said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an aweful example of the corruption of man left to himself.34
It’s clear, then, that black people were almost inescapable in eighteenth-century London. Yet though they’re often spoken about in this period, they’re rarely heard to speak for themselves. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, or James Albert as he was christened, is an exception to this rule. His memoirs, ghost-written by Hannah More ‘for her own private Satisfaction’, were published in Bath in 1772.35
Gronniosaw, whose grandfather was the King of Baurnou in the north-eastern corner of what is now Nigeria, was sold on the Gold Coast to a Dutch captain for two yards of check cloth. After a long sea journey to Barbados, he eventually found himself in New York serving a young man called Vanhorn. He was soon sold again, this time to Theodore Frelinghuysen, an evangelical Dutch Reformed pastor who tried to educate him.36 Mental collapse ensued: having been introduced to Bunyan’s writings, Gronniosaw became so convinced of his own wickedness that he tried to kill himself with a large case-knife. His master died, forcing him to become a cook on board a privateer’s ship in order to pay off his outstanding debts which an unscrupulous friend of Frelinghuysen had promised to clear. He came through countless adventures at sea before arriving in England where he was immediately robbed of his savings by a corrupt landlady. Eager to visit the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, whose sermons he’d been enthralled by in New York, he headed for London where the minister greeted him warmly before directing him to a lodging house in Petticoat Lane. While eating breakfast the next morning, Gronniosaw heard a clatter coming from above his head. Curious, he climbed upstairs to discover a loft full of women crouched over their looms weaving silk. One of them (never named) besotted him instantly. Despite learning that her errant husband had died, leaving her in debt and with a child to raise on her own, he decided to marry her.
Difficulties soon arose when Gronniosaw left London to earn money for his new family. Following a brief spell as a servant in Holland, he and his wife settled in a small cottage near Colchester. It was a hideously bleak winter. Gronniosaw had been discharged from work, his wife was sick and bedridden, they had no money. At one stage, they had only four carrots (given to them as a gift) to last them four days. As there was no fire the carrots had to be eaten raw. To make them digestible for her infant child, Gronniosaw’s wife chewed them before passing on the mulch to her baby. Gronniosaw himself went without.
Help arrived unexpectedly from a local attorney, and shortly afterwards they decided to move to Norwich where weaving work was easier to find. However, hours were long, wages irregular, their landlady was inflexible about rent payments, and their three children contracted smallpox. When one of the daughters later died of fever, the Baptists refused to assist with the burial. Nor did the Quakers help. The Gronniosaws had begun burying her in the garden behind their house when a parish officer relented. Even then, he declined to read a burial service for her.
The narrative ends with Gronniosaw, aged sixty, pawning his clothes to pay off his family’s debts and medical bills, and moving to Kidderminster where he tries to make a living by twisting silks and worsteds:
As Pilgrims, and very poor Pilgrims, we are travelling through many difficulties towards our HEAVENLY HOME, and waiting patiently for his gracious call, when the Lord shall deliver us out of the evils of this present world and bring us to the EVER-LASTING GLORIES of the world to come. – TO HIM be PRAISE for EVER and EVER, AMEN.37
Gronniosaw’s brief narrative is a depressing start to the history of black English literature. He had headed for England believing it to be a cruelty-free nation. London, in particular, appealed to him because he was ‘very desirous to get among Christians’.38
In the years following his arrival in London, Gronniosaw’s life mirrored that of many of his black compatriots in a number of respects: his enduring marriage to a white woman; the poverty and bereavement which dogged them at every turn; their need to scuttle constantly between different parts of England. Scholars have tried and failed to assemble a detailed biography of Gronniosaw. This isn’t surprising. In his enforced mobility, his dependence on handouts, his inhabitation of seedy lodging houses and freezing cottages both in London and on the edges of other English towns, Gronniosaw, like so many ex-slaves in the eighteenth century, relied both on his long-suffering family and on his sorely-tested religious faith for survival. The pilgrimage motif on which the narrative ends tempers Gronniosaw’s despair with what is only a partially convincing vision of future repose. The journey across the Atlantic to America, the passages to England and, finally, to London, may have been fruitless. However, when earthly cities are so inhospitable to the transplanted African, it’s understandable if the goal of migrating to a heavenly city becomes the only redeeming alternative.
Gronniosaw is still a largely unknown figure. The same cannot be said of Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797). Born (or so he claimed) to Ibo parents in Essaka, a village in what is now Nigeria, he was the youngest son of an aristocratic, slave-owning family. At the age of eleven he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. After surviving the Middle Passage, he found himself working in a plantation house in Virginia before being sold to Michael Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Pascal christened him Gustavus Vassa after a sixteenth-century Swedish freedom-fighter, a name which, as personal inscriptions and his letters to the press reveal, Equiano used for most of his life.
Coming to England for the first time in 1757, Equiano stayed in Falmouth and London where he slowly learned to read and write. He spent much of the next five years aboard British ships fighting the French in the Mediterranean. At the end of 1762 he was sold to Captain James Doran who, five months later, sold him on to a Quaker merchant named Robert King. Equiano worked for four years as a small goods trader in the West Indies and various North American plantations; the money he earned during this period allowed him to purchase his freedom for forty pounds in 1766. The following year he returned to London where he practised hairdressing before his maritime twitchings got the better of him and pushed him towards the oceans where he adventured away the next few years serving under various ship captains. An intensely ambitious man of ‘roving disposition’, he was the first black to explore the Arctic when he joined Lord Mulgrave’s 1773 expedition to find a passage to India, sailing on the same ship as a young Horatio Nelson.39
Equiano spent much of the final two decades of his life campaigning against the slave trade. In 1783 he was responsible for notifying the social reformer Granville Sharp about the case of the 132 Africans who had been thrown overboard from the Liverpool slave ship, the Zong, for insurance purposes. The incident, though hardly unprecedented in the miserable annals of slave history, provoked mass outrage and was later the subject of one of Turner’s finest paintings, ‘Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming on’ (1840). His growing status amongst London blacks was rewarded by his appointment in November 1786 as Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the 350 impoverished blacks who had decided to take up the Government’s offer of an assisted passage to Sierra Leone. It made him the first black person ever to be employed by the British Government, but the job did not last long. Angered by the embezzlement perpetrated by one of the official agents, he notified the authorities but was dismissed from his post. The affair did not curtail his political activities: he fired off letters to the press, penned caustic reviews of anti-Abolitionist propaganda, and became an increasingly effective speaker for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade as well as the more radical London Corresponding Society.
Equiano published his autobiography in 1789. Over the next five years it ran to nine editions and was translated into Dutch, Russian and German. He was a canny businessman and held on to the copyright of his book
