Thomas Herbert, an English traveler near the Cape Verde Islands during the early seventeenth century, linked the malevolent scents of the underworld to Africa when he wrote that the “Aethiopian” inhabitants of the islands lived as “idolaters” whose weather during Herbert’s time spent off the West African coast “had no wind” and “was very sulphurous and raging hot, so that (albeit we had … Awnings to shade us, and were almost naked) we could enjoy no rest, nor eate, drinke, lie still, or what else without excessive sweating day and night.”1 For Herbert and many other English travelers during the colonizing centuries to follow, the corrupt airs off the African coast were considered hot, hellish, and stinking, often emerging from a land of increasingly commodified and objectified beings from the Torrid Zone who were progressively part of the very cause of diseased miasmas that emerged from deep within the Dark Continent.