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[[File:William Blake - Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave - etching in book by John G. Stedman.jpg|thumb|upright|''Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave''by William Blake after John G. Stedman in Stedman's book ''Narrative, of a five years' expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam''.]]
However, Mannix and Cowley's interpretation of the poem based on the quoted lines is at odds with the more detailed analysis of the full poem by Dr. Regulus Allen. She concluded that neither Edwards or Teale condoned intimate relations between white men and their black slaves. The poem indicates the blame for such relationships lay with the Black Venus herself. "What would seem an acknowledgment of the capture of African people and the violation of black women is inverted into the Sable Venus’s conquest of European men . . . Through the representation of black women as sexual predators, the poem is able to deny the realities of slavery as well as white men’s desire for African women". Also, the classical details of the painting were more than just a way to show the painters learning. They were intentionally included to convey meaning that would be interpretable to learned gentlemen. They act together with Stothard's depiction of the Sable Venus as "thick and muscular" (very different from classical white beauty) to convey the temptation of white man's "desire for the undesirable" and its unmentionable consequences.<ref>{{cite journal
|first1=Regulus |last1=Allen
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[[File:William Blake - Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave - etching in book by John G. Stedman.jpg|thumb|upright|''Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave''by William Blake after John G. Stedman in Stedman's book ''Narrative, of a five years' expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam''.
Mannix and Cowley's book and article include two engravings by [[William Blake]] after paintings by John Gabriel Stedman: [[John Gabriel Stedman#Stedman and slavery|"Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave"]] in ''Black Cargoes'' and [[John Gabriel Stedman#Blake's illustrations|"A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows"]] in their American Heritage article "Middle Passage". Both engravings originally appeared in Stedman's book ''The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam''.<ref>{{cite book
|title=Narrative, of a five years' expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the wild coast of South America, from the year 1772, to 1778
|volume=1
|first1=John Gabriel |last1=Stedman
|others=Includes prints (some by William Blake) after paintings by the author.
|pages=325{{ndash}}326 & illustrations facing pp. 110 & 326
|location=London
|publisher=Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul's Church Yard, & J. Edwards, Pall Mall
|date=1796
|url=https://archive.org/details/narrativeoffivey01sted_1/page/n431/mode/2up
|access-date=21 June 2024}}</ref> Stedman's description of the flagellation scene was as follows:
{{Blockquote
|text=The first object that attracted my compassion while visiting on a neighboring estate was a truly beautiful Samboe girl of about eighteen, tied up with both arms to a tree, as naked as she came to the world, and lacerated in such a shocking condition by the whips of two Negro drivers that she was, from her neck to her ankles, literally dyed over with blood. It was after receiving two hundred lashes that I perceived her with her head hanging downwards, a most miserable spectacle.
|author=John Gabriel Stedman (1796)}}
A print by [[Johann Moritz Rugendas]], ''Nègres a fond de Calle'', taken from ''Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil'', published in 1835 was used on the dust cover of the first edition of ''Black Cargoes''.
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