Olaudah equiano

1. Olaudah was not sure of his exact birth date but it was some time in 1745, so he would have been around 11 when he was kidnapped.

2. He’s kidnapped by men from a neighbouring African tribe. 

3. Slavery seems to have been embedded into the social structure in this part of Africa. Equiano describes how his father, one of the village chiefs, had slaves. Slaves were obtained either through purchase from an African slave trader or by raiding the village of a neighbouring tribe. It took six months for Olaudah to be transported to the coast where the African traders sold their captives to the white traders who came in their sailing ships from Europe. 

4. This question gives an opportunity to explore how Olaudah might have felt about being captured as a slave and all that might entail. Equiano is first re-named Michael, then Jacob, then Gustavus Adolphus. He used this name for most of life, before reverting back to Equiano when he came to write his autobiography.

5.  Olaudah was sold at least five times: first to a white slaver sea-captain on the African coast, then in Barbardos, a third time in Virginia , a fourth time in Gravesend, England, and a fifth time in Montserrat. 

6. Olaudah might have had some basic education from Lieutenant Pascal, who also sent him back to England from time to time to stay with his sister, where he would have learnt a little more. He is encouraged to improve his reading and writing by Robert King as this would have been useful in his work as a trader.

7. Olaudah served as a personal valet to Lieutenant Pascal and so accompanied him on all his sea voyages. In doing so, he became a skilful professional sailor. England was involved in the Seven Years War between 1756 and 1763, and the Royal Navy fought several important battles with the French fleet. Olaudah would have been only thirteen at the battle of Louisberg, fourteen at the battle of Lagos, and sixteen at the battle of Belle Ile.

8.  Starting from Nigeria, Olaudah travelled to Barbados, Virginia USA, the coasts of Canada, Spain and France, England, Montserrat in the Caribbean while with Lieutenant Pascal, Philadelphia UA, Georgia USA, England, the Arctic, Nicaragua and then finally back to England. 

9.  He is able to save up the money with which to buy his freedom as Robert King allows his to trade on his own behalf and to keep the profits from that trading.

10.  He is still only 21 when he is able to buy his freedom.

11.  Olaudah did not feel safe in America for although he was a free black man, other white men may have considered him to be an escaped slave and therefore an easy target to be captured and re-enslaved. Once transported to a plantation it would have been very difficult for him to prove that he was free or to escape. In England, while the concept of slavery had been generally accepted - Lieutenant Pascal sells him to Captain James Doran in Gravesend, Kent in 1762 - but in 1778 Lord Mansfield, who was the Lord Chief Justice, had ruled that an escaped slave could not forcibly be returned to their master.

12.  We can suppose that Olaudah much preferred to be free rather than a slave. However, he undertook a job for Dr Irving whereby he went to Nicaragua to help choose and manage slaves on a sugar plantation there, which suggests a willingness to work within the slave system. He didn’t stay very long and afterwards when he came back to England, he became very active in the movement to abolish the slave trade, so perhaps this was the first time that he had been brought face to face with the horrors of slavery on plantations.

13. Olaudah made quite a lot of money from his autobiography, which became a best-seller, so by the end of his life, he was comfortably off. In his picture he is wearing quite stylish and expensive clothes.

14.  He was slave to Lieutenant Pascal for five years, and then with Mr King for four years.

15. There is no right or wrong answer here – it is a chance to reflect on Olaudah’s life experiences. Undoubtedly there were elements of luck: he was unlucky to have been captured in the first place, but lucky in that he survived the voyage across the Atlantic and then was not sent to a plantation, which is where the vast majority of Africans transported to the USA ended up and where conditions were terrible. Secondly he seems to have spent five years within the Royal Navy and gone through at least three major sea battles without incurring any significant injury. The impact of cannon balls on the hulls of wooden ships could be devastating. 

He was lucky in that two of his owners seem to have been relatively humane and generous men, Lieutenant Pascal who first educated him and Robert King, who allowed him quite a degree of independence as a slave and ultimately allowed him to buy his freedom.

However, we may speculate that Olaudah had many excellent personal qualities: that he was highly intelligent, enterprising, energetic and probably with considerable charm since both Lieutenant Paschal and Robert King retained his services for several years, and Dr Charles Irving sought him out to go to Nicaragua. He must have been an extraordinary man. 

  1. Since this is May and so summer, the fire would not be necessary as a source of heat for the household, but it would be essential for cooking. Mary is almost certainly using wood as a fuel and as this would take a little time for it to build up sufficient heat on which to cook, lighting the fire is her first task of the morning.

2. Mary is extremely busy: she rises very early,  gets dressed, lights the fire, sweeps the kitchen floor and cooks the breakfast for the family. She then strains the milk ready for making into butter and prepares her husband’s lunch, after which she attends to the animals. Back in the house, she tidies up while snatching a bite to eat. She then gets the children up and dressed and churns the butter, then goes into the garden to do the hoeing, after which she prepares the lunch, feeds the chickens again, and then more gardening in the afternoon.

There is a sudden emergency in the need to get the cows back into their own pasture and to repair the broken fence, after which she does some more gardening, with a short break to prepare the supper, and then sees to the animals’ evening feeds. In the evening she serves the supper, puts the children to bed, washes the dishes and prepares the next day’s breakfast.

3 Mary doesn’t give exact times for her tasks but it would seem clear that she spends most of her time in the garden, from roughly  8am to 11.30am and then again perhaps four or five hours after lunch. This may reflect the importance of the garden produce to the income of the family.

4. Mary mentions five different sorts of animals: cows, young steers and calves:  horses: pigs (stock hogs): chickens and sheep, so this is what we would call mixed farming, where the farmer is producing both crops and livestock.

5. Cows would give milk for drinking as well as making into cream, butter and cheese and also beef. The pigs would produce pork, bacon and ham. The chickens would produce meat and eggs. The sheep would produce meat and wool which could be used to make clothes.

6. The horses would be particularly useful as they were essentially the farm’s source of power. They would have pulled the farm’s machinery, such as the plough and the thresher and would also have provided the family with transport by pulling a buggy. This would enable the family to travel to the local town and to any market there, where they could sell their excess produce.

7. Mary mentions growing vegetables - tomatoes, sweet potatoes and cabbages- but she also talks about sowing a flower bed.

8. The family would have eaten a lot of their own produce (see the answer to Q 5) but they would also have bought such things as they cannot produce in the local town. This may have been salt, flour, honey, clothes, shoes, metal goods and luxuries such as sweets, ornaments, furniture, bed linen etc.

9. It’s not clear exactly what Mary’s husband does but she says that he is working on the family’s other farm all day. This farm may have been used for growing crops such as wheat, barley or maize. Any surplus produce could be sold for cash and Mary mentions quite casually planting several hundred tomato plants. These would have grown happily outside in the climate of middle America and are likely to have produced far more tomatoes than the family would eat themselves. The two cows when producing milk could provide 80 – 90 litres of milk a day, again far more than the family themselves would drink, and which could be turned into 2-3 kilogrammes of butter.

10. Mary doesn’t mention washing, ironing or mending clothes. The farm is very unlikely to have had electricity so getting clothes clean by hand would have been very hard work. It was customary to set aside a whole day once a week to do the laundry and this isn’t the day! She also makes very little mention of her children. It’s not clear whether or not this is a school day or if they are at home. If they were at home, they would certainly have been expected to help with all the tasks. They would not appear to be very young as there is no mention of any need to nurse them. Perhaps she just wasn’t very maternal.

11. She really has very little time to herself as there are so many tasks to get through during the day. She sits down for a few minutes after lunch and reads, which shows that she was literate.

12.  Despite having to work very hard, it’s clear that Mary does take pride in her appearance. She twice mentions combing her hair and takes the trouble to put flowers in her hair. She also takes the trouble to grow flowers as well as vegetables, presumably for this purpose.

13. Mary comes across as a very capable, practical person. She is in charge of the farm on her own all day, including the care of all the animals. When the pigs and the cows get into the wheat field, she gets them back into their proper enclosures and then mends the fence herself.

14. The family are likely to have been neither very poor – they own two farms – but not very rich either. They probably have enough to get by with a little left over for treats, but they manage this by working very hard.

15. Mary is describing a weekday in early summer. Her daily routine would have been very dependent on the weather and on the seasons. While the animals would always need feeding and watering, for example there would be very little opportunity for gardening in the middle of winter, especially if there was snow. The rhythm of family life was also likely to be dependent on the length of daylight: with no electricity they may have used oil lamps in the dark evenings. Mary may have used the long winter evenings to make or mend clothes and perhaps for reading.

16. Mary is religious – she mentions saying a short prayer – and the family would almost certainly have gone to church on a Sunday. This would have been one of the highlights of the week and an opportunity to meet with other villagers and to socialise. The family would also have celebrated the various religious festivals such as Christmas and Easter and may well have attended “hoedowns”, parties generally held in the autumn.

17. Mary is farming some 313 years after Thomas Bateman died but it is very likely that he would feel relatively at home in her world. Some things had changed: the house would have had rather more furniture than he was used to and a much more efficient iron range for cooking. Mary is growing vegetables which Thomas would not have recognised, but the essentials of her day of looking after the animals and the house would have seemed remarkably familiar to him.