"Follow me your guide": Poetic Empire in John Singleton's A General Description of the West-Indian Islands

On 7 April 1760, enslaved persons began what would become a massive uprising in Jamaica, seizing arms and supplies from the northern Port Maria before continuing southward through St. Mary's parish. What followed was an eighteen-month conflict across Jamaica that resulted in the deaths of over five hundred Afro-Caribbean persons and sixty white inhabitants as local governments and armed forces attempted to suppress rebelling groups and prevent future shows of powerful resistance.¹ In the decades that followed, colonial Caribbean writers flooded their texts with descriptions of the uprising and advice for local inhabitants to maintain peaceful order. One such writer was John Singleton, author of the poem A General Description of the West-Indian Islands, first published in 1767 in Barbados. Yet this poem was not, as its title suggests, a "general description." While Singleton documents travels through Barbados, Montserrat, and St. Croix and views of the islands of the Lesser Antilles, providing scientific notes about certain plants, he also includes extensive discussions of the proper treatment of enslaved persons and creole morality, offering guidance to "all the Worthy Inhabitants of the Caribbean Isles" to whom he dedicates the poem.² Singleton presents himself as an ideal authority and, indeed, although we know little of his life, as a member of Lewis Hallam's acting company during the 1760s, he would have toured the colonies reeling from the aftermath of the Jamaican revolt.³ However, while the discussion of this first of four editions has focused on Singleton's concluding exhortations to creole enslavers to "treat with justice" those they enslave, it is important to note that the poem also seeks earlier in the text to establish stability through the natural world of the West Indies, particularly in regions claimed by fugitive and maroon communities and thus marked by Afro-Caribbean agency and knowledge.⁴ As he describes summiting volatile mounts, Singleton notes how these volcanoes also provide necessary plants for Obeah practitioners, using his poem to advise his colonial readers on both the natural challenges of the terrain and the political alternatives posed by Afro-Caribbean expertise.

The discussion of Afro-Caribbean agency and resistance in relation to the natural world was familiar to writers of the eighteenth-century West Indies. As scholars like Susan Scott Parrish and Londa Schiebinger have demonstrated, despite their extensive descriptions, detailed engravings, and vast collections, natural historians' authority was always predicated upon extracting knowledge from Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean sources and negotiating its inclusion in colonial knowledge circulation.⁵ Parrish neatly summarizes, "Colonials, only partly familiar with their environs, needed the guidance, assistance, and keen observance of any who could show themselves qualified," articulating how the keen curiosity of natural historians resulted in deep and structural dependence on colonized informants.⁶ This vexed relationship, in which writers and their sources each sought to establish authority over one another, required Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean expertise to produce natural histories, legitimating this knowledge even as colonists worked to disown these communities of any political power. And the stakes of this contact zone were high. With Vincent Brown's mapping of the Jamaican revolt, we have been able to understand how knowledge of the natural world was crucial to instigating or quelling a rebellion, as enslaved persons navigated the space between mountainous terrain and plantation settlements throughout their resistance.⁷

While the natural histories emphasized in scholarship clearly and thoroughly underscore these stakes, Singleton's poem indicates that these negotiations do not solely arise from the production of prose and more recognizably "scientific" texts. In what follows, I contend that Singleton uses poetry to grapple with and ultimately eliminate the troubled reliance of colonial knowledge on Afro-Caribbean practices and expertise. As such, I build on the scholarship concerning colonial writers' attempts to configure their informants' knowledge within European epistemologies, emphasizing the role of poetic form in this negotiation. I trace this process through Singleton's use of three guide figures in A General Description: the Muse, whom he invokes to lead him to the...