Stroud and the Triangular Trade

18^th

Century

Sea Dog Doggerel:

A 21^st Century Shadow.

‘All

Ship-shape

And Bristol fashion’:

With river, canal and turnpike,

Cloth could be carried down to Bristol, bound for

Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Benin, Angola, Gambia.

 Then

The Door

Of No Return:

 The Middle Passage,

 Nevis, Barbados, Jamaica,

Virginia, Haiti and South Carolina.

They fill the hold with sugar, cotton, tobacco:

Commodities that still cast a ship-shape shadow. 

From

Where else

Did this nation’s

18^th century boom time come?

War,

Slavery,

Enclosure,

Exploitation

Mechanisation,

And the British Empire,

But the most lucrative of all

                             Was the shark’s feeding frenzy. 

And

Stroud lies

Hidden within the

Long decayed ledger books

Of Bristol merchants at their quayside,

Stroud Scarlet bought and sold in the damp

Teasled mill air of the tenter hooked Five Valleys,

Before exchanging use and life for human life and death

On the Middle Passage for the West Indies and the Americas.