Who Was Olaudah Equiano?

Vincent Carretta. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. xxiv + 436 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, notes, and index. $29.95. At a time when most black men and women in the English-speaking world were slaves, when slavery and the slave trade had made the British empire prosperous, a former slave named Gustavus Vassa, or Olaudah Equiano (O-la-OO-day Ek-we-AH-no), traveled throughout the British Atlantic and the Mediterranean on British merchant ships, took part in an expedition to the Arctic, and published his astonishing autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which made him one of the most successful writers of his day. Equiano's Interesting Narrative went through nine editions between its publication in 1789 and the author's death in 1797; it was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian. Equiano controlled the publication of each English edition and personally sold copies throughout the British Isles, using each book tour to organize communities of antislavery activists. He was so successful financially and artistically that he invested in London real estate and left his daughter an estate worth what today would be $160,000. William Lloyd Garrison's partner published an American edition in 1837, but Equiano's Interesting Narrative was supplanted as an anti-slavery weapon by Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it languished out of print. But it returned in the 1960s, brought back by novelist Arna Bontemps. Today at least three scholarly editions are readily available, and Equiano's is often the voice from whom students hear of the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Vincent Carretta—a professor of English at the University of Maryland; editor of one edition of Equiano's Narrative, as well as editions of Phillis Wheatley's poetry, and the writings of other eighteenth-century Anglo-Africans; and author of a study of British political satire—has now written the first scholarly biography of one of the most extraordinary writers in the Anglo-American canon. It is a book worthy of its subject. Like Equiano's Interesting Narrative, Carretta's Equiano, the African is powerful, engaging, and beautifully written. [End Page 12] It is a misnomer to call Equiano's book a slave narrative, since more than half of it deals with his life as a free man. It might also seem redundant to write a biography of someone whose own autobiography is a classic, though biographers of Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass seem not abashed. Carretta's Equiano is not simply a retelling of the story its subject already told so well. Instead, Carretta applies the historian's craft and the narrator's art and illuminates Equiano's life and the tragic and tumultuous world of the eighteenth century. Equiano managed to see much of the world he lived in, and his story touches on most of the major currents of the day. He sailed with General James Wolfe to Canada in 1758, and fought at the siege of Louisbourg. He witnessed the opening scenes of the American Revolution, watching the people of Charles Town, South Carolina, in 1766 celebrate the Stamp Act's repeal, though he was nearly flogged later in the day for trying to spend counterfeit money a white man had paid him, learning that to a "slave, the repeal of the Stamp Act was essentially meaningless" (p. 108). He may have been the author of a series of anti-American letters written to the London press in 1778. Equiano saw George Whitefield preach, and John Wesley read his book. He took part, along with young Horatio Nelson, in an expedition to the Arctic in 1773. In the late 1780s, he was commissary to the British expedition to colonize former American slaves in Sierra Leone, though he lost his position after charging others in the enterprise with fraud. Equiano is sometimes called the "black...

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