3 - Residence

Summary

[I]n Africa we were only tenants of the soil which we held at the good will of the natives.

Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and the Plantations, 14 February 1752.

After four days of exploring False Cape, Smeathman headed for the Bananas. On the boat's crossing he passed a large water spout, but these were ‘so often & so well described’ that he did not elaborate, especially as no snatches of verse came to mind. He saw swallows similar to the European kind, ‘playing about & skimming over the surface of the water’, as well as some tropical birds, flying fish, a few sharks, and two Grampus whales ‘at no great distance tumbling about as the Poet expresses it in “unwieldy joy”’. The poet is the Scot, James Thomson, author of The Seasons, one of the most popular poems of the eighteenth century. In ‘Spring’, the ‘broad monsters of the foaming deep’ are roused from ‘the deep ooze and gelid cavern’ to ‘flounce and tumble in unwieldy joy’. That Smeathman loved Thomson can be seen in his later redrafting and embellishment of his journal with liberal quotations from The Seasons. The poem's popularity lay in its moral and philosophical reflections on man's relationship to the created world, a world presided over by an all-powerful God whose spirit resides in the great and eternal forms of nature. One of the essays Smeathman later read to London's Society for Promoting Natural History in 1782 opens with these appropriately swaggering lines from Thomson's ‘Hymn on the Seasons’:

Should fate command me to the farthest verge

Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,

Rivers unknown to song …

… ‘tis nought to me;

Since God is ever present, ever felt,

In the void waste as in the city full;

And where He vital spreads there must be joy.

Smeathman followed this quotation with the claim that ‘No Science, no study, no pursuit—affords so many pure sources of rational gratification, mental improvement and pious adoration, as that of Natural History’.