Emmanuel Appadocca: Or, Blighted Life; A Tale of the Boucaneers

A distinguished Trinidadian jurist of mixed race, Philip published this novel in 1854, when he was a 24-year-old law student, as a protest against slavery in the U.S. In particular, Philip decried ""the cruel manner in which the slave holders of America deal with their slave-children,"" i.e., the offspring of white masters and black mothers. The charismatic, ""high-spirited and sensitive"" pirate Emmanuel Appadocca sets out to revenge himself on rich sugar planter James Wilmington for having dishonored Emmanuel's black mother and abandoned Emmanuel, his mulatto son. This pirate story, widely considered the first Caribbean novel, is part swashbuckling adventure, part ""exquisite philosophy,"" a mixture of social critique and aristocratic claims on behalf of Philip's fellow Creoles. Philip delights in turning the age's most revered works to his own uses: the novel begins with an epigraph from Euripides (in the original), prefaces each chapter with lines from one of Shakespeare's plays, and looks most obviously to Sir Walter Scott for a model of Romance. In the land- and seascapes, Philips comes into his own, although few readers will relish his renditions of Caribbean dialects or his unthinking comic stereotypes of blacks. Despite the novel's artistic flaws, students of Caribbean politics and culture, addicts of seafaring novels and seekers of protest literature will find this rediscovered Trinidadian classic interesting. Commentaries by William E. Cain and Selwyn R. Cudjoe (both of Wellesley College) place the novel in historical perspective. (Aug.)