We start with an image inscribed with a sign of the zodiac, the tropic of Cancer. Entitled ‘The Torrid Zone’, a delirious fallen archangel, fuelled with opium, clambers over the arc of the picture to reveal two scenarios. They are ironically captioned as the ‘Blessings of Jamaica’. On the top is a languorous siesta of white folk. They are lazing away their afternoon, reclining on sofas, reading the newspaper, shielding themselves from the burning sun, or embarking on what seems to be some form of foreplay, for the lady with the fan is revealing more than propriety would have allowed. These are the decadent beneficiaries of the island, the genteel creoles, the lethargic planters and their kin or agents who watched sugarcane turn into gold. Below them are the fulminant dangers of living on the tropical island. First and foremost, the deadly viral yellow fever, here depicted as a cadaverous creature, a grim reaper with hourglass in hand, mouth raging with fever. To its right is a scorpion bitten corpse; to its left is a dying man who tries to contain the West Indian gripes in his bowels with his clawed hand. And behind them, as a backdrop, are hieroglyphical figures, insects and skulls that reinforce how deadly a place Jamaica really was. A hallucinatory bestiary; a veritable hellhole of mortality.

The water-coloured print was created by Abraham James and published by William Holland in London in October 1800. It came in the wake of revelations about the huge mortality rate among soldiers sent out to contain black insurrection in St Domingue (Haiti) and to defend Jamaica, the principal sugar island of the British West Indies. Indeed, Abraham James was himself a participant in that campaign, an ensign in the 67th South Hampshire Regiment of Foot, evacuated from the French island to Jamaica in 1798 and staying there until his regiment left in 1801. In his spare time he lampooned the social mores of creole society whose pretensions to gentility he found derisory, and whose hauteur and brittle sense of honour often clashed with the regimental bucks of the British army who were garrisoned there.