The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade

Introduction

Introduction Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury In 1763 a young enslaved man who went by the name Gustavus Vassa went to sea in the British Caribbean. Like most sailors, he soon began to engage in petty commerce to make a bit of money. Over the next four years he built up his small savings by transporting goods from one island port and selling them in another. Around 1767 he invested all of his savings in limes and oranges that he took on a voyage to Santa Cruz (present-day Saint Croix). When the ship arrived in port, probably at Frederiksted, he and a friend lit out for the city to sell their fruit. Almost immediately “two white men” stopped them and openly stole their three bags of fruit. The two young slaves pleaded for the return of their trade goods, but the robbers “not only refused to return” the citrus, they cursed their two victims and threatened “to flog” them as well if they did not leave them alone. Thus, at the “very minute of gaining more by three times than” he had ever had “by any venture” in his “life before,” the young enslaved petty merchants was “deprived of every farthing” he “was worth.”1 Port cities created opportunities for enslaved Africans, but they also held dangers. Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, lived an amazing life in the Black Atlantic. According to his 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself , he was born in 1745 in a small Igbo village called Essaka. Kidnapped as a young boy, he was sold into American slavery. More fortunate than most victims of the slave trade, he ultimately won his freedom and became an antislavery advocate and author. His account of enslavement, the Middle Passage , his life as a slave, and his careers as a free man offers the most powerful Introduction 2 first-person account of eighteenth-century slavery to be found in English. Not surprisingly, scholars of eighteenth-century race and slavery use it in discussions of almost every aspect of eighteenth-century black life in the Englishspeaking world. And why not? Equiano/Vassa’s story lives up to its title—it is, indeed, an “Interesting Narrative.” He offers chilling descriptions of being snatched from Essaka with his sister, of being separated from her while traveling to the African coast, and of being purchased by slavers and shipped to America. Once in the New World he was sold to a Virginian and then to a ship captain, after which he traveled throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, going as far east as Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire. He fought on a Royal Navy man-of-war alongside his owner during the Seven Years War. He converted to Christianity in England. Sold back to America, he worked and made money for his owner while engaging in petty commerce on his own account. Finally, despite numerous efforts by whites to defraud him like the one on Santa Cruz, he saved enough to buy his freedom. As a free man he worked as a sailor, a barber and personal servant, and as an overseer. By the time he decided to write his autobiography, he had lived a life well worth telling, a life many would and did want to purchase as text. His Interesting Narrative was a best seller. That broad range of experience also helps explain the Narrative’s appeal to scholars. Equiano/Vassa went so many places, he interacted with whites and blacks throughout so much of Britain’s Atlantic empire, he recounted so many fascinating stories that his autobiography can seem like a gold mine for people searching for all-too-rare points of entry into the ways that slaves understood their world. Of course that very variety of experience raises questions about how to use evidence from the text. No one has ever pretended that Equiano/Vassa’s life as a slave resembled that of most victims of the Atlantic trade, but relatively little attention has been paid to the prominence of cities in his story. Though he spent a few weeks as a slave in rural Virginia, and a few months as an overseer on the Mosquito Coast of present-day Nicaragua, he reported precious little experience on plantations, the institution that dominated the lives of most American slaves. Instead, most of his time was spent either in ports or on ships...