Long was committed to a depiction of Jamaica as a successful ‘commercial society’ where white people could live comfortably on the labour of the enslaved. He mapped the island for his readers in such a way as to reassure them that the boundaries between the free and the unfree were secure. His picture provided a full account of island defences, against both external and internal enemies. He drew on his favourite English poets and writers to inspire poetic renditions of the beauties of this tropical paradise in which art and nature combined their glories. The island’s fecundity was there to be harnessed for profit. His racialized cartography utilized maps, engravings, tables and listings of commodities to illustrate boundless potential. Nature could be improved, tamed and catalogued, as people were. Alarming tales of colonists’ mortality could be challenged, mosquitoes kept at bay. White settlers could live a healthy life if only they would embrace moderation in all things. As an Enlightenment man and an enthusiastic reader of natural histories, Long was keen to represent the island as en route to a more civilized and ordered state, with more roads, more maps, more barracks, more settlements. But, he had to admit, it was a society sorely in need of more public virtue.

My essay utilizes a comparative interdisciplinary approach to read William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) alongside paintings and prints of his Jamaican estates by George Robertson. The essay considers how Caribbean people see their landscape, but more crucially how that seeing has been shaped by visual and scribal pre-texts. As Helen Tiffin argues, Caribbean people’s relation to their landscape is linked ‘with histories of transplantation, slavery and colonialism’ but also with our assimilation of ‘imported European traditions of land and landscape perception and representation’. How we see the Caribbean landscape now is largely determined by earlier ways of seeing which constructed tropical colonies. With Krista Thompson and Jill Casid, I argue that ‘imperial picturesque landscaping aesthetics’ in Beckford’s text are reinforced by the images, to naturalize colonial transplantation and mask the materialist matrix of the plantation economy by imposing a screen of picturesque composition.