The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): (or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself)

By Olaudah Equiano and Rebecka Rutledge Fisher

The Interesting Narrative, published in 1789 to considerable acclaim, has been compared to Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe and reviewed by Mary Wollstonecraft. Equianos life and work took shape in an era of revolution—against slavery, against injustice, against tyranny. Moreover, Equianos Narrative was deeply informed by the forces that have given the modern nation-state its present recognizable characteristics. Equiano effectively challenges concepts of Englishness as an absolute ethnic category. His narrative stands as one of the earliest written works of literature by an African of the diaspora, and is certainly one of the earliest works in Western history to combine the genres of spiritual autobiography, social protest, abolitionist tract, and travelogue in such a way as to mark him a significant commentator upon and a vocal critic of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430365

Olaudah Equiano

Born in Nigeria in 1745, Olaudah Equiano was a well-known African abolitionist. Equiano was shipped to the West Indies as a child-slave, and then to England where he was purchased by Lieutenant Michael Pascal and trained as a seaman before serving in The Seven Years’ War. At the conclusion of hostilities, Pascal did not free Equiano as promised, but instead sold him to Captain James Doran who then sold Equiano to James King, a merchant from Philadelphia. In 1765, King let Equiano purchase his freedom for forty pounds, and helped him earn money in his stead as a merchant. Now a free man, Equiano returned to London where he made significant contributions to the abolitionist movement, and published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which influenced the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Equiano is believed to have died in 1797 at the age of 52.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

AUTHOR’S NOTE

LIST OF ENGLISH SUBSCRIBERS.

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

001002003004

Introduction and Suggested Reading Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble Books

Originally published in 1789

This edition published by Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used

or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

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2005 Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc.

ISBN 0-7607-7350-5

eISBN : 978-1-411-43036-5

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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INTRODUCTION

THE Interesting Narrative was published in 1789 to considerable acclaim. The Abbé Grégoire compared it to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed it in the May 1789 issue of The Analytic Review. Like Wollstonecraft, Equiano’s life and work took shape in an era of revolution -- against slavery, against injustice, against tyranny. Moreover, Equiano’s Narrative was deeply informed by the forces that have given the modern nation-state its present recognizable characteristics. He contended with the notions of race and ethnicity that still serve, in large measure, to define one’s sense of national belonging. Indeed, the idea of Englishness, of belonging to and gaining acceptance within the English nation, not to speak of the British empire, emerges as a crucial point in Equiano’s Narrative: In submitting his text to the canon of English literature, Equiano effectively challenges concepts of Englishness as an absolute ethnic category. His narrative stands as one of the earliest written works of literature by an African of the diaspora, and is certainly one of the earliest works in Western history to combine the genres of spiritual autobiography, social protest, abolitionist tract, and travelogue in such a way as to mark him a significant commentator upon and a vocal critic of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) was born in what is today known as Essaka, Nigeria, to a well-respected Igbo family. His given name is said to have been Olaude Ekwealuo.¹ The name he gave himself was Olaudah Equiano. Much of our knowledge of him emerges from his own pen. He tells of being captured from his home at about age eleven along with his sister. The two were quickly separated by slavers. Equiano was sold numerous times before an English naval officer serving as captain of a West Indian merchant vessel purchased him. Officer Michael Pascal renamed him Gustavus Vassa, after a sixteenth-century Swedish monarch. With Pascal, Equiano served as gunmate and powder boy in the Royal Navy, fighting in several key battles during the Seven Years War. His free time was spent immersed in books, most often the Bible. He was baptized at St. Margaret’s Church in London in 1759, at about age fourteen.²

Freedom, however, would not attend his conversion, and he was once again sold to Captain James Doran in 1762. Doran carried Equiano to the West Indies, and in 1766, Equiano finally purchased his freedom through the profits he made as a small goods trader. He had fallen under the ownership of an American Quaker named Robert King, who treated him amiably and in whose employ Equiano for a time remained. As a free man, he settled briefly in London, working first as a hairdresser to the surgeon Dr. Charles Irving, said to be the inventor of water desalination, and later as personal servant to a number of ship captains. In 1775, he accompanied Irving to the Mosquito Coast of Central America, where he managed a plantation until the following year, acting both as overseer and buyer of black slaves. He returned to London in 1777, when he took a deeper interest in humanitarian efforts. He soon made application to the Bishop of London to serve as a missionary to Africa. His request was denied. However, he later made the acquaintance of Granville Sharp, the prominent abolitionist, and in 1783 convinced Sharp to petition the courts on behalf of the murdered slaves of the ship Zong, who had been thrown overboard so that the slave owner could collect the insurance money.

Equiano continued to be involved in matters benefiting poor blacks and the enslaved, and was, in 1786, appointed Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the black poor (as the many newly freed slaves were called) who were to be relocated to a new colony in Sierra Leone. There were many problems hidden in this endeavor, which turned out to be a scheme to rid London of its unemployed freedmen and to turn the colony of Sierra Leone into a vast field of peonage and neo-slavery. Sensing malfeasance, Equiano complained of mismanagement to the Commissioners of the Navy before his expedition even got under way. He was soon relieved of his post.

Olaudah Equiano’s two-volume autobiography (published in single volumes after the third edition) underwent nine editions and numerous printings during his lifetime. Several editions appeared after Equiano’s death in 1797, including translations into Russian, Dutch, and German. The story of his life continues to be told and retold.

Through his Narrative, Equiano addressed himself to the European reading public as a Christian arguing for the abolition of slavery and the humanity of people of African descent in direct conflict with prevailing Enlightenment-era thought across Europe regarding the utter commonness of the Negro. Although a sense of moral outrage pertaining to slavery permeated the political treatises of eighteenth-century philosophers such as the German thinkers Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried von Herder, and most agreed that slavery was a detestable institution, tensions remained palpable in their opinions on the subject.³ The European philosophes were generally discomfited by slavery and the popular misconception that black people were born with lesser faculties than whites (and thus that they were destined to be enslaved). However, the liberal Englishman John Locke and a number of his intellectual contemporaries held a silent interest in such ventures as the establishment of the slave-holding Carolina colonies in North America and invested heavily in slave-trading monopolies such as the Royal African Company. To these thinkers, Equiano would have represented a conundrum, for he had achieved the status of the uncommon: a well-read traveler, a navigator of the seas, and an observer of a broad range of cultures. He was a man who had endured trials that tested his mettle, not the least of which was his own enslavement and the travail he undertook to secure his freedom. In addition to positioning himself as a proselytizer of the Christian faith, Equiano proved a successful petty venture merchant, having amassed sufficient wealth to bequeath 950 pounds sterling to his daughter upon his death (a small fortune in Equiano’s time). In his Narrative, he repeatedly refers to himself as the uncommon slave, one who, we might say, defies the principles of Enlightenment-era racial and nationalistic philosophy by actively undertaking a critique of Englishness. By deliberately manipulating and subverting discrete ideas of Englishness and Africanness into ambiguous terms of self-identification, Equiano styles himself as the prefigur ative postmodern man.

The Narrative thus emerges from history as timeless and relevant due in large measure to the various border crossings Equiano himself undertakes. These are physical as well as ideological: His travels take him from the Old World to the New; from Africa to Europe; from bondage to freedom; from property to property holder. His career as a sailor, which he began while yet a slave, takes him on a journey from the west coast of Africa, to the Caribbean, to North America, and back across the ocean to Great Britain, with stops in Central America and the Mediterranean. One might say that his seafaring career facilitates his rise from chattel to master -- it is aboard ship that Equiano learns to read and practices the early art of the memoir. Furthermore, the capital he amasses over the course of his journeys enables him, ironically for one who argues vigorously and with conviction the virtues of abolition, to purchase his own freedom, to own the rights to his person as his own human property.

This fact has enormous implications, given the prominence of the discourse on capitalism (exemplified in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) that closely attended ideas of freedom and theories of race in the eighteenth century. By his own admission, our narrator had ample opportunity, while still enslaved by Robert King, to escape by signing on to other vessels where he was very much in demand as an able seaman, thereby escaping his state of bondage and thumbing his nose, so to speak, at his captors and at slavery as a Western economic and social system. Instead, Equiano deems the project of escaping not too capricious, as one might expect, but immoral. It would have worked against his Christian ethics to run away: It would have been tantamount to stealing himself. Instead, after amassing 40 pounds sterling through his small business ventures, Equiano remits his purchase price to Mr. King and becomes, in Equiano’s own words, his own master. He becomes his own property, his own man.

Equiano effectively enters the realm of proprietorship through the purchase of his freedom. And hence, he more closely approximates Western concepts of selfhood and, by extension, secures a firm standing as a subject of the British Empire. This process had already begun with his profession of faith and his conversion to Christianity. Although the baptism of Africans, a growing expatriate community in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, was not an irregularity, such a sacrament still aroused considerable disapproval among those who supported slavery. It was widely argued that Christianity and slavery should be held mutually exclusive. For a time, Equiano and other Africans who had been baptized felt that under English law, they were freed from bondage by virtue of this religious ritual. Pro-slavery forces, however, actively worked against any such claims, and English courts, unwilling to endanger the stability of the West Indian plantation society upon which the colonial system was founded, were careful not to allow challenges to slavery on English soil to go unchecked. They understood that to condemn slavery in the metropole would clearly spell imminent doom for slavery in the colonies. The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 had already pried open a loophole in aspects of English law that tacitly sanctioned England’s peculiar institution, as slavery was often called. Unbeknownst to many slaves, the Habeas Corpus Act was one measure that could be set in motion to save them should they, like the famous slave James Somerset, be placed on a vessel bound from England for the West Indies against their wishes.

James Somerset was a slave who had been brought to England from the United States. He promptly escaped soon after his arrival, but was recaptured and, in 1771, put on another ship bound for harsher enslavement in the West Indies. The West Indian plantations, as Equiano points out a number of times in his writing, were known for their severe methods of enslaving Africans, and slave owners often remanded their recalcitrant or rebellious captives to the isles as a form of punishment. Equiano’s friend, the abolitionist and scholar Granville Sharp, eventually took on Somerset’s case. Sharp managed to secure, under the Habeas Corpus Act, a writ that ensured that Somerset was not removed from England, and in 1772 presented Somerset’s case before Lord Mansfield, a jurist who was notorious for his somewhat mumbled and ambivalent statements on slavery. The Somerset case was of signal importance, as it indicated a threat to slavery not simply in England, where the case was heard, but also in America, where news of Sharp’s victory in trying the case echoed throughout the abolitionist community. Mansfield’s judgment has been variously reported, but in ruling that slaves could not be removed from England against their will, he effectively outlawed slavery on English soil. The idea that English soil was too pure to brook the stain of slavery, and that Africans were considered free once they set foot on hallowed English ground, was of acute significance in considering whether or not Africans could ever belong to England, whether or not they could lay claim to an English identity.

The question of Equiano’s belonging to England had as much to do with Christianity and literacy as with slavery and theories of racial inferiority. In addition to professing the Christian faith, which must be viewed as a measure of what it meant to be a Westerner and an Englishman, Equiano also styled himself as a man of letters whose Narrative appeared at a time when the autobiography, as a genre, was gaining in currency. Moreover, thanks to advances in print technology, a whole new class of people gained access to written works. This reading of the written word, described as an exercise in the founding of the nation-state by Benedict Anderson, served to draw people together as members of a national community. Robert J. C. Young rightly notes that English as a field of study was a self-consciously political activity from the start, deliberately conceived, in the face of the declining influence of the national church, to produce harmony among classes, and a shared sense of national identity.⁴ This is to say that at the end of the eighteenth century, when Equiano began amassing notes for his Narrative, the power of the church as a major unifying social tool was in decline. The outbreak of revolution in colonial America and France powered the rise of the nation-state, the founding philosophy of which insisted upon common culture, common heritage, and common history as foundation stones for the national community, even if such commonality demanded, as the French philosopher Ernest Renan later pointed out in 1882, the forgetting of particular and discrete pasts.

As the critic F. R. Leavis notes, it was the great tradition of English literature that served as an intellectual clearinghouse of English common identity in the late eighteenth century. Equiano works steadfastly to place himself squarely within this movement. In the face of international debates over the inferiority of Africans and the fate of slavery, he fashions himself an Englishman. Equiano wrote in English, published in England, and pictured himself on the frontispiece of his Narrative in English attire and holding a Bible opened to the book of Acts (a sign of Equiano’s Christianity and an apt indicator of the picaresque adventure he would embark upon with his reader, similar to the widely varied Acts of the Apostles after the death of Christ). Equiano thus gives evidence of his aspiration to Englishness. And somewhat more obliquely, he underscores the capricious nature of national identity. Although an African by birth, that is, in spite of the fact that his skin was of a darker hue than that of the people he wished to call his new countrymen, Equiano certainly did not have many obstacles to claiming at least a British identity.

There is a point here that needs to be made carefully. The sociologist and cultural critic Paul Gilroy has argued that Englishness and Britishness are two separate categories of identity. Britishness is a category of administrative convenience, he tells us. It is largely dependent upon the history of Great Britain as an imperial power, and evokes reminders of English dominion over Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, not to mention the Americas, India, South Africa, and other parts of the African continent. While English is often mistakenly substituted for British, Gilroy writes, the two terms operate differently. English is a term of ethnic identity, and the idea of an authentic cultural content of our national life is therefore constructed through an appeal to Englishness rather than Britishness.⁵ In other words, Equiano might well have laid some sort of claim, albeit tenuous, to a British identity, but an English identity would have constituted a great and audacious reach.

In spite of this, the eighteenth century saw a good deal of instability in the collective identity of the English. Having formed a union with Scotland in 1707, wherein forty-five Scottish members of Parliament joined the new House of Commons of Great Britain, England’s broader British identity remained ambiguous. Therefore, it is quite problematic to regard either Britishness (as a national identity) or Englishness (as an ethnic identity) as stable categories in the eighteenth century. Equiano was certainly not precluded from espousing an identity of Englishness simply because of strict lines of ethnicity that he did not fall within. Properly speaking, England (literally, the land of the Angles) came into being through the invasions of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and the subsequent unification of the various kingdoms of the region in the eleventh century under William the Conqueror. The second Union Act of 1800, enacted three years after Equiano’s death, created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which lasted until 1922. Such making and unmaking of national unions indicates to what degree national identity was in flux during the late eighteenth-century era of revolution and Enlightenment. Enlightenment-era statesmen and philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic sought to fix this identity within recognizable boundaries, specifically as regarded African slaves. Thomas Jefferson and David Hume both worked diligently to exclude Africans from the realm of citizenship in their states. Nonetheless, as national identities were largely fluid and not prescribed in any concrete way, it would have been relatively easy for an individual to make a choice as to what identity he or she felt best represented him or her as a citizen and as a subject of a newly coalescing nation-state. As Vincent Carretta argues, a choice of identities was possible because both British and American identities were recent political constructions invented in the eighteenth century, rather than the traditional ethnic or religious categories which they subsumed. Thus one could be (after the Union of 1707) a Scot-Briton, a Welsh-Briton, and (in the nineteenth century) an Irish-Briton, as well as an English-Briton. Or an Afro-Briton.⁶

Olaudah Equiano produced an archetypal narrative, one that serves as a model for nineteenth-century autobiographers such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. A freedman, a sailor, a social observer, and an homme engagé, he is also thought of as a willful integrationist and an imitator of European culture. His memoir comes to us almost as a cliché in the formation of black Atlantic literature, a force in our thinking about the origins of African diasporic writing. Examinations of his work have formed our reactions to early writings that reflect black culture. It speaks to us from the context of a number of literary and cultural traditions: spiritualism; abolitionism; eighteenth-century black autobiography; and the Enlightenment discourse on race, nation, and identity that was so prevalent in England during these times. Thus, we continue to seek him out, in the ports of the Caribbean, in the plantations of the American South, in the salons of England, because something in the equivocal nature of his history, his reality, reveals to us ourselves standing bare in the starkest light, because his pronouncements on the past reverberate into our future.

Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She previously taught at the Miami University of Ohio and at Washington University in Saint Louis. She has written a number of articles dealing with literature, race, and nationalism, and is currently at work on a book entitled Metaphors of Mediation: Race and Nation in African American Literature, which deals largely with the use of metaphor in racist and nationalist ideologies.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

AN invidious falsehood having appeared in the Oracle of the 25th, and the Star of the 27th of April 1792, with a view to hurt my character, and to discredit and prevent the sale of my Narrative, asserting, that I was born in the Danish island of Santa Cruz, in the West Indies, it is necessary that, in this edition, I should take notice thereof, and it is only needful of me to appeal to those numerous and respectable persons of character who knew me when I first arrived in England, and could speak no language but that of Africa.

Under this appeal, I now offer this edition of my Narrative to the candid reader, and to the friends of humanity, hoping it may still be the means, in its measure, of showing the enormous cruelties practiced on my sable brethren, and strengthening the generous emulation now prevailing in this country, to put a speedy end to a traffic both cruel and unjust.

Edinburgh, June 1792.

LETTER,

OF

ALEXANDER TILLOCK TO JOHN MONTIETH, ESQ.

GLASGOW.

DEAR SIR,

YOUR note of the 30th ult. I would have answered in course; but wished first to inform you what paper we had taken the article from which respected GUSTAVUS VASSA. By this day’s post, have sent you a copy of the Oracle of Wednesday the 25th—in the last column of the 3rd page, you will find the article from which we inserted the one in the Star of the 27th ult.—If it be erroneous, you will see it had not its origin with us. As to G.V. I know nothing about him.

After examining the paragraph in the Oracle which immediately follows the one in question, I am inclined to believe that the one respecting G.V. may have been fabricated by some of the advocates for continuing the Slave Trade, for the purpose of weakening the force of the evidence brought against that trade; for, I believe, if they could, they would stifle the evidence altogether.

Having sent you the Oracle, we have sent all that we can say about the business. I am,

DEAR SIR,

Your most humble Servant,

ALEX. TILLOCH.

Star Office, 5th May, 1792.

LETTER

FROM THE REV. DR. J. BAKER, OF MAY FAIR

CHAPEL, LONDON, TO MR. GUSTAVUS

VASSA, AT DAVID DALE’S ESQ.

GLASGOW.

DEAR SIR,

I went after Mr. [Buchanan] Millan (the printer of the Oracle), but he was not at home. I understood that an apology would be made to you, and I desired it might be a proper one, such as would give fair satisfaction, and take off any disadvantageous impressions which the paragraph alluded to may have made. Whether the matter will bear an action or not, I do not know, and have not inquired whether you can punish by law; because I think it is not worth while to go to the expence of a law-suit, especially if a proper apology is made; for, can any man that reads your Narrative believe that you are not a native of Africa? I see therefore no good reason for not printing a fifth edition, on account of a scandalous paragraph in a newspaper.

I remain,

DEAR SIR,

Your sincere Friend,

J. BAKER.

Grosvenor-street, May 14, 1792.

TO THE LORDS SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL, AND THE COMMONS OF THE PARLIAMENT OF GREAT BRITAIN.

My Lords and Gentlemen,

PERMIT me with the greatest deference and respect, to lay at your feet the following genuine Narrative; the chief design of which is to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen. By the horrors of that trade I was first torn away from all the tender connexions that were dear to my heart; but these, through the mysterious ways of Providence, I ought to regard as infinitely more than compensated by the introduction I have thence obtained to the knowledge of the Christian religion, and of a nation which, by its liberal sentiments, its humanity, the glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency in arts and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature.

I am sensible I ought to entreat your pardon for addressing to you a work so wholly devoid of literary merit; but, as the production of an unlettered African, who is actuated by the hope of becoming an instrument towards the relief of his suffering countrymen. I trust that such a man, pleading in such a cause, will be acquitted of boldness and presumption.

May the god of Heaven inspire your hearts with peculiar benevolence on that important day when the question of Abolition is to be discussed, when thousands, in consequence of your determination, are to look for Happiness or Misery!

I am,

My LORDS and GENTLEMEN,

Your most obedient,

And devoted humble servant,

OLAUDAH EQUIANO,

OR

GUSTAVUS VASSA.

March 1789.

TO THE CHAIRMEN OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE

ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE.

Magdalen College, Cambridge, May 26 1790.

GENTLEMEN,

I TAKE the liberty, as being joined with you in the same laudable endeavours to support the cause of humanity in the Abolition of the Slave Trade, to recommend to your protection the bearer of this note GUSTAVUS VASSA, an African; and to beg the favour of your assistance to him in the sale of his book.

I am, with great respect,

GENTLEMEN,

Your most obedient servant,

P. PECKARD.

Manchester, July 23, 1790.

THOMAS WALKER has great pleasure in recommending the sale of the NARRATIVE of GUSTAVUS VASSA to the friends of justice and humanity, he being well entitled to their protection and support, from the united testimonies of the Rev. T. Clarkson, of London; Dr. Peckard, of Cambridge; and Sampson and Charles Lloyd, Esqrs. of Birmingham.

Sheffield, August 20 1790.

In consequence of the recommendation of Dr. Peckard, of Cambridge; Messrs. Lloyd, of Birmingham; the Rev. T. Clarkson, of London; Thomas Walker, Thomas Cooper, and Isaac Moss, Esqrs. of Manchester, we beg leave also to recommend the sale of the NARRATIVE of GUSTAVUS VASSA to the friends of humanity in the town and neighbourhood of Sheffield.

Nottingham, January 17, 1791.

IN consequence of the respectable recommendation of several gentlemen of the first character, who have born testimony to the good sense, intellectual improvements, and integrity of GUSTAVUS VASSA, lately of that injured and oppressed class of men, the injured Africans; and further convinced of the justice of his recommendations, from our own personal interviews with him, we take the liberty also to recommend the said GUSTAVUS VASSA to the protection and assistance of the friends of humanity.

LETTER

TO MR. O’BRIEN, CARRICKFERGUS,

(PER FAVOUR OF MR. GUSTAVUS VASSA.)

Belfast, December 25, 1791.

DEAR SIR,

The bearer of this, Mr. GUSTAVUS VASSA, an enlightened African, of good sense, agreeable manners, and of an excellent character, and who comes well recommended to this place, and noticed by the first people here, goes to-morrow for your town, for the purpose of vending some books, written by himself, which is a Narrative of his own Life and Sufferings, with some account of his native country and its inhabitants. He was torn from his relatives and country (by the more savage white men of England) at an early period in life; and during his residence in England, at which time I have seen him, during my agency for the American prisoners, with Sir William Dolben, Mr. Granville Sharp, Mr. Wilkes, and many other distinguished characters; he supported an irreproachable character, and was a principal instrument in bringing about the motion for the repeal of the Slave-Act. I beg leave to introduce him to your notice and civility; and if you can spare the time, your introduction of him personally to your neighbours may be of essential benefit to him.

I am,

SIR,

Your obedient servant,

THOS. DIGGES.

LETTER

TO ROWLAND WEBSTER, ESQ. STOCKTON.

(PER FAVOUR OF MR. GUSTAVUS VASSA.)

DEAR SIR,

I TAKE the liberty to introduce to your knowledge Mr. GUSTAVUS VASSA, an African of distinguished merit. He has recommendations to Stockton, and I am happy in adding to the number. To the principal supporters of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade he is well known; and he has, himself, been very instrumental in promoting a plan so truly conducive to the interests of religion and humanity. Mr. VASSA has published a Narrative which clearly delineates the iniquity of that unnatural and destructive commerce; and I am able to assert, from my own experience, that he has not exaggerated in a single particular. This work has been mentioned in very favourable terms by the Reviewers, and fully demonstrates that genius and worth are not limited to country or complexion. He has with him some copies for sale, and if you can conveniently assist him in the disposal thereof, you will greatly oblige,

DEAR SIR,

Your friend and servant,

WILLIAM EDDIS.

Durham, October 25, 1792.

Hull, November 12, 1792.

THE bearer hereof, Mr. GUSTAVUS VASSA, an African, is recommended to us by the Rev. Dr. Peckard, Dean of Peterborough, and by many other very respectable characters, as an intelligent and upright man; and as we have no doubt but the accounts we have received are grounded on the best authority, we recommend him to the assistance of the friends of humanity in this town, in promoting subscriptions to an interesting Narrative of his Life.

John Sykes, Mayor, R.A. Harrison, Esq.

Thomas Clarke, Vicar, Jos. R. Pease, Esq.

William Hornby, Esq. of Gainsborough.

LETTER

TO WILLIAM HUGHES, ESQ. DEVIZES.

DEAR SIR,

WHETHER you will consider my introducing to your acquaintance the bearer of this letter, OLAUDAH EQUIANO, the enlightened African, (or GUSTAVUS VASSA) as a liberty or favour, I shall not anticipate.

He came recommended to me by men of distinguished talents and exemplary virtue, as an honest and benevolent man; and his