Olaudah Equiano and The Interesting Narrative (1789)

Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in London in 1789, is the autobiography of a man who was enslaved as a child, bought his freedom and became one of the best-known Black Britons of his age. Appearing as Parliament began to debate the slave trade, it became a bestseller and one of the most influential documents of the abolition movement. It remains a founding text of both Black British and African American literature.

Background: Britain and the slave trade in the 1780s

By the 1780s Britain was the largest slave-trading nation in the Atlantic world. Ships from Liverpool, Bristol and London carried tens of thousands of Africans each year across the Middle Passage to the Caribbean and North America, where they worked on sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations.

Opposition was growing. Quakers had long condemned slavery, the Somerset v Stewart case of 1772 had questioned the legal basis of slavery in England, and the Zong massacre of 1781 shocked those who learned of it. In May 1787 a small group founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London. Its campaigners collected evidence, printed pamphlets and lobbied MPs. What the movement lacked was the voice of someone who had experienced the trade from the inside as a captive. Equiano supplied it.

Equiano’s early life as he described it

According to the Narrative, Equiano was born around 1745 in a village called Essaka in the Igbo-speaking region of West Africa, in what is now south-eastern Nigeria. He describes the farming, crafts, religion and customs of his people in detail, comparing them at times to the ancient Israelites. At about the age of eleven, he writes, he and his sister were kidnapped by African raiders and separated. After passing through several owners in Africa he reached the coast and was put on board a European slave ship.

His account of the voyage is among the most quoted passages in the literature of slavery: the crowded hold, the stench, the sickness, the floggings and his terror that the white crew would eat him. He was landed in Barbados and then taken to Virginia, where he was sold.

Enslavement, the sea and freedom

In Virginia Equiano was bought by Michael Henry Pascal, a Royal Navy lieutenant, who renamed him Gustavus Vassa after the sixteenth-century Swedish king Gustav Vasa. Equiano resisted the name at first but used it for most of his life, including on legal documents and his marriage record.

With Pascal he served at sea during the Seven Years’ War, witnessing the siege of Louisbourg in 1758 and the naval battle off Lagos, Portugal, in 1759. He learned to read and write, and was baptised at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in February 1759. He believed Pascal would free him. Instead, in December 1762 Pascal sold him to a ship’s captain who took him to the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

There he was bought by Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia. King employed him as a clerk and seaman on trading voyages between the islands and the North American colonies. Equiano traded glasses, fruit and other small goods on his own account, slowly building savings. On 10 July 1766 he paid King £40, the price they had agreed, and received his manumission (a formal grant of freedom).

Freedom did not end the danger. As a free Black man in the Caribbean and the American colonies he risked being kidnapped and re-enslaved, and he records being cheated and threatened. He continued to work at sea: he sailed to the Mediterranean, joined Constantine Phipps’s 1773 expedition towards the North Pole, and in 1775–76 helped a former employer, the physician Charles Irving, set up a plantation on the Mosquito Coast of Central America, where he himself supervised enslaved workers. Around this time he experienced a religious conversion and became a committed Methodist-influenced Christian.

Campaigner in London

By the 1780s Equiano had settled in London and joined its Black community, which numbered several thousand people. In 1783 he alerted the abolitionist Granville Sharp to the case of the Zong, a slave ship whose crew had thrown well over a hundred captives overboard.

In 1786 he was appointed Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the government-backed scheme to resettle poor Black Londoners in West Africa, which became the Province of Freedom in Sierra Leone. He complained publicly about theft and mismanagement of supplies and was dismissed in 1787, before the ships sailed. The episode made him a public figure and, by his own account, partly prompted him to tell his story.

He was also a leading member of the Sons of Africa, a group of Black Londoners, including Ottobah Cugoano, who wrote letters to newspapers and politicians against the slave trade.

The book: writing, publishing and selling

The Interesting Narrative appeared in March 1789 in two volumes. Equiano published it himself by subscription: buyers paid in advance and their names were printed in the front. The first list of subscribers included the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, the abolitionist Granville Sharp, and many clergy and merchants. The frontispiece showed Equiano in a gentleman’s coat holding a Bible, an image designed to present him as respectable, educated and Christian.

The book combined several genres popular at the time: spiritual autobiography, travel writing, adventure at sea and economic argument. Its final pages argued that ending the slave trade would open Africa to profitable trade in British manufactured goods. This appealed to readers who were not moved by moral arguments alone.

Timing made it a success. In the same year Parliament examined the trade and William Wilberforce gave his first great speech against it. Equiano travelled widely to sell copies and speak, visiting towns across England, Scotland and Ireland between 1789 and 1794. He revised the text for each new edition and added letters of support. Nine British editions appeared in his lifetime; an American edition was printed in New York in 1791, and translations appeared in Dutch (1790), German (1792) and Russian (1794).

Later life and death

On 7 April 1792 Equiano married Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Soham in Cambridgeshire. They had two daughters, Anna Maria and Joanna. Susannah died in 1796, and Equiano himself died in London on 31 March 1797, aged about 51 if his own birth date is accepted.

Sales of the book had made him relatively wealthy. His will left his estate, valued at around £950, to his daughters. Anna Maria died a few months after her father, aged four, and Joanna inherited the money when she came of age. Joanna Vassa later married a Congregational minister and died in 1857; her grave in Abney Park Cemetery, London, was restored in 2008.

The debate over his birthplace

In the 1990s the literary scholar Vincent Carretta found two documents that complicate Equiano’s account. The register of his 1759 baptism describes “Gustavus Vassa” as born in Carolina, and the muster roll of Phipps’s 1773 Arctic expedition gives his birthplace as South Carolina. Carretta argued in his 2005 biography that Equiano may have been born in America and built the African chapters from other people’s testimony and published sources.

Other historians, notably Paul Lovejoy, have argued that the African sections contain details about Igbo life that would have been hard to learn second-hand, and that Equiano may have had practical reasons to give a colonial birthplace, for example to avoid being treated as a newly arrived captive. Carretta himself stresses that the evidence is not conclusive. The rest of the Narrative, covering his life after about 1754, has been widely confirmed by ship records, letters and other documents.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Equiano was the first enslaved African to publish a book in English. Fact: Earlier writers include Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772), Phillis Wheatley (poems, 1773) and Ignatius Sancho (letters, 1782). Equiano’s work was, however, the most widely read of its time.
• Myth: The book was ghost-written by white abolitionists. Fact: The subtitle says “written by himself”, and his surviving letters show the same style. Scholars accept him as the author.
• Myth: His birthplace has been proven. Fact: Neither the African nor the Carolina origin can be proved beyond doubt.

Timeline

• c. 1745: Equiano’s stated date of birth in the Igbo region of West Africa.
• c. 1754–1756: Kidnapping and transport across the Atlantic, according to the Narrative.
• 1759, February: Baptised as Gustavus Vassa at St Margaret’s, Westminster.
• 1762, December: Sold by Michael Henry Pascal and taken to Montserrat.
• 1766, 10 July: Buys his freedom from Robert King for £40.
• 1783: Tells Granville Sharp about the Zong massacre.
• 1787: Dismissed from the Sierra Leone resettlement scheme.
• 1789, March: The Interesting Narrative published in London.
• 1792, 7 April: Marries Susannah Cullen at Soham.
• 1797, 31 March: Dies in London.

Legacy

Equiano did not live to see the Slave Trade Act of 1807, but his book helped make the human cost of the trade visible to a mass audience. It set a pattern for later slave narratives, including those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs in the United States.

Interest revived strongly in the twentieth century. Modern editions are widely taught in schools and universities in Britain and North America, and the bicentenary of abolition in 2007 brought exhibitions, plaques and public events in his memory.

Why it matters

The Interesting Narrative gave readers a first-person account of enslavement at the moment Britain was deciding whether to end the slave trade. It showed that a formerly enslaved African could be an author, businessman and political campaigner. Whatever the truth about his birthplace, Equiano’s life story shaped how the slave trade has been understood ever since.