The Cruise;

£1,800 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Sabin 21240. Rare. OCLC/COPAC record copies at BL Cambridge , Glasgow and St Andrews in the UK; Stanford and Texas only in the USA. No copies recorded for sale on Rare Book Hub. An eye-witness account of the West Indies in verse - with highly detailed supplementary notes - which celebrate the beauty and romance of the islands alongside their troubling history of violence, slavery, colonial rule and the challenging weather conditions. Robert Nugent Dunbar (d.1866) lived for many years in the Antilles and he signs his preface to this poem from the, “seldom sufficiently estimated” Antilles in March 1843. Dunbar complains that the Antilles are, “little known to the generality of European readers…every body is aware that they produce sugar, rum and molasses; but, beyond this, very slight information is current in Europe concerning them” (viii). This narrative poem, in ninety-seven Spenserian stanzas, presents a shipboard and exploratory overview of the Antilles from Curaçao, Barbados and Trinidad, through Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Saint Martin, Saint Kitts and Nevis, to Saint Thomas in the Virgins (with Tortola and Virgin Gorda), and finally Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Generally the descriptions of the different islands are positive and celebrate the landscape and people with Dunbar using the area as many of the Romantic poets might have used Italy as an idealised muse, but Dunbar does not shy away from the darker aspects of the West Indies:

• Year: 1835

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