Colonizing Paradise: Landscape and Empire in the British West Indies

COLONIZING PARADISE

ATLANTIC CROSSINGS

Rafe Blaufarb, Series Editor

COLONIZING PARADISE

LANDSCAPE AND EMPIRE IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES

JEFFERSON DILLMAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Granjon and Scala

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover illustration: James Hakewill, St. Thomas in the Vale (Jamaica, 1825)

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dillman, Jefferson, 1969–

Colonizing paradise : landscape and empire in the British West Indies / Jefferson Dillman.

pages cm. — (Atlantic crossings)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1858-1 (hardback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8804-1 (ebook) 1. West Indies, British—Colonization—Social aspects. 2. West Indies, British—Foreign public opinion, British. 3. Landscapes—Social aspects—West Indies, British—History. 4. Landscapes—Political aspects—West Indies, British—History. 5. Landscapes—West Indies, British—Psychological aspects—History. 6. British—West Indies, British—Attitudes—History. 7. Imperialism—Social aspects—West Indies, British—History. 8. West Indies, British—Relations—Great Britain. 9. Great Britain—Relations—West Indies, British. 10. Public opinion—Great Britain—History. I. Title.

F1621.D55  2015

327.410729—dc23

2014040797

Contents

List of Figures

Introduction

1. The Discovered Landscape: Iberians in the New World

2. The Colonial Paradise: English Encounters with the New World

3. The Lawless Landscape: Early English Colonial Experiences

4. The Recovered Landscape: Cataloging and Ordering the British West Indies

5. The Rural Landscape: The Pastoral, Picturesque, and Tropical

The Tropics: An Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. James Moxon, A New Mapp of Jamaica, According to the Last Survey (London, 1677)

2. Edward Slaney, Tabula Iamaicae Insulae (London, 1678)

3. Inset of Slaney’s map, showing the privateer quarters and a location labeled Banditi (London, 1678)

4. Lansdowne Guilding, View of the Botanic Garden St. Vincent (1824)

5. Lansdowne Guilding, Botanic Garden from the Bottom of the Central Walk (St. Vincent, 1824)

6. Lansdowne Guilding, House of the Superintendant (St. Vincent, 1824)

7. Agostino Brunias, A Negroe’s Dance, Dominica (1779)

8. Agostino Brunias, The Linen Market, Santo Domingo (ca. 1775)

9. George Robertson, View of Roaring River Estate (Jamaica, 1778)

10. James Hakewill, St. Thomas in the Vale (Jamaica, 1825)

Introduction

On January 1, 1816, Matthew Lewis, an absentee planter from England, set foot on Jamaican soil for the first time. Disembarking at Black River Bay after nearly two months at sea, the 40-year-old novelist and playwright noted in his journal that, after enduring a long and sometimes difficult voyage, he was moved by his first sight of the landscape in which he would live, move, and breathe for the next three months. The beauty of the atmosphere, the dark purple mountains, the shores covered with mangroves of the liveliest green down to the very edge of the water, and the light-coloured houses with their lattices and piazzas completely embowered in trees, wrote the member of Parliament, altogether made the scenery of the bay wear a very picturesque appearance. Lewis’s delight with the island’s natural environment only increased over time, leading him to remark that I am as yet so enchanted with the country, that it would require no very strong additional inducements to make me establish myself here altogether.¹ Yet juxtaposed against this aesthetic evaluation of the landscape was the reason he was there: to attend to the management and operations of his slave-operated sugar plantation.

Matthew Lewis seemed altogether uncomfortable with the business he inherited from his father at Cornwall Plantation in Westmoreland Parish. Almost from the moment of his arrival at the estate, he was distressed at the thought of owning other human beings. When one of his bondsmen introduced himself as a slave, Lewis felt a pang at the heart. Although the slave appeared all gaiety and good humour, Lewis nonetheless realized that this man was bound to serve him whether it was pleasant or not, and the thought of that left him feeling quite humiliated and tempted to tell [the slave,] ‘Do not say that again; say you are my negro, but do not call yourself my slave.’ Lewis also blanched at the violence endemic to slave-era sugar plantations. He forbade the use of the cart-whip at Cornwall, even for the most egregious of trespasses, and in so doing earned the enmity of his fellow planters. Upon his departure from Jamaica at the end of March 1816, Lewis left instructions with his agent to continue the ban on physical correction and to provide for a 24-hour cooling off period between offenses and the meting out of punishment; Lewis promised immediate dismissal or demotion to anyone found violating these directives.²

Lewis was not only repulsed by the violence directed at slaves, but he attempted (at least according to his account) to improve his slaves’ material condition. He increased holiday time and time off so the slaves could tend to their own gardens, and he provided money to build a better hospital on the plantation for the treatment of ill or injured slaves. Yet for all of his apparent humanity, Lewis was ultimately indifferent to the institution itself. Talk of manumitting his slaves did not figure into his account, and he wrote critically of the efforts of abolitionist William Wilberforce and others to press the issue in Parliament even while he referred to the slave trade as execrable. Of the slaves themselves, Lewis recognized their humanity and their individuality as people, but he also maintained a low opinion of them: in his writings, Lewis often referred to them as though they were children who were incapable, for the most part, of rational activity. In the end, despite his professed trust for his slaves, he worried about the possibility of being poisoned or falling victim to a violent uprising.³

The Jamaican landscape occupies two mental spaces in Lewis’s conception of the island. On the one hand he saw it as a land of picturesque and pastoral beauty. On the other, he recognized it as a land of horrors, death, and fatal disease. Beneath the surface of a natural landscape that often resembled ornamental parks in England—that is, panoramic vistas of rolling green meadows sprinkled with majestic trees, highlighted by the colorful blossoms of wildflowers and punctuated by the sweet wafting scents of the blooming logwood—lurked a monster, a vile, soul-stealing devil ever on the lookout for its next victim. Lewis personified disease, the invisible killer that rendered the tropical Americas a dangerous environment for the European, as the yellow plague’s Imps and a dread black demon. That Jamaica was a deadly place is perhaps best expressed by Lewis’s retelling of an old joke immediately after extolling the landscape and declaring himself to be at the peak of health: There was a man once, he writes, who fell from the top of a steeple, and, perceiving no inconvenience in his passage through the air,—‘Come,’ said he to himself, while in the act of falling, ‘really this is well enough yet, if it would but last.’⁴

Although the clean, neat rows of the cane fields created a pleasing effect of order and prosperity, and although the slaves’ huts with their hermitage-like appearance, all situated in little gardens and embosomed in sweet-smelling shrubbery, recalled a placid and sedate community of happy laborers, both were only veils for a churning world of darkness filled with the black magic of Obeah—a world of murderous plots, rebellion, violence, and sexual degradation.⁵ Lewis recognized these dangerous aspects of Jamaican life, but only in passing. Instead, it was the beauty of the landscape that captured the fullness of his literary imagination. For Lewis, this mode of expression seemed to sooth the inner conflict of a sensitive soul placed in an environment that required assent to practices that his heart condemned. Finding himself so placed by circumstances, Lewis discovered it easier, and far more comfortable, to see the picturesque, the beauty, and the aesthetic harmony of Jamaica and plantation life and to present it as such to a reader who might otherwise be inclined to stand in judgment. In so doing, he was reflecting a long-established practice in the West Indies of constructing a landscape vision that emphasizes what the viewer wishes and expects to see, and at the same time using that vision to create a protective cover, a rhetorical bandage, over the unpleasant realities of Caribbean life.

The landscape trope that Lewis employs, one in which visual excellence is emphasized and perhaps overstated in the face of troubling challenges in an effort to obscure them, represents the culmination of more than three centuries of European imagining and interacting with the West Indian environment. As part of a larger landscape narrative, Matthew Lewis’s story properly begins with Christopher Columbus and the first European sighting of the New World landscape somewhere in the Bahamas in 1492. Columbus inaugurated the process of projecting onto the Caribbean landscape what the European traveler or colonist desired to see. In evaluating different time periods and locales in which this process played out, Mary Louise Pratt calls such projection the Imperial Eye, while David Arnold labels it the Tropical Gaze. What both of them refer to are the wish-fulfilling descriptions of distant lands and peoples that are assigned qualities dictated by European cultural frameworks.⁶ Because of its environmental qualities, the Caribbean landscape fostered a specific type of Imperial Eye. The West Indies’ obvious contrasts to European countries—and specifically the British Isles—in appearance, climate, and natural productions encouraged travelers and colonists alike to imagine the Caribbean as a land of possibilities. From Columbus onward, such possibilities called to mind images created through cultural myths, such as the Garden of Eden, a pastoral golden age, or the stylized representations of the picturesque. Yet this continuity of vision, seen, for example, in the employment of a fairly common set of evocative descriptors over time (i.e., bountiful, verdant, luxuriant), is only one part of the story. More striking than the continuities are the ways in which visions of the West Indies landscape evolved from initial contact through the height of empire. This evolution reflected the changing desires, challenges, and experiences of those who visited, settled, and interacted with the islands.

English and, later, British views of the Caribbean were part of an iterative process in which visitors and residents alike projected a particular mental vision onto the landscape, and they often preserved these visions in the form of images they drew, painted, or textually described. However, experience and observation of experience subjected the image to modification and restructuring. Each new expression of the landscape vision was built upon the ones that preceded it. As both observers and participants grappled with the meaning of the landscape, they also created new themes and ideals that highlighted what they wished to see in it. The landscape story of the Caribbean up until 1800 reflected this process. Initially the English saw the landscape as figurative of the biblical Paradise found in Genesis, but they later came to view it as representative of the tropical, wherein they challenged and, ultimately, discarded earlier projections. The Spanish, as the first Europeans to encounter the West Indies, developed a landscape vision in accordance with their cultural experiences of the Reconquista, strong Roman Catholic tradition, and economic expectations. For many, the landscape recalled the biblical Garden of Eden to the point where at least some wondered whether they might perhaps have discovered its true location. Other Iberians imagined the Indies as a land of spiritual darkness that needed to be conquered in the name of Christ and the true faith. For yet other Spaniards, the New World landscape represented both. It was this early Spanish landscape vision, one of didactic absolutes, that informed English expectations and prepared the ground for a vision of their own.⁷

The English landscape vision, modeled as it was on the Spanish example, contained nuances particular to the English experience. Unlike the Iberians, the English did not approach the New World as a blank canvas on which to paint their expectations.⁸ Rather, the Spanish example, besides providing a base model of the Indies as both Edenic and satanic, demonstrated the colonial possibilities of the New World. These possibilities included the extraction of vast amounts of wealth and the potential to establish bases from which to assault Spanish dominions. The English projective model might therefore be called the colonial paradise; the English primarily employed the Garden of Eden as a readily recognizable metaphor on which to hang the promise of West Indies colonization.

The metaphorical paradise, however, soon collapsed under the weight of experience. English adventurers saw the landscape as a colonial paradise both fertile and salubrious, and believed they could establish profitable and stable colonies. Yet they could do little to control the behavior of many who went to the Indies as part of the settlement ventures. The English West Indian colonies in the early to mid-seventeenth century developed reputations as fractious, immoral, and lawless places. Lured west in part by the landscape vision of colonial proponents and organizers, some colonists saw the warm temperatures, copious natural resources, and perceived easy living as offering the opportunity to cast off cultural and social expectations and define their own modes of life in relationship to the land. This group included not only traditional settlers who came to plant or to engage in commerce but those inclined to outlawry as pirates and privateers. A third group that contributed to the lawless reputation of the West Indies were the Maroons. Although they differed from other colonists in that they had been forcibly settled on the islands as slaves, Maroons too constructed lives, much like pirates, on the peripheries of colonial society and threatened the order and prosperity that colonial adventurers sought. This lawless element in the English Caribbean played an important role in the evolution of landscape visions, as travelers and residents reacted to an experienced landscape that operated much differently from the one they had imagined. It was no longer enough for these Englishmen to see the West Indies as a colonial paradise, destined to succeed solely on the merits of its appropriateness as a site of settlement. The reality of half a century of lawlessness forced colonial organizers to reimagine the landscape as one of potential—but a potential that needed to be mastered and controlled. All the possibilities suggested by the colonial-paradise vision remained, but by the opening of the eighteenth century, many Englishmen realized that the landscape needed to be brought under subjection if the colonies were to succeed.

As the eighteenth century approached, proponents of the English colonial enterprise in the Caribbean sought to master and control lawlessness by reformulating their landscape vision in the context of Enlightenment theories. Seeing the landscape as a colonial paradise meant seeing it as an organic whole. Viewing it as a location to assert mastery meant viewing the landscape in terms of its component parts. By studying the landscape in detail and coming to understand it, the English hoped to recover the paradisiacal promise of an earlier generation. One of the methods by which they attempted to achieve this improvement was through writing natural histories and establishing botanical gardens, the first as a means of recognizing and grasping the landscape’s many individual parts, the second as a means of ordering and displaying them. The English still engaged in a projection of fantasy onto the landscape, but it was fantasy of a different kind, one in which the shaping hand of rational man elevated it to what they thought it could and should be.

If recovery had as its object a detailed accounting of the land to foster orderly development, the second half of the eighteenth century saw the reassembly of the varied discrete landscape parts back into the organic whole. Alternatively presenting the landscape as picturesque or pastoral, and sometimes both, British travelers and West Indies residents conceived of the landscape as the embodiment of an ideal. This was not the Edenic ideal of the sixteenth century or a seventeenth-century metaphorical re-creation of the biblical Garden, but a new vision that accorded with prevailing British tastes and sentiments regarding beauty and landscape sensibilities. The pastoral form of reassembly imagined the Caribbean plantation landscape as analogous to the rural ideal presented in English landscapes of the latter eighteenth century. These landscapes emphasized the visual excellence of agricultural order and efficiency, and presented the slaves as naturally occurring elements of the environment. The picturesque West Indian landscape with its focus on the natural beauty and splendor of the islands worked in tandem with the pastoral to, ideally, mitigate any reservations one might have about the Caribbean as the site of virulent pathogens and a vicious slave system.

At the same time that proponents of the West Indian plantation system were presenting a landscape of pastoral beauty, other Britons saw beyond the surface to the more troubling aspects of Caribbean life. While the landscape still retained qualities evocative of a paradise, no amount of natural beauty or abundance could mask the twin evils of disease and slavery that plagued the West Indian experience. Landscape visions of the Caribbean from this perspective were shaped by the growing category of the tropical. As an emerging category of description that originated with medical writers who discovered in the West Indies a disease environment unique to perpetually warm climates, the tropics became, for Caribbean colonists and administrators, a means of presenting a landscape vision that accommodated both beauty and horror. For medicos, the tropical represented a unique classification that had no real comparisons to European norms. Instead, they accepted the Caribbean and other warm climates for what they were: beautiful, certainly, but also the home of deadly disease. In this tropical conception, these Britons gave little thought to creating an ideal or projecting fantasy; instead, they focused on preserving the lives of soldiers and accomplishing a military mission. Travelers and residents during this late eighteenth-century period were in no way abandoning the creation of ideal landscapes. Instead, they believed the Caribbean had to be accepted, at least partially, on its own terms and not as a location that could be transformed either physically or psychologically into an imitation of a British ideal. From the 1760s on, this move toward the tropical represented the final step in a reassembled landscape vision, where slaves and blackness of skin were natural to the tropics, as were diseases. Thus we find Matthew Lewis, at the end of his landscape descriptions, acknowledging this truth and leaving himself and his readers with both a soaring description of Jamaica’s natural beauty and an uneasy, almost tragic, sense of impending terror and revulsion. His awareness of the disease dangers suggests that Lewis had access to contemporary medical texts.

Culture, wrote Raymond Williams, is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language . . . mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.⁹ And while landscape as a term may not approach the same level of complexity as culture or—to use another one of his examples, nature—it certainly retains about it a tremendous amount of possible meaning. The difficulties of landscape as a concept are perhaps best expressed by D. W. Meinig, who asserted that, for all of the scholarly attention paid to it, landscape remains an elusive concept that defeats attempts to aspire to a clean and clear definition. Nonetheless, its role as the significant theoretical component in this study requires definition and explication. In its simplest sense, again to quote Williams, landscape implies separation and observation, and it is understood primarily as a scene to be viewed from afar.¹⁰ And so the first instance of landscape as a term owes its origin to the German landschaft (or Dutch landschap), which signified a discrete territory and which came to be applied to an emergent art genre in Northern Europe, the landscape painting. Primarily the province of art historians interested in the technical aspects of landscape paintings such as light, shadow, and perspective, and geographers such as Carl Sauer who worked in an empirical style to connect observable and verifiable facts about landscapes into larger synthetic wholes, it was only in the 1980s with the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography that landscape began to take on the complexity and depth of meaning the term now holds.¹¹

The seminal figures in this cultural turn are Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, who advanced the concept that landscape is more than a simple representation of physical geographical space; it is a way of seeing and a means by which some Europeans have represented to themselves and to others the world around them and their relationships with it.¹² This essentially projective model of analysis has allowed cultural geographers to consider how culture is, in the words of John Wylie, produced and transmit[ted] through visual symbols and representations. It has also allowed scholars to go beyond the confines of more traditional landscape studies centered on landscape art to include other subjects—such as cartography, literature, and travel writing—where landscapes are portrayed. Whether a painting, a travel narrative, or a map, landscapes in this approach are created and imbued with meaning by the viewer, who projects onto the scene not only what he wishes or expects to see as dictated by the cultural milieu from which he comes, but who also invests the landscape with meaning derived from the same cultural milieu.

Yet Williams also notes that landscape is at least in part a sentimental or emotional experience, as he details in the opening chapter of The Country and the City. It has a visceral relevance to the observer and evokes a myriad of feelings, as in the country life, inseparable from images of the land, which Williams explores. To state it another way, as much as landscape may be a cultural, or even mental, construction, it is also experienced. Furthermore, successive experiences with a landscape work to alter the image. This alteration occurs not only as a form of projection of new ideas and values that the viewer carries with him, but also as a result of interacting with environment or location in view, and even through observing others’ experience within that same site. This phenomenological turn in landscape studies, embodied in the work of scholars and geographers such as J. B. Jackson, D. W. Meinig, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Jay Appleton, locates the meaning and importance of landscape within the experience of the viewer. A landscape is seen, certainly, but it is also felt, similar to the way Williams experienced the country life as a child in Wales and as an adult in Cambridge.¹³

Whether as a subjective, experiential concept or as a cultural space reflective of the ideas and values of the view, landscape is a progressive idea. By observing the landscape idea from a point in time and tracking the human activity that occasions changes to this idea, analysis can reveal the history of a particular landscape vision while using that history as a means to determine the effect of this vision on the broader culture of the viewing individual or community. In the inverse, the landscape vision can be seen as a response to the human activity occurring within the studied geographical space, changing as observed or experienced relationships to the space evolve. Moreover, landscape as an experience encompasses the totality of the viewed scene. Consuming static images such as paintings or textual descriptions of landscape render the initial experience of the vision as primarily visual. But encountering the actual physical landscape increases the range of sensory perceptions that combine to generate an overall landscape representation. Smell, sound, air temperature and humidity, weather, and even things known to be present but not immediately visible are incorporated into the construction of an experienced landscape, which is then conveyed as image.¹⁴

Along these lines, the landscape definition employed in this study follows Cosgrove and Daniels’s approach in that landscape is a way of seeing. It also is a medium through which individuals represent themselves, their relationships, and their world, while employing many elements of the phenomenological model. It takes as its starting point the idea, particularly relevant to the New World, that the Americas were a blank canvas upon which Europeans could paint their expectations and desires, a concept which is excellently reflected in studies in the travel-writing genre such as Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes. This idea has significant uses in a region such as the Caribbean, where a supposedly empty landscape could be shaped and altered by colonists according to the way they perceived their relationship with the land. Landscape construction, both physically and mentally, can and often does occur beyond the constraints of what is actually visible—the motives for designing a plantation along certain architectural lines, for example, says as much about how a planter believes it should look as it does about concessions to topography and economic necessity. Why the planter believes a plantation ought to look a certain way reflects social and cultural imperatives in the manner suggested by Cosgrove and Daniels. Yet that planter is not merely acting as a conduit for a preestablished cultural norm; he is also responding to a landscape that has been experienced, often in ways very different from European landscapes, by successive generations of explorers, colonists, travelers, and migrants.¹⁵

Given the primacy of place that terms such as Eden and paradise occupy in the early portions of this study, as well as their continued deployment throughout the history of landscape perceptions in the Caribbean region, it is worthwhile to clarify their use and meaning. In the earliest landscape constructions, the Iberians and their English counterparts equate paradise with the biblical Garden of Eden. Thus, this study uses those terms interchangeably to convey the same idea: something that represents the original Garden in a literal sense. As the idea of Eden becomes metaphorical, paradise comes primarily to mean something that has qualities similar to the literal biblical Garden but not necessarily the Garden itself. The terms themselves, paradise and Eden, remain a useful and even necessary component to any landscape discussion on tropical or subtropical latitude, even though these terms ultimately end up some way off from their original meanings. This assertion holds true so long as it is borne in mind that their meanings are contextual to the time, place, and individual employing them.

The geographic area under consideration in this study begins with the broader New World, although the accounts are primarily located in the tropical latitudes. The early English experience is centered on what is labeled by anthropologist Julian Steward as the circum-Caribbean.¹⁶ This term refers to places not just in the Caribbean islands proper but to those areas that share some climatic and geographical features, such as Bermuda and Guiana. The southern portions of North America feature briefly as well: accounts of these locations help to develop the position of the English mind toward the landscape. The focus of later chapters is exclusively on the traditional or customary British West Indies—that is, the islands of the Lesser Antilles and Jamaica.

1

The Discovered Landscape

Iberians in the New World

I then conjectured that the currents and the overwhelming mountains of water which rushed into these straits with such an awful roaring arose from the contest between the fresh water and the sea. The fresh water struggled with the salt to oppose its entrance, and the salt contended against the fresh in its efforts to gain passage outward.

Christopher Columbus, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus

With these words, Christopher Columbus, on his third voyage to the New World, described the Orinoco River delta, where millions of gallons of fresh water pour into the Atlantic. The passage comes on the heels of a frightening event in which his ship and crew were tossed about by great waves that marked a collision of currents in the strait between present-day Venezuela and the island of Trinidad. A swift succession of tidal waves nearly capsized Columbus’s small vessel, prompting him to name the strait Boca de la Sierpe (Mouth of the Serpent).¹ Sailing west a few leagues along the Venezuelan coast before leaving the Gulf of Paria by way of another strait, Columbus encountered the scene described above, so violent a clash between river and sea that he feared his ship would perish "no less than in the Boca de la Sierpe . . . but the peril was now doubled," because the wind failed and the bottom was too deep to make anchor. Columbus named this passage the Boca del Dragon (Mouth of the Dragon).² These events represent the beginnings of a change in his descriptions of the New World landscape that had been almost exclusively positive to that point. Both the dragon and the serpent, used by Columbus to describe dangerous maritime features, are time-honored appellations for Satan, and reflect the admiral’s growing unease about a region upon which he once lavished fulsome and hyperbolic praise.³ Columbus’s account thus illustrates what would become the fundamental Spanish approach to the New World landscape as a place of absolutes, either beautiful or terrible, and oftentimes both.

That the sight of millions of gallons of fresh Orinoco River water being forcibly thrust into the Gulf of Paria elicited a response is, in and of itself, unremarkable. What was remarkable was the tension inherent in Columbus’s phrasing, a deafening battle of waters sowing danger and discord, because it marks a distinct departure from his positive characterizations up to that point. The scene is indeed noteworthy, even awe-inspiring, a marvel of the natural world that has amazed and impressed observers for centuries ever since. But for Columbus, it was more than that. It was also a terrifying spectacle, one that seems at odds with the Caribbean that he had come to know and experience.⁴ In short, the Orinoco River delta is a metaphor, if unconsciously given, for an emerging duality in the circum-Caribbean landscape. The beauty, the wonder, and the possibility now clashed with the threatening and aggressive Carib cannibals—a supposedly docile native group in the Taíno, who proved something other than docile—terrifying animals, and the hint of unhealthy climes on land.

Columbus and other early European observers of the New World were understandably overwhelmed by the landscape they encountered, and they struggled to not only make sense of it personally but also how best to convey their experience to others back home. As Jesús Carrillo Castillo observes, these first European visitors to the Americas lacked a lexicon to describe so much that was new and unclassified. The vertiginous image of the tropical forest, he remarks on the work of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, was "mare magno y oculto, an entangled and opaque accumulation . . . only embraceable in aesthetic terms. Terms such as greatness and beauty reflected a tumultuous verbal display organized around the sensorial immediacy of the natural phenomenon—its sheer presence."⁵ It seems unremarkable, then, that such grandeur might best be conveyed through a familiar medium. What the mild climate, thick green verdure, plentiful water, and plainly visible fertility resonates with is a well-ingrained conception, a cultural memory of a land as yet unspoiled by