Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic

Notes

¹ I am indebted to Sara Suleri's The Rhetoric of English India for drawing my attention to this document.
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² My translation. The original text reads: "Dos maneras generales y principales han tenido los que allá han pasado . . . en estirpar y raer de la haz de la tierra a aquellas miserandas naciones. La una por injusticias, crueles, sangrientas y tiránicas guerras. La otra . . . opimiéndolos con la más dura, horrible, y áspera servidumbre en que jamás hombres ni bestias pudieron ser puestas . . . . La causa porque han muerto y destruido tantas y tales . . . ha sido solamente por tener por su fin último el oro y henchirse de riquezas en muy breves días, y a subir a estados muy altos y sin proporción de sus personas."
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³ In his Speech on Conciliation with America, Burke exemplifies this nostalgia for the colonial era before the Peace of Paris when he urges that Britain "return to that mode which a uniform experience has marked out to you as best, and in which you walked with security, advantage, and honor, until the year 1763" (Burke 108). Before the rise to power of Lord North and the application of George III's coercive bills, Burke continues, "everything was sweetly and harmoniously disposed" and the empire was "more united than it is now" (Burke 122). Burke's proposed conciliation with America, as opposed to economically "sophistical" imperialism, "is what becomes the dignity of a ruling people—gratuitous, unconditional, and not held out as a matter of bargain and sale" (Burke 76, 126).
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⁴ Sara Suleri insightfully notes: "Burke supplies imperial England with an idiom in which to articulate its emergent suspicion that the health of the colonizing project was dependent on a recognition of the potentially crippling structure of imperial culpability" (Suleri 26).
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⁵ Popham et. al. were far from the only British officers to make an attempt on Argentina. Among the more well-known British colonialists, John Constanse Davie, who wrote Letters from Paraguay (1805), one of the earliest British travel accounts about Spanish America, also conspired to wrest the Plata region of Argentina from Spain.
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⁶ In his Speech on Mr. Fox's East-India Bill, Burke explains that although the people of India are not descended of the English, they match—and even precede—the English in civilization and dignity: "This multitude of men does not consist of an abject and barbarous populace . . . but a people for ages civilized and cultivated; cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods. There, have been . . . princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence . . . . There, is to be found an ancient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning, and history . . . a nobility of great antiquity and renown; a multitude of cities, not exceeded in population and trade by those of the first class in Europe; merchants and bankers, individual houses of whom have once vied in capital with the bank of England . . . millions of ingenious manufacturers and mechanicks" (Burke 295-96).
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⁷ Originally envisioned in 1789, the first version of Madoc appeared in print in 1794. It was followed by a revised version in 1797 and a final, expanded version in 1805. Madoc was reprinted with minor alterations several times throughout the nineteenth century, and was particularly appreciated by the young Shelley and Byron.
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⁸ George Burnett, who planned to emigrate to America with Southey and Coleridge, described the "grand object" of the Pantisocratic movement as "the Abolition of Property; at least of individual property. Conceiving the present unequal distribution of property, to be the source of by far the greater part of the moral evil that prevails in the world; by removal of the cause, we thought, and as it appears to me justly thought, that the effect must also cease" (Quoted in Roe 157).
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⁹ It should be remembered that Southey's foisting of Pantisocracy onto Inca law is a two-way street, as many of his Pantisocratic ideals came initially from the study of Inca and other Native American civilizations.
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¹⁰ Quotations from the Bedford letter follow Pratt's editorial decisions: "‹ . . . › indicates an ellipsis; [ . . . ] a deletion or an insertion written above the line. Southey's spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have all been retained" (Pratt, "Pantisocratic" 35). Southey habitually spelled Manco Capac as "Mango Capac."
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¹¹ The sources Madoc draws on include Peter Martyr, Bernal Díaz's Historia verdadera, Gomara's Conquest of the West India, Cortés's Cartas de Relación, Clavigero, Torquemada, Garcilaso de la Vega, Ercilla y Zuñiga's La Araucana, Oviedo's Relación sumaria de la Historia Natural de las Indias, de Bry, La Crónica de Pero Nino, Herrera, Gregorio García's Origen de los Indios, Padilla's Historia de la Fundación y Discurso de la Provincia de Santiago de Mexico de la orden de los Predicadores, and del Techo's History of Paraguay. Southey also derives information from French, English and Anglo-American sources, such as Lafitau's Sur les Moeurs de Sauvages Amériquains, Charlevoix, Roger Williams, Heriot, Timberlake, Mackenzie, Brainerd, and Carver's Travels, intermingling details of various tribes and topographies of North and South America, and including the very occasional reference to Asia.
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¹² William Robertson's History of America (1777) presents another excellent instance of Britain's rescripting of the Spanish conquest of America. In North America, Joel Barlow's epics, The Vision of Columbus and the Columbiad, represent a project similar both in historical scope and nationalist aims.
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¹³ Interestingly, Thomas de Quincey identifies the Iberia from which the good colonist of Egypt, Prince Gebir, hails in Walter Savage Landor's eponymous poem as "spiritual England" (Quoted in Leask, 26).
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¹⁴ An Exposé, 1810, 11. This warning came as a response to the increasingly prevalent  wish that Britain, and not Spain, possessed the wealth of Spanish America. One English columnist expressed this desire as follows: "The more I contemplate on the filth and laziness of these people, the more I regret the miserly Henry, when applied to by Columbus, was not inspired by the demon of avarice, if no more laudable motive could have actuated him, to have fitted out that noble adventurer, and by that means to have secured this country, this rich delightful country, to the Crown of Britain. The Spaniards possess blessings they never did, nor ever will know how to appreciate; for, slaves to gold, they neglect every other advantage. Had the English possessed this southern world, thousands and tens of thousands, nay millions, would have blest the hour when they became their conquerors" (Quoted in Jones 65-6).
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¹⁵ Significantly, Barbauld's poem was met by an anxious rebuttal from Southey the reviewer, and the aging Barbauld suffered vicious attacks, both on her poem and her person, by a host of intellectuals who had previously supported her work.
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¹⁶ All further references to Madoc will be to this edition unless otherwise stated.
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¹⁷ In addition to Madoc, the example of Owain Glyndwr is particularly characteristic. After being considered throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a "usurper or misguided rebel . . . . Glendwr seems to burst forth in splendor in the 1770s as a national hero" (Morgan 81). During the same period, a new and widely-read version of Madoc's history appeared in 1790, by Dr. John Williams.
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¹⁸ See also Gwyn Williams's In Search of Beulah Land for an extensive treatment of the Welsh renaissance.
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¹⁹ Linda Colley notes, "Rich, landed, and talented males from Wales, Scotland, England, and to a lesser extent Ireland became welded later in the 1770s into a single ruling class that intermarried, shared the same outlook, and took to itself the business of governing, fighting for, and profiting from greater Britain" (Colley, 325-6).
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²⁰ Significantly, when John Evans was sent in 1790 to investigate the Welsh Indians, he was financed, not by the British government, but by the Welsh. Kindled by the American Revolution, Welsh interest in America focused on the movement to immigrate to America in order to found a Welsh-speaking colony in the new republic.
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²¹ Southey believed that the "general fault of Epic Poems is, that we feel little interest for the Heroes they celebrate [ . . . ] to engage the unprejudiced, there must be more of human feelings than is generally to be found in the character of Warriors." (Southey, Joan of Arc, quoted in Pratt, "Revising" 153). However, as Pratt says, "This did not mean that Southey was to follow the example of some of his contemporaries and attempt to produce a pacifist epic" (Pratt, "Revising" 153). The example of a pacifist epic cited by Pratt is Joseph Cottle's rather limp Alfred, An Epic Poem, in Twenty-Four Books (1800). Southey's generic revisionism did not sit well with reviewers, one of whom sardonically quipped: "We behold the author mounted on a strange animal, something between a rough Welsh pony and a Peruvian sheep, whose utmost capriole only tends to land him in the mud," and more sarcastically: "there is nothing in Homer, Virgil, or Milton, in any degree resembling the beauties of Madoc" (Ferriar 104).
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²² The link between Madoc and Malinal is naturalized via ritual engagement with American soil. Malinal approaches Madoc just as the latter has finished interring his father's bones. As Malinal speaks, "In sorrow come I here, a banished man . . . Cut off from all my kin, from all old ties / Divorced," one recalls Madoc's flight from his brother's corrupt reign. Poignantly, Malinal's brother, the Aztec leader, Yuhudthiton, is there to hear this speech, and like the Welsh King David, haunted by his brother's righteous words, "hearkened he as one whose heart perforce / Suppressed its instinct" (Southey, Madoc 227-8).
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²³ Work by Sara Suleri, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak has opened the subject of colonial complicity in the representation of British India, revealing "the dynamic of powerlessness underlying the telling of colonial stories" (Suleri, 1). See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics and Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse."
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²⁴ In this context, it is worth exploring the extent to which Southey's Madoc was influenced by Alfonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga's sixteenth-century creole epic La Araucana, which he knew of through William Hayley's An Essay on Epic Poetry (1782).

In 1807, Southey wrote, without much hope, "We are going upon a wrong plan with respect to South America, and a ruinous one . . . . What should be done is to throw the Spanish colonies open, and leave them alone" (Quoted in Humphreys 8).
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²⁵ Madoc's encomium on Aztlan reveals an inability to separate the land from the woman he conquers: "Queen of the Valley! thou art beautiful!" (Southey, Madoc 356). This aspect of Southey's strategy for naturalizing conquest is very much in line with the tradition of Spanish conquest narratives against and over which he wrote. Annette Kolodny points out that standard colonial discourse encodes a gendered ur-narrative by which the American land is conflated with the native woman. See Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American life and letters.
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²⁶ Southey's implicit reference to the natural devastation of imperial Rome is clearly no accident, and participates in a larger discourse that defined Spanish American volcanic activity, like its Italian correlative, as a warning against the arrogance of empire.
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²⁷ Conflations of Catholics and Aztecs abound in Madoc. In another scene, the Aztecs "piled a heap of sedge before our host, / And warned us: 'Sons of Ocean! from the land / Of Aztlan, while ye may, depart in peace!  / Before the fire hence shall be extinguished, hence!  / Or, even as yon dry sedge amid the flame, / So shall ye be consumed.' The arid heap  / They kindled, and the rapid flame ran up, / And blazed, and died away (Southey, Madoc 65). Southey furnishes this action with a footnote that leaves no room for misunderstanding his design of dissolving Aztec crimes into Catholic ones: "As the sacring of the new-elected pope passeth (as the manner is) before St. Gregory's Chapel, the master of the ceremonies goeth before him, bearing two dry reeds, at the end of the one a burning candle tied, and at the other a handfull of flax, the which he setteth on fire, saying, with a loud voice, 'Pater Sancte, sic trasit gloria mundi" (Southey, Madoc 171n).
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²⁸ Nigel Leask explains that British demand for Chinoiserie in the Romantic Era is "rationalized in terms of an (always risky) analogy with the imperial triumphs of the classical world. For the orientalist poet Tom Medwin, English Romantic literature found a precedent and alibi in the Athenian practice of incorporating the imagery of its subjugated enemies into its own culture, caryatids from the Peloponnese, flowery eastern capitals from Persia" (Leask 8).
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²⁹ For an shrewd analysis of how eighteenth-century British painting also worked to soften the violent seizure of American lands by portraying Native Americans, rather than their conquerors, as seduced by commodities, see B. Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting, 56-80.
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