s, Southey’s, and, most powerfully, Coleridge’s poem is the logical response of the sympathetic imagination, and it is the only response of the distanced imagination. For the culture at large, guilt signaled the beginnings of a dismantling of the slave system that had been in place for so many hundreds of years. Guilt was nothing less than the initial pangs of remorse felt upon recognizing the inhumanity of the British self against the humanity of the African other.

IV

Interestingly enough, recognition of slaves as more than “things” coincided with recognition that slavery created a biological and a psychological rift in the natural environment. From its beginnings in the fifteenth century to its peak in the early nineteenth century, the slave trade represented the largest movement of people in history to that point. It was clear to medical writers of the period that this dramatically disturbed the atmosphere. When Dr. James Clark noted that the activity of the slave trade caused “a deranged state of the atmosphere” and thus “excited this mortal disease in our island,”⁵⁰ he was saying that the slave trade disturbed environmental balances, which in turn produced yellow fever.

Moving bodies turned the earth in a dangerous and often fatal direction. Since Africans and slaves appeared to be immune to yellow fever, the only way epidemics spread was among gatherings of freshly arrived Europeans in a tropical locale. As Philip Curtin explains in his book Death by Migration, in order to survive, the yellow fever vector A. aegypti needed groups of nonimmune subjects “concentrated within the flight range” of the virus. If not, the disease would creep back into the recesses of the tropical jungle, where animals kept it active until a new crop of Europeans arrived.⁵¹ Of course, early-nineteenth-century medical workers did not have germ theories, and they did not even consider the mosquito as a carrier of the virus. But they did understand yellow fever’s mode of existence at some level. They knew that the disease stemmed from the European encounter with the tropics. Dr. Thomas Dancer, for one, observed in 1801 how yellow fever “first visits the abodes of wretchedness and squalor, and disappears for a season, or diminishes in virulence to return again and expend its fury over the community at large.”⁵² American doctors, reporting on the yellow fever epidemic of Philadelphia, recognized that the fever “exists in the West Indies particularly in times of war, when great numbers of strangers are to be found there.”⁵³

These early medical men clearly believed that the breakdown of the Caribbean ecosystem caused yellow fever to break out. When Dr. Clark insisted in 1799 that yellow fever ran rampant in the Caribbean the more it was “crowded with strangers,” he gestured toward the cultural suspicion that yellow fever was the result of environmental trauma. Although Britain had its own socioenvironmental problems (the poverty of the city, the fear of French invasion), nothing of the sort was happening at home. In contrast to the environment of the Quantocks, where Coleridge and Wordsworth first conceived of “The Ancient Mariner,” the abolitionist poet William Hutchenson wrote of the Caribbean in 1792:

New cargoes crowd our shores, and on the beach

The squalid multitudes are pouring forth,

From over-loaded ships, which, like the curse

Of vile Pandora’s box, bring forth disease,

With misery, and pallid want,

Crippled and maim’d, whose ulcerating sores

Cling to the canker’d chains, that rankle deep.⁵⁴

If the yellow fever outbreaks of the Caribbean frightened Europeans, outbreaks in America created real alarm. The 1793 outbreak in Philadelphia was by far the most referenced and terrifying eighteenth-century yellow fever epidemic precisely because it proved that the disease could be imported like so many slaves and goods. Dr. Trotter blamed the fever on “damaged coffee, that was left to rot on the wharfs, and from which noxious exhalations were spread that first affected the neighbourhood, and afterwards more distant parts of the city.”⁵⁵ The Americans insisted that this “imported” fever had transgressed the national boundary and thus altered the American environment. Robert Jackson and John Redman, two prominent American doctors, led public opinion in the matter. Yellow fever, said Jackson, had been “imported into Philadelphia from some foreign country” and was “propagated afterwards solely by contagion.”⁵⁶ Redman traced the infection to “imported clothing or persons who died in the West Indies”; at the very least, the disease stemmed directly from “the neighbourhood of shipping or among persons connected with vessels.”⁵⁷ So it was that doctors blamed commerce for destroying environmental balances that otherwise kept epidemics at bay. People who carried on the national dirty work of commerce brought fever home. Those, like the mariner, “connected with vessels” were literally on the national border and were somehow held responsible for importing the wrong thing. On the one hand, countries like England and America relied heavily on people associated with the seafaring industry, yet on the other, these individuals were diseased, disturbing, and abject, because of their inevitable contact with foreign cultures.

Many bystanders, however, could not help but use the outbreak of European contracted disease in tropical climates to condemn the slave trade for deforming the environment. Helen Maria Williams asks how slave traders can, in good conscience:

Deform creation with the gloom

Of crimes that blot its cheerful bloom?

Darken a work so perfect made,

And cast the universe in shade?—⁵⁸

Though the moral universe condemned the British slavery system with plagues of yellow fever, the natural universe ultimately paid the price. In James Montgomery’s abolitionist poem, yellow fever destroys the British body and thus the entire cosmos:

Foreboding melancholy sinks his mind,

Soon at his heart he feels the monster’s fangs,

They tear his vitals with convulsive pangs

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Now frenzy-horrors rack his whirling brain,

Tremendous pulses throb through every vein;

The firm earth shrinks beneath his torture-bed,

The sky in ruins rushes o’er his head;

He rolls, he rages in consuming fires,

Till nature, spent with agony, expires.⁵⁹

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” (The Prelude, 10:224–36). From what came to be seen as the center of the Romantic poetic tradition, Wordsworth called the structures of slavery a disease that could outrot 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.”⁶⁰

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” (112; 180). Even the body of the ship is diseased: “The planks look warped! and see those sails, / How thin they are and sere!” (529–30). The Hermit—who is also a figure for decay, as he prays at a “rotted old oak-stump”—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 (522). In his Lecture, 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” (Lects 1795, 248–49).