He also traveled widely with Pascal and served under him during the Seven Years’ War.
Pascal gave him the name Gustavus Vassa after a Swedish king.ĭuring the next several years, Equiano attended to Pascal’s cousins, the Guerin sisters, who provided him with a formal education. Michael Henry Pascal, a British commander of a merchant ship, bought him and took him back to England in 1757.
From there, Equiano was sent to Virginia. He was sold to British slave traders and taken by ship to the West Indies. According to his own account, when he was still a child, he and his sister were kidnapped by local slave raiders and soon separated. This raised still unresolved questions about whether his accounts of Africa and his forced voyage to the New World are based on memory, reading, or a combination of the two.Įquiano was born about 1745, possibly in Essaka (in present-day Nigeria). However, at the turn of the 21st century, newly discovered documents suggested that he may have been born in North America. Equiano said he had been born in West Africa. Graphically depicting the horrors of slavery, this narrative spurred the abolitionist cause in Europe and the United States. The book is called The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). Olaudah Equiano was a slave whose autobiography is considered by many to be the first significant work about an enslaved person’s life.
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