44 pages • 1 hour read
Olaudah EquianoThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1789A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Equiano’s captors were not able to find a buyer for him in Barbados, so he ended up in a household in Virginia. There, Equiano had enough to eat but was frequently fearful as he saw an enslaved woman walking around with her mouth muzzled. He describes how mystified he was by common objects like a portrait and a watch. He took special note of books in his master’s library; he attempted to get one of these books to talk to him, but he gave up when the book failed to talk back to him. Equiano was then sold to Captain Pascal, who served in the British Royal Navy. Once aboard Pascal’s ship, Equiano was christened with the name “Gustavus Vassa,” despite his desire to continue going by the name Jacob, given to him by his previous owner.
Over the course of two years, Equiano traveled the Atlantic aboard several ships as his owner fought during the Seven Years’ War between England and France. During these years, he went from fearing the English and colonists and thinking of them as magicians to seeing them as ordinary people with some mastery of technology. He made a lifelong friendship with Richard Baker, who explained with great patience the many oddities of life aboard ship and among the English. Equiano also began to understand Christianity, particularly the idea that there is one god and that there is no need to entreat ancestors and gods for help. This chapter ends with his participation in the Siege of Louisburg, a grave defeat for the French. In his master’s company, Equiano returned to England.
Chapter 4 Summary
By 1759, Equiano was regularly serving aboard ships that engaged in battle. Between these expeditions, he stayed in England with his master’s relatives, including the Guerin sisters, who used their influence to send Equiano to school. Under the influence of the sisters, Equiano also converted to Christianity after the sisters explained that he must be baptized to go to heaven. He began to think of himself both as a Christian and “almost an Englishman” (94) and did all he could to emulate the example of his peers and superiors. Under the influence of his religious conversion, Equiano began to see signs of God’s intervention during his time at sea, including the salvation of a man who escaped death after God told him in a dream to stop his drinking. Equiano also encountered another enslaved African boy during his travels.
Equiano recounts in detail the dangers and turns of the English expedition to the French island of Bell-Isle, an adventure that essentially marked the end of the Seven Years’ War. Not all his adventures were good, however. He was nearly kidnapped after being gullible enough to believe the would-be captors could take him to his sister. Over the course of these years, Equiano’s master participated in battles and raids that gained him bounty money, as did Equiano. When the war ended, Equiano, who had up until then been treated with kindness by his master, expected that living in England, being baptized, and earning prize money for his master would bring about his freedom. When they arrived in England, however, Pascal seized his funds and sent him to the West Indies on the first ship he could find. Equiano was devastated.
Chapter 5 Summary
Once in the West Indies on the island of Montserrat, the captain of the ship sold Equiano to Mr. King, a Quaker regarded as a kindly master because he treated his slaves gently and fairly in comparison to others in those islands. King, recognizing that Equiano was trustworthy and had many skills, trained him to manage ships and hired out his labor. King profited from Equiano’s labor, considering what he paid for Equiano. Equiano was at first in a dark depression as he realized that he would likely never gain freedom in Great Britain and its territories, but he developed an attitude of acceptance based on his Christian faith.
Equiano traveled to many islands of the West Indies, and he witnessed extraordinary cruelties in each place he went. He provides testimony about enslaved people who received too little food to engage in the strenuous labor assigned to them, people whose meager earnings (allowed by some masters) were stolen by white people, and enslaved women and girls who were raped on board the ships that brought them to the islands. These cruelties were particularly bad in places with absentee owners. Some masters even increased the number of slaves on their plantations by raping and impregnating enslaved women, creating a situation in which such men were both fathers and owners to their own children.
Equiano directly addresses the planters of the West Indies and English people in general. He advances several arguments on why this treatment must not continue. The debasement of enslaved people transforms their captors into brutal, greed-driven beasts. In addition, such cruel treatment runs counter to the Christianity so many claim they accept. Their treatment of the enslaved, authorized by slave codes that place little value on the lives and natural rights of enslaved people, creates an atmosphere that will one day lead to deadly insurrection.
Chapters 3-5 Analysis
Equiano claims in the first chapter of the book that his life is ordinary but also quite extraordinary, and the events he narrates in the second section of the book bear out that paradox. In these chapters Equiano shows the reader how his experiences and choices began transforming him into something familiar—an Englishman—but also how the experience of slavery in his own life and that of others is exceptional and extreme.
As a person coming from outside of Western culture, Equiano has a hard task, and that is to show that he understands and engages with the values of his audience. Equiano is a unique figure—a formerly enslaved person who can write and speak on his own behalf. Part of the challenge of being a Black writer directly out of Africa is to get a white English audience to recognize that identity as a source of authority.
Equiano accomplishes this balancing act by incorporating English history, including firsthand accounts of his participation in the Seven Years’ War, into his narrative. These exciting accounts of near misses and victories would have been appealing to the self-regard of his English readers. In addition, Equiano shows his diligent efforts to take on important aspects of Anglo-American identity, especially when it comes to Christianity. His account of attempting to make books talk to him shows his naivete, but it also shows an initiative when it comes to securing the literacy that is supposed to be a part of the education of a respectable Englishman.
Equiano makes no effort to flatter English planters of the West Indies, however. He makes a clear distinction between the actions of the English people he encounters in England and West Indian planters. His direct address to English people in general is a call for the mainland to put an end to the excesses of the planters. These people are perpetrators of extreme acts of cruelty, and Equiano’s accounts of beatings, rapes, and extortion are surely designed to encourage readers to rein in these excesses in British colonies and to consider themselves as morally separate from the island dwellers of English origin.
Like many slave narratives, this one incorporates not just the life story of the writer but also an avalanche of stories of the cruelties suffered by others. The many tales of brutality Equiano witnesses highlight the emphasis on using the space of the autobiography to tell a larger story about the institution of slavery. In these early chapters, Equiano chooses to allow the stories of others and a more general description of the practices of West Indian planters to take up much of the pace in Chapter 5. This testimony is so central to his overriding goal of arguing against slavery that these details sometimes interrupt the flow of his autobiographical narrative, a point Equiano acknowledges from time to time.
His focus on testimony shows his awareness of the historical context. These details are especially important, given that the moment when the narrative was published was one in which there were legislative debates about slavery, especially as practiced among the planters. The choice to subordinate his autobiography to testify about a larger social reality is thus a strategic choice.
