Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade: Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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:

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 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...