Olaudah Equiano: Selling Glass Tumblers to Buy His Freedom for £40

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Olaudah Equiano was born around 1745 in Essaka, in what is now Nigeria, the youngest of six sons. At about 11 he and his sister were kidnapped while the adults were away, and they were separated almost at once. He was carried with more than 240 other captives to Barbados and then to Virginia, where Royal Navy lieutenant Michael Henry Pascal bought him as a valet. Ship crews had called him Michael and his first Virginia owner called him Jacob; Pascal renamed him Gustavus Vassa and beat him until he answered to it. As a powder monkey in the Seven Years' War he saw the siege of Louisbourg and the Battle of Lagos, learned to read and write in England, and was baptized in London in 1759.

In 1762 Pascal suddenly sold him to a captain bound for the Caribbean, and on Montserrat he was bought by Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia, who promised freedom for £40. Equiano traded fruit and glass tumblers between Georgia and the islands and bought himself out in 1766. Free in London, he sailed on a 1773 Royal Navy expedition toward the North Pole with Dr. Charles Irving, then turned to abolition. When his friend John Annis was seized in London and shipped to St. Kitts despite a writ of habeas corpus, Equiano turned from the courts to print. His 1789 Interesting Narrative ran to nine editions in his lifetime and helped lay groundwork for the Slave Trade Act of 1807.

• A 1759 parish register and a naval muster roll list his birthplace as Carolina, which a few scholars cite to question his African childhood.
• Shortly after buying his freedom he was nearly kidnapped back into slavery while loading a ship in Georgia.
• In 1783 he alerted Granville Sharp to the Zong massacre, where over a hundred captives were thrown overboard for an insurance claim.
• On his book tour he met the United Irishmen in Belfast in 1791 and worked with the London Corresponding Society.
• He married Susanna Cullen in 1792 and died in 1797 at 52, leaving an estate of nearly £1,000 to his daughter Joanna.