Europe in the Caribbean, Part I: The Age of Catholic Kings

Writing books and publishing travellers’ tales on the West Indies was a fashionable occupation in the later eighteenth century, for interest among Europe’s educated classes in these remote but wealth-providing islands on the other side of the Atlantic was always lively and inquisitive. Although political pamphleteering played an important part in this literature, dealing as it did with territories that had representative but not responsible government and were, like the North American Colonies, subject to taxation without consent, many writers touched only lightly on such grievances and preferred to dwell on the sensuous beauties and social amenities of what Sir Walter Ralegh had called ‘The Paradise of the World’. Dr John Quier, a ‘practitioner of Physic and Surgery’, who arrived in Jamaica in 1767 and in the nearly fifty years of his residence there - he died in 1822 -acquired a great local reputation as a slave doctor, pioneer of inoculation for smallpox and, politically, as an enlightened member of the Assembly, Jamaica’s Lower House, found that he must correct some of the mistaken impressions spread about the island of his choice by these fashionable men of letters.