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The phrase the white man’s grave designates:
– (originally): Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa, on the Atlantic Ocean;
– (and, by extension): equatorial West Africa in general.
This phrase, now historical, refers to the high mortality rate among white colonisers of the region.
The phrase the white man’s grave occurs, for example, in the following from Malaria, the deadly disease that deserves respect, by Dr. Maeve White, General Practitioner, published in the Irish Independent (Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland) of Monday 19th June 2006 [health & living, page 9, column 4]:
Malaria infects people who’ve been bitten by an infected mosquito in whatever country these creatures hang out, which is pretty much anywhere in the world outside of Western Europe and North America.
Of the 400 million people who are infected by it each year, one million die. Most of the deaths happen in West Africa, which used to be called “the white man’s grave” and in countries south of the Sahara Desert.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the phrase white man’s grave that I have found:
1-: From Court of Honour, published in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (London, England) of June 1833 [page 209]:
A man who is volunteering to Sierra Leone is evidently possessed of a life of no value, and should never be allowed to set it against that of a respectable citizen at home. Who would fight a duel with a person just snatched from suicide? The case is precisely similar. The Britomart was waiting to take Sir John Jeffcott to “the white man’s grave.” He had not sailed, because the wind was not fair. This is just as if a man, attempting to jump from Westminster Bridge into the Thames, was caught by the skirts by the watchman. Is such a one qualified for the duello? It is said the Colonial Office are determined to bring the fugitive back. What folly! What worse punishment can they devise than the coast of Africa, among the condemned regiments? They would not, surely, exchange Sierra Leone for Australia! This would be rewarding the man!
2-: From The White Man’s Grave: A Visit to Sierra Leone, in 1834 (London: Richard Bentley, 1836), by the British author Francis John Harrison Rankin (1805-1847) [Volume 1, Preface, page viii]:
Few spots upon the earth’s face have been so uniformly pronounced deformities without having been seen. None hesitate to condemn it. It is deemed a land of miasma, contagion, and death. It bears the terrific and poetic title of the “White Man’s Grave.” Its aspect is generally suspected to present a uniformity of flats, spongy with swamps, and dotted with tombstones, over which poisonous fogs eternally brood.
3-: From The Naval & Military Gazette and East India and Colonial Chronicle (London, England) of Saturday 12th November 1836 [page 738, column 3]:
The head-quarters of the 2d West India Regt. were sent to Sierra Leone some years since to complete the corps; they were eminently successful, and it is impossible to conceive a finer body of African soldiers than those that constitute that regiment at the present time. It is almost cruel to suggest that European officers should be sent to “the white man’s grave” for such a purpose; but as it appears to be the determination of Government to garrison the West India Islands almost exclusively with black troops, it might be found to be the most effectual and ready way of obtaining them.
4-: From The Naval & Military Gazette and East India and Colonial Chronicle (London, England) of Saturday 3rd December 1836 [page 788, column 1]—this article does not specifically mention Sierra Leone:
Human life is of little value when the public good or the service demands the sacrifice; but still, by doing away with the depot in Africa, a few unfortunate Officers doomed to die there, or to linger out a miserable existence in that noxious climate, qualifying themselves for the hospital of incurables, or returning
“Green-visaged Monsters,”
nay, objects of compassion to their friends; a few of these, we say, would be spared the melancholy anticipation of looking forward from the “White Man’s grave” to healthy quarters in the West Indies.
5-: From Leaves from the Tropics. No. VI, published in The Naval & Military Gazette and East India and Colonial Chronicle (London, England) of Saturday 25th March 1837 [page 183, column 3]—the following is about Prince Rupert’s Bay, in Dominica, West Indies:
I can give no plainer or more homely representation of Prince Rupert’s Garrison than to liken it to a grave, in every acceptation and meaning of the word. […]
The sides of the grave […] are clothed with bush, jungle, and weeds of the most noxious description. Wild guavas, cotton, indigo, and many other unwholesome plants, vegetate in the rankest luxuriance on them; so that, after heavy rains, a bouquet de pestilence is sent forth from them, unequalled even at the “White Man’s Grave.”
6-: From The Liverpool Mercury, and Lancashire General Advertiser (Liverpool, Lancashire, England) of Friday 4th August 1837 [page 250, column 6]:
Sierra Leone.—By the brig Buzzard, which sailed from this colony on 25th June, arrived in this port, on Wednesday night, we learn that this (rightly named) “White Man’s Grave” was visited in May and June, with a pestilence, that exceeded in its effects any previous mortality; upwards of seventy per cent. of the European inhabitants having died in those months. Business (it is unnecessary to say) was almost wholly suspended.
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