Reason and Revolution Part II
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Week Seven: Reason and Revolution Part II
Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature
Olaudah Equiano Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007
OLAUDAH EQUIANO (1745?–1797?)
As a child of eleven, Equiano was captured by slavers. His sister was taken at the same time, but they were soon separated, and he was to be haunted the rest of his life by his inability to save her and by his fears about her fate. Born in what is today Nigeria, he probably spoke the Ibo language and was able to learn several other African dialects as he traveled westward, passing through the households of several masters over a six-month period. Finally he arrived on the shore of a large river, probably the Niger, which took him to a seaport where he was sold to white slave traders bound for the West Indies.
The young slave served several English and American masters who gave him Western names, including Gustavus Vassa, the name he used most often and in- cluded in the title of his book: Equiano’s Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. Even more important, his various masters acknowledged his intelligence by training him to read and write and by teaching him the navigation and business skills he needed to prosper. After ten years of servitude he earned the money needed to buy his freedom by investing in cargoes traded by his last master, a Philadelphia Quaker named Robert King.
Equiano’s cosmopolitan experience both as a slave and as a free man took him to Canada, where he served Captain Pascal, a soldier with General Wolfe dur- ing the French and Indian War, to the Arctic, where he was icebound on a ship, to Italy, where he saw an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and to the United States, where he observed events leading up to the American Revolution. After the war, he helped focus the energies of a diverse antislavery movement into an organized force, connected with its British counterpart.
Although he was active in advocating justice for slaves and former slaves in both countries, Equiano’s cherished dream was to return to Africa and regain title to his ancestral lands, where he promised to entertain his abolitionist friends with “luxuriant pineapples and the well flavoured virgin palm wine.” His hopes of re- turning were dashed, however, when the expedition he was appointed to supervise fell victim to corruption and political intrigue.
In 1788 Equiano settled down in the home of a London friend to write his autobiography. It appeared in print in England the following year and in the United States two years later. From his earliest days of literacy, Equiano had made a habit of noting details of his experience in his journals. As a convert to Christianity and a spokesperson for the antislavery movement, he mingled regularly with educated English speakers. It is not surprising, therefore, that at the age of forty-four he was able to write the first great African-American slave narrative in a clear and pleasing style. With his autobiography—an international best-seller widely distributed by the abolition movement—and his speaking tours, he campaigned for an end to the slave trade and encouraged the repatriation of freed slaves.
Citing Old Testament approbation of racial intermarriage, Equiano advocated it as one possible solution to racial problems, arguing in a letter to a friend that marriages between whites and blacks would strengthen the British nation and urg- ing the practice as “a national honour, national strength, and productive of na-
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Olaudah Equiano Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007
tional virtue.” Disappointed with his plans for repatriation, he stayed in England, married an English woman, Susan Cullen, in 1792, and fathered two daughters who were orphaned by his wife’s death in 1795 and his own two years later. His daughter Anna Maria soon followed her parents in death, and the epitaph on her tombstone, describing her as “a child of colour” and expressing the hope that she has gone to a place where “some of every clime shall joy in God,” suggests that Equiano’s faith in intermarriage was in some measure warranted by public opin- ion in late-eighteenth-century England.
Although Equiano did not live to see the abolition of slavery either in Britain or in the United States, his own contributions—both as a writer and as a speaker— clearly added to the social and political pressures that finally led to emancipation in both countries in the century following his death.
Equiano’s narrative has been edited by Paul Edwards, Equiano’s Travels, 1967, and Robert J. Alli- son, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1995. A two-volume facsimile edition of the Narrative, edited by Paul Edwards, appeared in 1969, and a modernized version, edited by Vin- cent Caretta, in 1995. Studies are Angelo Costanzo, Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography, 1987, and James Walvin, An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1999.
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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature
Olaudah Equiano from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007
OLAUDAH EQUIANO
From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano1
Chapter 2 [Horrors of a Slave Ship]
* * * The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast, was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I were sound by some of the crew, and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions, too, differ- ing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke (which was very different from any I had ever heard), united to confirm me in this belief. In- deed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment that, if ten thou- sand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too, and saw a large furnace of copper boiling and a mul- titude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who had brought me on board, and had been receiv- ing their pay; they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair. They told me I was not, and one of the crew brought me a small portion of spirituous liquor in a wine glass, but being afraid of him I would not take it out of his hand. One of the blacks therefore took it from him and gave it to me, and I took a little down my palate, which, instead of reviving me, as they thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor before. Soon after this, the blacks who brought me on board went off, and left me abandoned to despair.
I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore, which I now considered as friendly; and I even wished for my former slavery in preference to my present situ- ation, which was filled with horrors of every kind, still heightened by my igno- rance of what I was to undergo. I was not long suffered to indulge my grief; I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nos- trils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables,
1. The text is that of the first American edition, New York, 1791, with minor emendations.
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Olaudah Equiano from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
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and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced anything of this kind before, and, although not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet, neverthe- less, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not; and besides, the crew used to watch us very closely who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water; and I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating. This indeed was often the case with myself.
In a little time after, amongst the poor chained men I found some of my own nation, which in a small degree gave ease to my mind. I inquired of these what was to be done with us. They gave me to understand we were to be carried to these white people’s country to work for them. I then was a little revived, and thought if it were no worse than working my situation was not so desperate; but still I feared I should be put to death, the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so sav- age a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cru- elty, and this not only shown towards us blacks, but also to some of the whites themselves. One white man in particular I saw, when we were permitted to be on deck, flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute. This made me fear these people the more, and I expected nothing less than to be treated in the same manner. I could not help expressing my fears and appre- hensions to some of my countrymen; I asked them if these people had no country, but lived in this hollow place (the ship). They told me they did not, but came from a distant one. “Then,” said I, “how comes it in all our country we never heard of them?” They told me because they lived so very far off. I then asked where were their women? had they any like themselves? I was told they had. “And why,” said I, “do we not see them?” They answered, because they were left behind. I asked how the vessel could go? They told me they could not tell, but that there was cloth put upon the masts by the help of the ropes I saw, and then the vessel went on; and the white men had some spell or magic they put in the water when they liked, in order to stop the vessel. I was exceedingly amazed at this account, and really thought they were spirits. I therefore wished much to be from amongst them, for I expected they would sacrifice me; but my wishes were vain—for we were so quar- tered that it was impossible for any of us to make our escape.
While we stayed on the coast I was mostly on deck, and one day, to my great astonishment, I saw one of these vessels coming in with the sails up. As soon as the whites saw it they gave a great shout, at which we were amazed; and the more so, as the vessel appeared larger by approaching nearer. At last, she came to an anchor in my sight, and when the anchor was let go I and my countrymen who saw it were lost in astonishment to observe the vessel stop—and were now con- vinced it was done by magic. Soon after this the other ship got her boats out, and they came on board of us, and the people of both ships seemed very glad to see each other. Several of the strangers also shook hands with us black people, and made motions with their hands, signifying, I suppose, we were to go to their coun- try, but we did not understand them.
At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not
Olaudah Equiano, from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano 165
Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature
