Olaudah Equiano

Abstract

Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, as he was known during his lifetime (b. 1745?–d. 1797), was a writer and polemicist of extraordinary abilities. His Interesting Narrative informs readers that he was born into a ruling-class Igbo family in 1745 and was kidnapped at the age of eleven. He tells readers that he was then sold to Europeans on the Gold Coast and made to endure the dreaded transatlantic Middle Passage to Virginia. After this time, he was sold to Michael Henry Pascal, an officer in the British Royal Navy, who, against Equiano’s will, named him Gustavus Vassa, a name that Equiano used throughout the rest of his life. Traveling with Pascal to England, Equiano was officially baptized, he tells us, in 1759. After his baptism, Pascal recruited Equiano for the Seven Years’ War. Equiano mistakenly assumed that Pascal would free him at the end of the conflict. Instead, Pascal sold him into West Indian slavery. From there, Equiano worked to save enough money and purchase his own manumission in 1766. With his new freedom, Equiano sailed the world, gaining the rank of able seaman, as he traveled across the Atlantic and even to the North Pole. After that harrowing journey, Equiano experienced a spiritual conversion to Methodism in 1774, and grew publicly involved with the antislavery debate, through letters, speeches, and his own Interesting Narrative. He married a white Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, in 1792, and had two daughters, only one of whom survived to inherit the estate that Equiano left for her when he died on 31 March 1797. Biographer Vincent Carretta suggests that aspects of Equiano’s life story, including his African nativity, may be fabricated, as Equiano’s baptismal record lists him as “a Black born in Carolina 12 years old,” a possibility supported by one ship’s muster logs. Following on Carretta’s research, critics continue to debate important questions about genre, evidence, imagination, authenticity, testimony, and authorship.