The Myth of History and Coleridge’s Caribbean Bath

By Alexandra L. Milsom, Hostos Community College, CUNY

Ten years ago, Necee Regis wrote in the Washington Post that sharing her love of vacations in Nevis with other travelers was like “shaking a secret handshake in a club.” Like nearly every commercial and journalistic piece I have found that promotes Nevis to tourists, Regis’s article names Samuel Taylor Coleridge as an early visitor to the island’s “therapeutic hot springs.” She lists Coleridge and then a British monarch as visitors, as if associating the island with such illustrious guests authenticates it as a destination with a particular sort of elite and cultural clout.

The fact is that Samuel Taylor Coleridge never visited Nevis, let alone the Caribbean. The story of Coleridge’s trip to Nevis endures because of a Victorian guidebook that fails to mention, probably on purpose, that the first name of the Coleridge who did, in fact, visit Nevis was “Henry.” Henry Nelson Coleridge – the poet’s nephew (and son-in-law)—memorialized his own voyage in an 1832 volume entitled Six Months in the West Indies in 1825. If Coleridge—any old Coleridge—can still be invoked to sell a Caribbean vacation to people who might not even read Romantic poetry, then it remains financially advantageous to keep using the story of his bath. Doing so perpetuates a profitable colonial fantasy and relies heavily on the authority still conferred by the English literary canon.

A colonial fantasy that can still sell tickets to today’s tourist implicates a Romanticism that still centers England, lionizes its literary celebrities, and avoids mentioning the unpalatable violence of empire as much as possible. In “Novel and History: Plot and Plantation,” Sylvia Wynter argues that lying about history in this way has always been profitable, which is why it persists. She explains, “The world had to be kept safe for the market economy. History, to help in this task, had to be distorted. The myth of history was used by the plantation to keep its power secure.”[1] Today, that very “myth of history” encourages tourists to ignore, or at best politely deplore, the history of enslavement and the poverty that persists in these tourist destinations.

[1] Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5 (1971): 100-101.

A photograph of the Hot Springs in Nevis, located on the site of the ruins of the Bath House Hotel, taken by Daniel Farrell on 4 June 2010

"File: Nevis Hot Spring.jpg." Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. 2 Sep 2022, 07:01 UTC. 25 Mar 2023, 20:52 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Nevis_Hot_Spring.jpg&oldid=686255367>.

Bath Hotel, Nevis, taken by Jose Anjo in the 19th century

"File: Bath Hotel, Nevis, photograph by Jose Anjo of Antigua.jpg." Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. 23 Jan 2023, 14:04 UTC. 25 Mar 2023, 20:54 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Bath_Hotel,_Nevis,_photograph_by_Jose_Anjo_of_Antigua.jpg&oldid=727271272>.

Cover of the third edition of John Osborne’s Guide to the West Indies, Madeira, Mexico, Northern South America, &c (Walton and Mitchell, 1845)

This was the volume that included seven references to “Mr. Coleridge” and a poem written by that same “Mr. Coleridge.” This essay argues that these ambiguously cited references facilitated the mistaken association of Nevis tourism with the famous Romantic poet.

Page 294 from Osborne’s Guide to the West Indies (1845)

This page quotes a poem by “Mr. Coleridge” in which he reminisces about his tropical voyage. Again, by using only the author’s last name, the guidebook facilitates confusion. 

About the Author

Alexandra L. Milsom is an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. She specializes in Romanticism, Victorian Literature, and tourism. You can find her publications in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, the Keats-Shelley Journal, and Studies in Romanticism.