that accrued to him when he toured the United Kingdom inveighing against slavery and hawking his narrative. By the time he died in 1797, his literary success allowed him to leave an estate worth almost a thousand pounds to Susan Cullen, the white Englishwoman he’d married in 1792, and their two daughters, Anna Maria and Johanna. It was a far cry from the single half-bit with which he had bought a glass tumbler on the Dutch island of St Eustatia, a transaction that had kicked off his career as a small trader.
Over the course of the last two decades Equiano has become one of the most famous black Englishmen to have lived before World War Two. His memoirs were issued in 1995 as a Penguin Classic and have sold tens of thousands of copies on both sides of the Atlantic. Films, documentaries and cartoons have been based on his adventures. His life and travels have inspired a growing amount of academic research into eighteenth-century maritime culture. Of the millions of people who flocked during 2000 to the Millennium Dome in Greenwich a good proportion would have seen a video about him that was screened in the ‘Faith Zone’ there.
This level of fame is in part a belated – and hence amplified – recognition of his distinction in being the first African to write rather than dictate his autobiography, an achievement which confounded pro-slavery ideologies and led various newspaper critics to question the book’s authenticity. The Interesting Narrative is also one of the earliest slave narratives, a genre more normally associated with nineteenth-century American figures such as Frederick Douglass. It offers a rare – and, for a black writer, unprecedented – account of life below the deck of a slave ship. Long before the golden period of anti-imperialist activity in the metropolis – the first half of the twentieth century when Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore railed against colonialism – Equiano, in tandem with a cabal of black revolutionaries who had named themselves the ‘Sons of Africa’, fought tirelessly for the abolition of slavery. His autobiography is also, inadvertently, a fascinating account of life in black London in the final decades of the eighteenth century.
To Equiano the capital seemed a place of liberty, a shelter from the storms that slavery had rained down upon him since he was a young boy. Throughout the time he was chained below deck or toiling in plantation fields, London lingered stubbornly in his imagination as a city that, far off and possibly unreachable, might be an asylum from the immiseration in which he and his fellow blacks found themselves. It was a dream, one that inspired hope. He had seen friends dashed to pieces in battles at sea. He had seen female slaves raped, men tied to the ground and castrated before having their ears chopped off bit by bit. In Georgia he himself had been randomly bludgeoned and left for dead by one Doctor Perkins. And when he was in Montserrat he
knew a Negro man, named Emanuel Sankey, who endeavoured to escape from his miserable bondage, by concealing himself on board of a London ship: but fate did not favour the poor oppressed man; for being discovered when the vessel was under sail, he was delivered up again to his master. This Christian master immediately pinned the wretch down to the ground at each wrist and ankle, and then took some sticks of sealing-wax, and lighted them, and dropped it all over his back.40
The Interesting Narrative is invaluable as a book about witnessing. It is a record of horrible things seen, horrible events from which the author would rather have averted his gaze, which, he hopes, might be brought to an end as a result of his describing them. London, in contrast, is a place where looking is a pleasure, not a duty. A place full of entertaining spectacle, not evil: ‘Though I had desired so much to see London, when I arrived in it I was unfortunately unable to gratify my curiosity; for I had at this time the chilblains.’41 Equiano found himself unable to stand up and had to be sent to St George’s Hospital where his condition deteriorated. The doctors, fearing gangrene, wanted to chop off one of the twelve-year-old boy’s legs. He recovered just in time only to find that, on the brink of being discharged, he had contracted smallpox. By the time many months later he had regained his health he was needed to sail to Holland and then on to Canada, having seen almost nothing of the capital except the inside walls of a hospital dormitory.
Such dismal experiences didn’t turn Equiano against the city. When he returned two years later in 1759 he had a much better time. While serving three sisters in Greenwich, the Guerins, he decided to learn skills that might hasten his liberty. He attended school to improve his English and got himself baptized at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster. He watched how the nobility comported themselves and what made them tick. For a while he became rather besotted by them: ‘I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us.’42
As he attended Miss Guerin around town, ‘extremely happy; as I had thus very many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’, he also saw many sights – public executions, a white negro woman – that imprinted themselves on his memory.43 No doubt he would have seen other blacks, in situations not dissimilar to his own, working as coachmen and footmen for the aristocracy. Such sightings would have alerted him to the fact that some black people in London were not as blessed with good fortune as he was, and that not only could he strike up friendships with them, but he could also help to improve their lots.
On Equiano’s own daily perambulations, though, danger and delight were never far away. Once, hanging around a press-gang inn located at the foot of Westminster Bridge, he was playing with some white friends in watermen’s wherries. Along came two ‘stout boys’ in another wherry and started abusing him. When they suggested that he should cross over to their boat, Equiano, eager to placate them, tried to do so but was pushed into the Thames, ‘and not being able to swim, I should unavoidably have been drowned, but for the assistance of some watermen, who providentially came to my relief’.44
Equiano never forgot London. Through the years he spent at sea it stuck in his memory as a brief interlude of joy. The moment he gained his freedom in 1766 his thoughts turned back to the grey, sportive city across which he had once ranged. At dances in Montserrat his freshly purchased clothes caught the attention of pretty women: ‘Some of the sable females, who formerly stood aloof, now began to relax, and appear less coy, but my heart was still fixed on London, where I hoped to be ere long.’45 Over the course of the next fifteen years Equiano’s ‘roving disposition’, his attraction to the ‘sound of fame’, and the poor wages that domestic service offered in comparison to seafaring led him back to the ocean time and again. Yet he always returned to the capital.
Perhaps the pivotal moment in Equiano’s life came in 1773 after his return from Lord Mulgrave’s Arctic expedition. Arriving in London he went to a lodging house in the Haymarket near the Strand. He had stayed in this area before, during which time he had learned to dress hair and to play the French horn and had persuaded a neighbouring Reverend to teach him arithmetic. Now he felt much less resourceful: ‘I was continually oppressed and much concerned about the salvation of my soul, and was determined (in my own strength) to be a first-rate Christian.’46 He began to go up and talk to anyone he thought might be able to succour him in his hour of spiritual need. When this proved to be useless he wandered dejectedly around the streets of central London. Soon he was visiting local churches, including St James’s and St Martin’s, two or three times a day, always searching for fresh answers. He approached Quakers, Catholics, Jews. Yet ‘still I came away dissatisfied: something was wanting that I could not obtain, and I really found more heart-felt relief in reading my bible at home than in attending the church’.47 He fled to Turkey. In 1779 he resolved to become a missionary in Africa, but, despite visiting the Bishop of London to seek permission, was refused ordination.
Equiano’s memoir is couched as a spiritual autobiography, a genre that was hugely popular during
