Sickened by the third of his public reproaches for fornication on 6th August 1786, and facing financial ruin, Robert Burns planned to emigrate just days later. Fleeing from his future wife’s family and from his entanglements in Scotland, he had arranged to sail with a Captain Smith aboard the Nancy, a ship bound from Greenock to Savanna la Mar in western Jamaica.
The poet had arranged to serve as assistant overseer on a slave plantation. His “master” was Charles Douglas, a Scottish plantation owner at Port Antonio whose brother was known to Burns in Ayr. These circumstances lie behind such verses as “On a Scotch Bard Gone to the West Indies,” whose penultimate stanza reads:
Jamaica bodies, use him weel,
An’ hap him in a cozie biel [place]:
Ye’ll find him ay a daintie chiel,
An fou o’ glee:
He wad na wrang’d the vera Diel [devil],
That’s owre the Sea. Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, published that year, were warmly received and he decided to stay in Scotland. But imagine, for a moment, that events had taken a different turn and that Burns did set sail for the Caribbean.
Before he left Ayrshire, Burns took part in a debate with fellow freemasons. He seems to have shown some awkwardness about committing himself to the practice of slavery, contending that eventually slaves might be granted “independence”; most of his friends, however, argued that the relationship between slaves and masters should remain as it was, since they were “better together.”
The poet had never been to sea before he began his Jamaican voyage. His surviving correspondence (including fragments preserved by Captain Smith) indicates that as soon as the Nancy left the Firth of Clyde, Burns began to be violently sea-sick. This continued for weeks. His discomfort was heightened by dental problems (common on board ship in this period), which he described as a “violent toothache”—perhaps an abscess. In the mid-Atlantic, Burns wrote his posthumously published poem, “On a Toothache during my Voyage to Jamaica,” which begins, “My curse upon your venom’d stang/ That shoots my tortured gums alang!”
Before setting off, the 27-year-old poet had been warned that the considerable journey from Savanna la Mar to Port Antonio would bring a high risk of fever “in consequence of hard travelling in the sun.” Lacking any experience of prolonged exposure to tropical sunshine, Burns chose to ignore such warnings; weakened by sea-sickness and infected gums, he contracted a fever soon after the Nancy docked at Savanna la Mar. He wrote to his parents and to his brother Gilbert in Ayrshire, asking them to send money for medicine; and his master Charles Douglas contacted a noted Scots Jamaican physician, Dr McBeath, begging assistance for the young assistant overseer (“It will cost me dear to find another such”).
Though Burns’s family sent money, it arrived too late. Growing weaker daily, he lay for three weeks in a Savanna la Mar “fever house” where his fellow inmates were a mixture of poor Europeans and those few slaves considered sufficiently valuable to be worth saving. Listening to the agonies of the people around him (but also lamenting the riches that the West Indies might have brought him), Burns penned his last known poem, “To my Brother Fever Patients.” In it his attitude towards “the negroes” seems ambivalent at times, but the most moving verse does not specify whether the “neebors” addressed are masters or slaves:
When fevers burn, or agues freeze us,
Rheumatics gnaw, or colics squeeze us,
Our neebor’s sympathy does ease us
Wi’ pitying moan;
But thee, thou hell of a’ diseases!
They mock our groan. Burns died on 25th January 1787 on the morning of his 28th birthday. He was buried the following day in an unmarked grave in a small churchyard at Savanna la Mar, overlooking the Caribbean.
Alhough there were calls in Scotland for a second edition of his poems, these soon petered out. It was not until the 20th century that a few scholars called attention to the remarkable promise of some of the verse which Burns had published in Kilmarnock. In 1987, to mark the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Professor David Daiches, to whom Burns’s modern reputation owes so much, arranged for a stone obelisk to be placed close to what is believed to be the site of this obscure poet’s last resting place. It is inscribed simply, “Robert Burns, poet and assistant overseer, born Alloway, Scotland, 25th January 1759; died Savanna la Mar, 25th January 1787.”
