In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

While Captains O’Brien and Stephens and their crews suffered in Algiers, another man began to write the story of his own captivity on the other side of the Atlantic. Olaudah Equiano, an African, was sold into slavery and shipped to the Americas but eventually gained his freedom and an education that enabled him to write one of the most famous captivity narratives of his age. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was first published in England in 1789 and New York in 1791. By the time the second group of Americans was captured by Algerians in 1793, English and Dutch editions had sold widely throughout the Atlantic world.1 Superficially, Equiano’s story was the mirror image of most captivity narratives , which portrayed the sufferings of Europeans among dark complexioned “savages.” A carefree and well-born young African, Equiano was suddenly kidnapped by slave traders who forced him on board a European ship, which took him to an American port, where he was sold into slavery. Equiano, who had become a devout Christian before writing his narrative, portrays his European captors as satanic demons and their ship as a hellish nightmare. At first sight of the ship, young Olaudah believed he had “gotten into a world of bad spirits.” On board, he saw “a large furnace of copper boiling and a multitude of black people of every description chained together.” After a fainting spell, he asked some fellow Africans if they “were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair.”2 Many European accounts of capture by Algerians, or by Indians for that matter, likewise portrayed the captors as devilish heathen. The difference, of course, is that in Equiano’s tale the heathen were European Christians and the peaceful victims were non-Christian Africans. Equiano reinc h a p t e r f o u r Slavery at Home and Abroad 72 The Impact of Captivity at Home forces the racial reversal throughout the narrative as he adopts Christianity while his tormentors continually violate central Christian tenets through their involvement in slavery and the slave trade. Although the racial and religious dynamic of Algerian captivity was indeed the opposite of Equiano’s narrative, American authors writing about Algiers often employed the same trope of European savagery that was so evident in Equiano’s account. In a literal sense, Christians were the victims rather than the aggressors in these narratives, but their authors also stressed Christians’ broader culpability in the slave trade. In his history of Algiers, Mathew Carey commented, “For this practice of buying and selling slaves, we are not entitled to charge the Algerines with any exclusive degree of barbarity. The Christians of Europe and America carry on this commerce an hundred times more extensively than the Algerines.” Similarly, in a fictional argument between a mullah and an American slave in Algiers, novelist Royall Tyler had the mullah remark that, unlike American masters , Algerians immediately freed any slave who converted to Islam: “We leave it to the Christians of the West Indies, and Christians of your southern plantations, to baptise the unfortunate African into your faith, and then use your brother Christians as brutes of the desert.”3 Equiano wrote his narrative in large part as antislavery propaganda at a time when there was growing abolitionist sentiment throughout the Atlantic world. By pointing out the barbaric un-Christian behavior of the European captors, he hoped to shame them into renouncing their role as slaveholders. Many American authors like Carey and Tyler who wrote about the Algerian captives hoped to make a similar point by comparing the savagery of the Algerians to that of American slaveholders, usually to the detriment of the Americans. Linda Colley has recently posited that British captivity narratives expressed the deep-seated sense of vulnerability shared by a fairly small group of people living on a very small island involved in colonizing large groups of Africans, Asians, and Americans.4 The United States was not yet a colonizing empire, but it had, in a sense, internally colonized nearly three-quarters of a million Africans. For many American authors writing about Algerian captivity, the fate of their “enslaved” brethren in far away North Africa offered an opportunity to reflect on some of the evils of the institution of slavery closer to home.  Not everyone who wrote about Algiers shared this concern. Most notably, none of the captives who wrote letters from Algiers compared their situation...

Share