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View allThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Equiano
1789
The Middle Passage, told by a man who survived it and then organized against it.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano · 1789
Published in 1789 and sold by subscription across Britain and Ireland, Equiano's Narrative is one of the earliest and most widely read firsthand accounts of the Atlantic slave trade in English — a childhood account of kidnapping, the terror of the slave ship's hold, enslavement across multiple owners and colonies, self-purchased freedom, and years at sea that took him from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. It became a bestseller in its own time and a foundational document of the British and American abolitionist movements. Modern historians have also raised a genuine question about the book's own opening claim — whether Equiano was born in West Africa as he wrote, or in South Carolina as a 1759 baptismal record and an official 1773 ship's muster suggest — a debate this edition presents rather than settles.
12 chapters · 80,697 words · ~6.1 hr read
Contents
Africa and Capture
Equiano's account of his childhood, his kidnapping, and the passage into slavery, ending with the horror of the Middle Passage and his arrival in the Americas.
Enslavement Across the Atlantic World
Years of enslavement under multiple owners across the Caribbean, the American colonies, and at sea, and the trading that lets Equiano begin earning toward his own freedom.
Freedom and the Wider World
Equiano purchases his freedom and takes up a life at sea as a free man — voyages to the Mediterranean and the Arctic, a religious conversion, and his eventual turn to abolitionist writing and organizing.