Captain John Gabriel Stedman served in a Dutch military force sent to Surinam in South America to surpress a slave rebellion in the Dutch colony. During the five years he served there he kept a detailed diary with an account of his personal and military experiences, and the natural environment he encountered. He returned to Europe in 1777. In 1791 he submitted to Joseph Johnson, the publisher with whom Blake frequently worked, the manuscript written from the diary. It was lavishly illustrated with the fauna and flora indigenous to Surinam, living conditions, military expeditions, and the treatment of the slave population. The majority of the 80 illustrations were of animals and plants which Stedman drew in meticulous detail. Blake, however, was engaged to provide several engravings illustrating the brutality endured by slaves.
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| Wikipedia Commons Illustration to Stedman's Five Years Expedition Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave |
Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Plate 3, (E 47)
[Oothoon speaks:]
"How can I be defild when I reflect thy image pure?
Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on. & the soul prey'd on by woe
The new wash'd lamb ting'd with the village smoke & the bright swan
By the red earth of our immortal river: I bathe my wings.
And I am white and pure"
Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Plate 5, (E 48)
[Oothoon speaks:]
"Does he who contemns poverty, and he who turns with abhorrence
From usury: feel the same passion or are they moved alike?
How can the giver of gifts experience the delights of the merchant?
How the industrious citizen the pains of the husbandman.
How different far the fat fed hireling with hollow drum;
Who buys whole corn fields into wastes, and sings upon the heath:
How different their eye and ear! how different the world to them!
With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer?
What are his nets & gins & traps. & how does he surround him
With cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude,
To build him castles and high spires. where kings & priests may dwell.
Till she who burns with youth. and knows no fixed lot; is bound
In spells of law to one she loaths: and must she drag the chain
Of life, in weary lust! must chilling murderous thoughts. obscure
The clear heaven of her eternal spring? to bear the wintry rage
Of a harsh terror driv'n to madness, bound to hold a rod
Over her shrinking shoulders all the day"
Michael Davis in William Blake: A New Kind of Man wrote this passage relating Blake's personal experience as it affected his attempts to eliminate all forms of tyranny:
"Blake saw many Negroes on the London streets: runaway slaves, their flesh indelibly branded with their owners' marks; paid servants, apprentices, vagrants. Many of the Negroes who had served with the British forces in America were sent to London at the end of the war and became beggars. Although more than four hundred were shipped to Sierra Leone, many stayed in London and became a social problem for years as 'vagrant blacks.' Conversation with Stedman filled in the background of such outcasts. Blake's passionate Vision of the Daughters of Albion, which he was writing and engraving in 1792, was affected in its attitude to slavery by the cruel subject of his illustrations for Stedman's book, and in its narrative by Stedman's marriage to Joanna. Blake's poem is a protest against various restrictions besides the slavery of Negroes, and a plea for liberty in religion, morality and sex. It shows a deep sympathy towards women, and attacks their oppressors. Life's cruelties and restrictions, which Blake sees to be inter-related, prompt his challenging motto on the title page: 'The Eye sees more than the Heart Knows.' Only when human hearts experience true feeling will there be freedom from the tyrannies we see every day." (Page 52)
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