|
Southey's idea of shipping Irish Catholics to the colonies became reality as the politics of landownership forced the poor to emigrate. But it depended on the rapid growth of new colonies in the period. In 1815, Cape Colony was confirmed under British rule after being twice taken from the Dutch in 1795 and 1806. Despite the fact that ninety per cent of the colony was Dutch, it became the focus for British territorial expansion. In 1809, the legal status of the indigenous population was defined in such a way as to oblige them to work for the Europeans, and in 1812 they were virtually enslaved by the Boers. In 1820, British settlement of the Cape began in earnest when 5,000 emigrants arrived, bringing with them the London Missionary Society.[13] British law was imposed in their wake and English became the colony's official language in 1822. The native Khoikhoi ('Hottentot') were given legal protection and slavery was abolished in 1833, leading to the Great Trek of the Boers, in which thousands moved Northward, establishing the Orange Free State and the Transvaal republics. Although the Cape did not catch the attention of Romantic writers to the extent of other geo-political regions, it was a source for the popular tale by Mary Butt Sherwood which Moira Ferguson analyses in this volume. It was the subject for the work of the Scottish poet, Thomas Pringle. Pringle emigrated there in 1820 as part of the British drive to colonize the Cape. His collections of verse and prose, Ephemerides (1828) and African Sketches (1834), applied the rhetoric of the picturesque to the South African landscape. J. M. Coetzee argues that the intractability of the South African landscape to European notions of the sublime may have been linked to the absence of an aggressive politics of expansion in the area, which lacked the great American frontiers.[14] Pringle also adapts the typical Romantic ballad to subjects native to South Africa in poems such as 'The Bechuana Boy', 'Song of the Wild Bushman', and his sonnets on the three tribal groups of the Cape, 'The Hottentot', 'The Caffer' and 'The Bushmen'. 15
|
|
A further colony of settlement was added to the British Empire when James Cook charted the coast of Australia in 1770, on his first voyage of exploration. In 1788, a colony was established in what Cook had named New South Wales when a fleet of eleven vessels containing 736 convicted criminals, a Governor and some officials arrived there. Transportation was an important part of the British penal system and, after the revolution of 1776 prevented any further convict settlements in North America, an alternative destination needed to be found. By 1852, some 160,000 convicts were transported to the new colony which became a major supplier of wool for the British textile industry.[16] Not surprisingly, it is the penal aspect of the colony's character which features in writing of the period. Up until 1820, views of Australian nature were largely created by the experience of the colonists who settled around Sydney Harbour and Cumberland Plain. For the colonists, Australian scenery appeared visually monotonous and led to feelings of melancholy in those who surveyed it.[17] Southey's 'Botany Bay Eclogues' (1794) use 'this savage shore' at the 'farthest limits of the world' as a background for an indictment of social injustice and penal severity, yet also depict a land of potential opportunity, uncorrupted by European civilization. Southey's 'Eclogues' gloss over the real hardship endured by the colony:
|
Welcome, ye wild plains
Unbroken by the plough, undelved by hand
Of patient rustic; where for lowing herds,
And for the music of the bleating flocks,
Alone is heard the kangaroo's sad note
Deepening in distance. Welcome, wilderness,
Nature's domain! for here, as yet unknown
The comforts and the crimes of polish'd life,
Nature benignly gives to all enough,
Denies to all superfluity.[18]
|
Ironically, it was to a 'moral' Botany Bay that Byron, perhaps with the 'Eclogues' in mind, was to sentence Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge for their 'apostacy' in Don Juan (Canto iii, stanza xciv).[19] Byron may have been alluding to the Crown's 1790s practice of transporting reformers to Botany Bay under legislation against sedition. Transportation was one of the fates that Coleridge's radical friend, John Thelwall, would have had in mind as an alternative destiny to being hanged for treason when he penned his sonnet 'On the Report of the Death of Thomas Muir, on Board the Surprise, in his Passage to Botany Bay'.[20] But, by and large, the colony is simply represented as a land unwounded by plough or spade and suitable for the erasure of either the individual's guilt or society's iniquities. From the start, Australian nature was, as Bernard Smith puts it, seen as 'something to be worked upon and made congenial for human occupation'.[21] This was the tenor of the medallion Josiah Wedgwood fashioned out of clay which had been sent from New South Wales. On it was stamped the legend, 'Hope encouraging Art and Labour, under the Influence of Peace, to pursue the employment necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement.' The medallion was accompanied with a dedicatory poem by Erasmus Darwin, The Visit of Hope to Botany Bay, which envisaged a municipal and agricultural future for the colony. Australia provided a congenial space for Darwin's 'progressive and evolutionary speculations in natural philosophy'.[22] The aborigines, although a frequent subject in the colony's visual art, scarcely feature in the poetry of the time. Despite an initial attempt to idealize the inhabitants of New Holland as noble savages, it was the aborigines who were to rival the 'Hottentot' for the distinction of being, in European eyes, the lowest link in nature's chain between man and animal.[23]
|