The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Glossary
B
- Barbadoes
- The West Indian island where the slave ship carrying young Equiano first makes landfall, and where the ship's captive cargo is sold off and dispersed at auction — his introduction to the plantation economy of the Caribbean.
- Related: The Middle Passage
C
- Captain Doran
- The ship captain who informs Equiano, without warning, that his master has ordered him sold — the moment that leads to his purchase by Robert King in Montserrat and sets in motion the years of trading that would eventually buy his freedom.
- Related: Robert King, Montserrat
- Captain Michael Henry Pascal
- The naval officer who purchases young Equiano in Virginia, renames him Gustavus Vassa, and takes him to England and then into Royal Navy service, including the 1758 expedition against Louisbourg under Admiral Boscawen. Equiano serves him for years expecting eventual freedom, only to be sold again without warning.
- Related: Gustavus Vassa
D
- Deptford
- A dockside district on the River Thames from which Equiano recalls being forced away as a young man, and to which he later returns; its naval and shipbuilding trade shaped much of his life at sea in service to various masters.
- Related: Captain Michael Henry Pascal
- Doctor Charles Irving
- A physician and inventor who employs the freed Equiano, teaches him to distill fresh water from sea water, and later brings him along on an Arctic expedition toward the North Pole under Captain Phipps, as well as a venture to cultivate a plantation on the Mosquito Shore.
- Related: Mosquito Shore
E
- Embrenche
- A mark of distinction among Equiano's people, made by cutting the skin across the top of the forehead, denoting a person of rank destined for a chief's role in judging disputes. Equiano describes being destined to receive it before his kidnapping cut his upbringing short.
- Related: Kingdom of Benin
G
- George Whitefield
- A prominent evangelical preacher of the Great Awakening whom Equiano encounters preaching to a crowded church in Georgia. The scene marks one of Equiano's early exposures to the fervent Protestant Christianity that would come to shape his own religious identity and public voice.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano
- Gustavus Vassa
- The name given to Equiano by one of his enslavers aboard ship, after the sixteenth-century Swedish king. Equiano initially refused it and insisted on being called Jacob, but the name was forced on him and he used it publicly for most of his life, including on the title page of his Narrative.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano
I
- Impositions on Free Negroes
- The recurring legal and practical abuses Equiano documents against free Black people in the Americas and West Indies even after emancipation — being denied passage without advertising oneself, cheated of wages, or threatened with re-enslavement — underscoring that manumission did not guarantee safety or equal treatment.
- Related: Self-Purchase
K
- Kidnapping and Separation from His Sister
- The traumatic central event of Equiano's childhood: he and his sister are abducted from their family compound by kidnappers, briefly reunited, and then permanently separated as they are sold onward through a succession of African owners toward the coast.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano, The Middle Passage
- Kingdom of Benin
- The most considerable kingdom of the Guinea coast region Equiano describes in Chapter 1, noted for its wealth, cultivated soil, and powerful king. Equiano situates his own Igbo homeland within this broader West African political and cultural landscape.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano
M
- Manumission Document
- The formal certificate of freedom Robert King issues Equiano upon his self-purchase, registered at Montserrat's Register Office. Equiano describes receiving it with an almost visionary joy, comparing his disbelief to the apostle Peter's at his own sudden deliverance from prison.
- Related: Self-Purchase, Robert King
- Marriage Ceremony and Public Entertainments
- The detailed account of courtship, marriage, and communal dancing customs among Equiano's people that opens the Narrative, offered partly to establish the dignity and complexity of African society against European stereotypes of the era.
- Related: Kingdom of Benin, Embrenche
- Montserrat
- The West Indian island where Equiano is enslaved to Robert King for several years, witnesses the routine cruelties of the plantation system toward other enslaved people, and eventually purchases his own freedom.
- Related: Robert King, Self-Purchase
- Mosquito Shore
- A Caribbean-facing coastal region of Central America where Doctor Irving undertakes a plantation venture, bringing Equiano along and involving him in transactions to purchase enslaved laborers — an episode in which the formerly enslaved Equiano finds himself implicated in the very system that had held him captive.
- Related: Doctor Charles Irving
O
- Olaudah Equiano
- The author and narrator, born (as the Narrative states) in the Igbo region of what is now Nigeria around 1745, kidnapped into slavery as a child, and eventually a free Black writer and abolitionist in Britain. His account of the Middle Passage and his own self-purchase became one of the most widely read firsthand testimonies against the slave trade.
- Related: Gustavus Vassa, The Middle Passage, The Sons of Africa
P
- Petition to the Bishop of London
- Equiano's formal written request, described in Chapter 12, to be ordained and appointed as a missionary to Africa, in hopes of converting his countrymen to Christianity. The Bishop received him politely but declined to ordain him.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano, Sierra Leone Expedition
R
- Robert King
- A Quaker merchant in Montserrat who purchases Equiano and, unusually for the time, allows him to trade on his own account between islands. Equiano earns and saves toward his own freedom while enslaved to King, who ultimately honors his earlier promise and accepts the forty pounds for Equiano's manumission.
- Related: Self-Purchase, Montserrat
S
- Self-Purchase
- Equiano's purchase of his own freedom in 1766 for forty pounds sterling, earned through years of small-scale trading — buying and reselling goods between islands — while still legally enslaved to Robert King. The moment of receiving his manumission document is one of the Narrative's emotional high points.
- Related: Robert King, Montserrat
- Snow (ship)
- A type of small two-masted sailing vessel used in the eighteenth-century slave trade. Equiano was renamed "Michael" aboard an African snow, one of several identities imposed on him as he was passed between owners and ships.
- Related: The Middle Passage, Gustavus Vassa
T
- The Birthplace Debate
- A modern scholarly dispute over whether Equiano was actually born in Africa as the Narrative states, or in South Carolina, based on a 1759 baptismal record and a 1773 ship's muster listing a South Carolina birthplace — a controversy that does not resolve within the text itself but shapes how historians read its opening chapters.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano, Kingdom of Benin
- The Interesting Narrative
- The full title of Equiano's 1789 autobiography, which he sold by subscription and toured widely across Britain and Ireland to promote — a bestselling firsthand testimony that became a central text of the British abolitionist movement.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano, The Sons of Africa
- The Middle Passage
- The transatlantic crossing from Africa to the Americas aboard a slave ship, which Equiano describes from inside the hold — the suffocating heat, the chained and dying captives, and his own terror as a child seeing white people and the ocean for the first time. It stands as one of the most widely read firsthand accounts of the crossing.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano, Barbadoes
- The Miss Guerins
- Two sisters, relatives of Captain Pascal, who befriend Equiano in England, help arrange his baptism, and later assist him in finding work and looking after his interests after he arrives in London a free man.
- Related: Captain Michael Henry Pascal
- The Sierra Leone Expedition
- A late-1780s British scheme to resettle London's Black poor in a colony in Sierra Leone. Equiano was appointed to a role in its administration but became embroiled in disputes over its mismanagement and corruption before his involvement ended.
- Related: The Sons of Africa
- The Sons of Africa
- An abolitionist group of formerly enslaved and free Black men in Britain, including Equiano, who wrote public letters and campaigned against the slave trade in the 1780s, working alongside white abolitionists to press for its end.
- Related: Olaudah Equiano
- The Transatlantic Slave Trade
- The broader commercial system carrying captive Africans to the Americas that Equiano's own life is caught within and later campaigns against — extending along the Guinea coast "above 3400 miles" by his account, and structuring nearly every relationship and journey in the Narrative until his manumission.
- Related: The Middle Passage, The Sons of Africa