About that book ...

[Dave Monroe]

>From J.H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Voyage to Isle de
France, Isle de Bourbon, The Cape of Good Hope ...
With New Observations on Nature and Mankind by an
Officer of the King, Vol. 1 (1773) ...

"I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to
the  happiness of Europe, but I know well that these
two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two
great regions of the world: America has been
depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them;
Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people
to cultivate them."

And, while I'm at it, William Blake's finis page for
J.G. Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition,
against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (London: J.
Johnson & J. Edwards, 1796) ...

http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/asi/images/Europe.jpg

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/sitepages/blakepic.html

The Bernardin quote and the Blake engraving are the
frontispiece for ...

Mintz, Sidney W.  Sweetness and Power:
   The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
   New York: Viking, 1985.

Quod vide.  And see as well here ...

http://www.library.miami.edu/archives/slaves/representations/Individual_art_essays/carolines.htm

Esp. ...

http://www.library.miami.edu/archives/slaves/representations/Carolines_images/Large_caroline_images/Large_hanging.gif

http://www.library.miami.edu/archives/slaves/representations/Carolines_images/Large_caroline_images/Large_hanging_woman.gif

Speaking of slavery and the gallows ...

--- Paul Nightingale <paulngale at supanet.com> wrote:
> A visitor is "perhaps being led to meditate upon
> Punishment,-- or upon Commerce...for Commerce
without 
> Slavery is unthinkable, whilst Slavery must ever
> include, as an essential Term, the Gallows,--
> Slavery without the Gallows being as hollow and
> waste a Proceeding, as a Crusade without the
> Cross" (M&D, for those of you familiar with it,
> p108).
> 
> Commerce, as a topic to meditate upon, is an
> alternative to punishment. This is qualified by the
> assumption that commerce necessarily includes
> slavery, which in turn necessarily requires the
> gallows. So punishment is equated with the gallows,
> ie as capital punishment ...

> This passage, therefore, includes both C18th 'facts'
> (the generous use of hanging to enforce observance
> of this or that 'law') and also late-C20th
> sensibility (I suspect we're rather more sceptical
> about crusades now). Yet the paragraph has opened
> with a delightfully impressionist moment, straight
> out of Manet (or Zola): "a pair of Gallows,
> simplified to Penstrokes in the glare of this Ocean
> sky". Furthermore, the passage reminds us of Mason's
> line in spectator sports (which is then taken up by
> the rest of the chapter). It reminds us (as does the
> exchange between Cherrycoke and Mr LeSpark, p105) of
> the global economy that has politicised the
> scientific endeavour of Mason/Dixon.
 
> Aunt Euphrenia, recalling her own visit to the
> island, insists she be allowed to "mourn" what she
> cannot have known personally, ie "Orange and
> Lemon-Groves, the Coffee-Fields" (p105). What she
> leaves out, of course, is the slave-labour, without
> which her "Paradise" would have been unlikely.

As I've hinted at along the way here, I suspect much
of Pynchon's imagery here is inspired as much by the
imagery of the period (e.g., Hogarth, Blake, Wright of
Derby)  as by its literature (and, as always,
biographies, travel literature, scientific documents,
et al., are all rocks worth looking under as well) ...

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