Delight Is a Slave to Dominion: Awakening to Empire with Richard Ligon’s History

Abstract

Ecocritics are certain that delight is an engine of ethics, that what we love is what we will save, that texts teaching us to value otherkind are instruments of environmental virtue. To be clear, when I say “ecocritics,” I mean myself. Books about the Book of Nature, the universe as a system of signs with a meaning, an end-in-itself beyond human concepts of value, have been the center of my scholarship and environmentalist practice, such as they are. But there are more things in heaven and earth than I have dreamt in my philosophy. Like Hamlet with his ghostly father, I discovered to my horror a document from the seventeenth century, called A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657) by Richard Ligon, a casualty of the English Civil War. This field manual to Caribbean colonization was recovered, in photocopied form, from the Huntington Library by one of my teachers; the complete work is not currently in print, though excerpts have begun to appear in anthologies of colonial Anglophone literature.1 The scholarship treating it is modest in size, but growing.2 It is tempting to let it pass, to keep my knowledge to myself, to hope that history will drown this book. But like a tell-tale heart or an artifact of high fantasy, it wants to be found. It is a ring of power, after its fashion, unearthed from a riverbed in the midst of a war. It bears a message, and before we unmake it, we must comprehend the inscription. Delight is a slave to dominion, it says.