In only three years, he made enough money to buy his own freedom. While working as a deckhand, valet and barber for King, Equiano earned money by trading on the side. Pascal then sold Equiano to a ship captain in London, who took him to Montserrat, where he was sold to the prominent merchant Robert King. Equiano travelled the oceans with Pascal for eight years, during which time he was baptised and learned to read and write. In Virginia he was sold to a Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Michael Pascal, who renamed him 'Gustavus Vassa' after the 16th-century Swedish king. Doubt also stems from the fact that, in later life, he twice listed a birthplace in the Americas.Īpart from the uncertainty about his early years, everything Equiano describes in his extraordinary autobiography can be verified. In the absence of written records it is not certain whether Equiano's description of his early life is accurate. He describes how he was kidnapped with his sister at around the age of 11, sold by local slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to Barbados and then Virginia. In his autobiography, Olaudah Equiano writes that he was born in the Eboe province, in the area that is now southern Nigeria. © Equiano was an African writer whose experiences as a slave prompted him to become involved in the British abolition movement.
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