LETTERS OF THE INDIES, THE, comprise more than the books written by visitors to the sugar islands. Those books are readily counted; the letters, sermons, local print, and songs by which the islanders have represented their own life are less conveniently assembled. The geographical term is here restricted to the Commonwealth's Indies (q.v.). It does not turn every English account of the Caribbean or the neighbouring main into a document of Commonwealth possession.
The distinction is particularly necessary in the case of Aphra Behn (q.v.). The Slave of Surinam, a True History (1688) concerns a plantation upon the main of Guiana, and recollects its English period before Surinam (q.v.) passed to the Dutch in 1667. Its continued reading in the islands belongs to the history of their conscience and their books, not to an enlargement of their boundaries. It was read because its persons and transactions were intelligible where sugar was grown by slaves. A reader required no common flag to recognise a common usage.
The older printed description of an island commonly proceeds from harbour to estate, from estate to produce, and from produce to the comfort or inconvenience of its owner. Its literary accomplishment should not be denied merely because its order is interested. The best descriptions have a precise ear for conversation and a lively sense of the delays by which a projected fortune becomes a debt. But the labourer appears chiefly as one of those delays or as an item in the remedy. He may be described at considerable length without ever becoming a person whose purposes direct the account.
The songs supply a different arrangement of attention. A refrain names a road, a task, or someone absent; successive singers add the particulars which the occasion requires. The return of the common words holds the company together while allowing individual recollection its turn. To print the refrain once and suppress its repetitions is economical of paper and destructive of the form. The repetitions are where the company answers. For the related practice and its history see MUSIC OF THE FREEDMEN, THE (q.v.). The island traditions are not made identical with those of Carolina by having suffered under the same trade.
Emancipation, the Severance (q.v.), and the restoration of Commonwealth rule in 1838-39 altered the conditions of authorship without at once equalizing the means of publication. A schoolmaster might possess a manuscript and no money for paper; a planter might possess both and little to say which had not already been printed. The local sheet, shared or read aloud, consequently deserves a place beside the bound volume in any account of the audience.
The teachers trained at the Freedmen's College of New Carthage (q.v.) have carried books and methods between Carolina and the islands. Dinah Canaan's (q.v.) Hymns of the Charter have passed by this and the older congregational road into the island churches. Their use is neither a mere importation of taste nor an assertion that all local experience is the same. A congregation chooses what it can make answer to its own condition. The literary historian who records the arrival of a book should therefore attend also to what its new readers require it to mean. (J. E. C.)