Empire: World History - 60. Britain's Most Famous Slave

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Olaudah Equiano is Britain's most famous slave. In many ways he lived the life which many slaves did, but in others he was totally unique. A brilliant man with extraordinary abilities, listen as William and Anita discuss the life of Olaudah Equiano. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. And today we have an extraordinary story, one of the most remarkable individuals to emerge from the whole horrific tale of the Middle Passage and the Caribbean plantation system. It's the life of Lauda Equiano, one of the most famous and most significant black Englishman of the 18th century,

a man of extraordinary initiative and skill, able to turn his hands to all sorts of things, who wrote a famous autobiography. It's also a political work that had real and actual knock-on effect with the abolition movement. Also, it should be said, there is now a brand of rum named after him. There's an undersea. cable named after him that links the west coast of Africa with Lisbon that follows the route that the first Portuguese slavers took. A lot of the story that we will be telling comes from his own narrative, even though the story of his early life being snatched from his family and taken across the middle passage to be sold as a slave has been called into question subsequently by some scholars

and we'll be going into that later. But Anita, tell me about this man. Where was he born? Who was he? and why are we interested in him? Right. Before I get into that, because as you say, there are some recent scholars who are saying, actually, liar, lie, la, pants on fire, Equiano, you weren't. You weren't, but you said you were. You weren't, but just before, can I do the elevator pitch for who he was? Because I think you would like him very much.

So this is a man who, having gone through the worst depredations that humanity can throw at another human, right? He ends up being one of the best networkers in London. He is a prodigious writer, not just as you say, of his narrative, but also of articles, pamphlets, papers. He never sold the copyright of his book, which is unthinkable at the time. He never sold it. It was so popular, this narrative of his life, that we're going to talk about in more detail, that it went through nine editions. And every single penny came to him, not to anybody.

else it came to him because he was very savvy when it came to money. So he spent his life, the latter part of his life, if we call him Equiana the older, which we'll get to a lot later on, giving book tours, signing autographs. Does he sound like someone you know? And, you know, he was sort of the man about town. He was a man that people wanted to know, but he didn't start that way. So let's first of all take him at his word. Let's take him at his word. So when he wrote the the interesting narrative of Olauda Equiano of Africa, told by himself. You know, there's a great frontispiece in his book, which is a picture of him looking very grand, like a gentleman dressed in Western clothes.

Much reproduced in books today. Every which were and everywhere. We were talking about the Joshua Reynolds picture of Francis Barber. This is almost as ubiquitous, or maybe even more so than that image. So what he starts off by saying in his book is really interesting, I think. He says, I offer here the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant. I believe there are a few events in my life which have not happened to many. It is true.

Incidents of it are numerous and, did I consider myself, and European, I might say my sufferings were great. But when I compare my lot with that of most of my countrymen, I regard myself as a particular favourite of heaven, and I acknowledge the mercies of providence in every occurrence of my life. So, isn't that amazing? Yeah. And yet his life,

as laid down in his autobiography, has the lineaments of one of those 18th century novels. This is an autobiography. It's not a work of fiction. However much people may have cast some doubts on his origins, whether he came from the Carolinas or from Africa. But he arranges his material in exactly the way that, say, Samuel Richardson arranges the ups and downs of the lives of Pamela or Tom Jones or the way that Thackeray. arranges the life of Barry Lyndon that got made into that wonderful movie. And this sensation that, which I think is so telling about the 18th century,

that life is full of hidden trap doors, full of hidden pits that you can just plunge down into and all your hope suddenly disappear overnight. And this is something is very common in that period. I think life was very fragile and, you know, all the more so, if rather than an aspiring Irish gallant like Barry Lyndon, you're in fact a black man in a white country where most black men are enslaved and have very little control over their own lives.

So when he talks about his own story, he says he was born in 1745 in a province called Ibo. Now, Ibo is south-eastern Nigeria, and he was given by his family, the people who loved him, the name Olauda. So he came from a large family, so he says, the youngest in a family of seven children, six boys, one girls, there were more siblings, but they died, he says.

And it seems to be a happy childhood, but it is in the kingdom of Benin. And we've talked about the problems in Benin, haven't we before? Yes, when we had Vincent on last week, he had this extraordinary fact in his amazing book, Taki's Revolt, that there was depopulation 100 miles in land in Benin because people were, very obviously so worried about slaving parties coming and taking them and selling them off to whoever would buy them in the slave ports. But he is brought up in a village, he says, beyond that. And even so, he falls party to a group of African slavers who lift him from his house with his sister. Yeah, I mean, he talks about sort of, it is two men and a woman. I mean, notably, you know, we talked about this with Vincent. there were women who were involved.

And also the film, you know, the Warriors of Dahomey, they talk about women warriors in a very heroic way, but there were women slavers who were going around from the kingdoms of Dahomey. African women slaves just to be explicit about this. African women slavers, exactly, who were picking up children and men and women and taking the way to be slaved. And he talks about this in the book,

and it's almost the opening of the insight into his life, his early memories, of being sort of clutching his sister, being utterly afraid and that notion of not knowing what's going to happen to you and then being forcibly separated from the clasp of his sister. So immediately he is making himself a human being and he's talking about family in a way that is accessible to people who don't look like him who don't have the colour of skin that he does. And he has this kind of idyllic description of his childhood before this, living with simple food, a simple life in the village. His people, he say, are favoured by

because they're hardy, intelligent, they possess integrity. And he says that no one from my tribe is idle. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, we all look at our charters and by and large, we say they were, they were perfect and perfect and everything was lovely until. And the until happens when he's taken away. Aged 11. Ageed 11, yeah.

We don't know what happens to his family, but he certainly seems to suggest that they are killed, but he never sees them again. It's just he and his sister who were taken away. And he talks about that feeling of being completely separate, completely alone. He also talks about not understanding what is going on, that, you know, there is a brutality. They don't know why they're being hit. They don't know why they're being shouted at. They don't know what people are saying to them.

And it is when he's passed into the hands of sort of the white slavers who are going to take him on. He's separated from his sister. We don't know what becomes of her after this. After moving several times through different hands, he says. Yeah, exactly. He suddenly comes face to face with the ship that is going to change his life. And I'll just, I'll read you a little bit of what he says, because I think he writes very beautifully, and that's what's notable about Equiano. He says, the first object, which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast, was the sea and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor and waiting for its cargo.

And these filled me with astonishment. So he's like a little boy like, oh, this is so cool. He's never seen a boat. He's probably never seen the sea before. It filled me with this astonishment which was soon connected with terror when I was carried on board. And I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I was sound by some of the crew. And I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits and that they were going to kill me. So that, again, I mean, the economy of expression of what this young boy was feeling at the time,

I think is really something else. And I think what we should remember is that while in a sense we're now very familiar with the Middle Passage and its horrors, an 18th century audience reading this book might never actually have not only not read this, but even thought about it. Their contact with slavery was limited to the sugar they put in their tea with the tobacco they smoked or the cotton that they wore on their bodies. And it was just like today, you know, it's very easy to go to a supermarket and buy a steak and forget that this was once part of a living cow. It's very easy not to, you know, to put these into different categories.

You look at a commodity, you don't necessarily associate it with a living being. And this is very much, I think, what the 18th century audience did, that they put this all in a completely different room. Slavery was very easy to keep out of sight and out of mind. And Equiano, for the first time, writes a first time. person narrative that's read very widely by a British public. And this description that he gives, and tell us about this, Anita, now the description of the Middle Passage would have been completely new. Yeah, absolutely, because, you know, people don't talk about it, what they can't see, they don't know about, and nobody really talked about the Middle Passage. He says, you know, I wish for my former

slavery in preference to my present situation, which was filled with horrors of every kind still heightened by my ignorance of what I was to undergo. I was not long suffered to indulge my grief, I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I have never experienced in my life. The loathsomeness of the stench he talks about. He puts you right in the picture, you know, the crying together. I became so sick and low, he says, I wasn't able to eat, and nor at I the least desire to taste anything. And I now wished for the last friend, death to relieve me. Isn't that awful? That's a terrible, terrible description. And this, again, we can't emphasize how.

how new this must have been for an 18th century audience. They never had a black man describe the process of actually being enslaved himself and what people must have felt when they read this and put two and two together. It's very easy to, I'm sure it's very easy to ignore all this. I mean, it's very easy for us to look back. He also doesn't sanitise it because he puts sort of the white slavers or the white crew right into the middle of the picture from the moment that he's sort of thrown up in the air and weighed and seen whether he's worthy or not.

he talks about not eating this trauma of being on the ship that is about to embark on the Middle Passage is so harrowing to him that he decides he's not going to eat, he can't eat, he's sick he just can't have any food he talks about two of the white men offered me

eatables and on my refusing to eat one of them held me fast by the hands and laid me across I think the windlass and tied my feet while the other flogged me severely I had never experienced anything of this kind before and although not being used to the water, I naturally feared the element the first time I saw it. Yet nevertheless, I could have

got over the nettings. I could have jumped over the sides, but I could not. And besides, the crew used to watch us so closely, who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water. And I've seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, an hourly whipped for not eating. This indeed was the case with myself. So just remember, this is an 11-year-old boy. This is happening to. He also describes how children younger than him are on board and that they keep falling into the hideous, what he calls the necessary tub, the latrine downstairs, or just the tub, I suppose, where this excrement goes. And these children falling in and drowning, it just gets kind of worse, worse. Yeah, and everybody chained up that picture, you know, making it visual for people who are reading his book, of people chained together, of people, you know, suffering in.

darkness under those decks. I think it is the first time, as you say, the first time people in Britain are actually made to see what it was like to be one of those people who was chained and being kidnapped, in effect, from their homeland. And you know what's interesting? There are some modern tellings of Equiano, some modern investigations that suggest. Actually, he wasn't born in Africa. He said a couple of points that he was from the Carolinas. But he says, you know, that beginning thing is that this is not my unique experience, is that unique of many people. So there is this sort of belief that maybe he's talked to a lot of people and that is the story he's also beginning to tell. But who knows? We're going to take a break now and

when we come back, we are going to tell the increasing horrors of what happens to him when he arrives in Barbados. Welcome back. We've just been talking about Equiano, the author of the first real autobiography of a slave and the extraordinary fact it has. had when he published this and went on book tours across Britain in the late 18th century. And Anita, you took us up from the Middle Passage and broke just before we got to Bridgetown Barbados. Yeah, so he arrives in the West Indies in Bridgetown. And at the slave market, he is watching and describing families being torn apart. He sees husbands torn from wives and children screaming.

And it's the sound of screaming and that's stendium. again that he makes very visceral. And he also makes these sort of cries in the middle, which become then a great foundation stone for abolitionists. Things like this, O ye nominal Christians, might not an African ask you, learned you from this, from your God, who says unto you, do unto all men, as men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust? And it's things like this, real, you know, within the narrative of what happened to him, these battle cries that go up. which become, you know, they're very easy to quote.

They're very easy to replicate. You can sort of feel that pulpit in them as they come through, and they prove to be very effective at the time. So he then goes on to Virginia, and he gets bought by a man called Michael Henry Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. What happens to him then? Well, first of all, he gets a new name.

So, you know, this is the thing that we've talked about with Vincent before, that the part of the dehumanisation of a person is to rob them of everything that linked them to their home. And he is called, at first, he's called Michael. And then Pascal decides he's going to rename him, Gustavus Vasa. And he says, I'm naming you after a Swedish king who freed his people from the tyranny of the Danes, which is just cruel, you know, something that you're never going to experience at all in your lifetime. Was that the motive? There was that thing also just to call slaves by sort of heroic names like

sort of Hannibal? Well, he does also say that, you know, this is a man who freed his slaves and you're not going to be freed. And at the first, you know, when he's called by his name, Equiano refuses to answer. He says, that's not my name. Because he's been known by two other names before he's actually been bought by Pascal. He's been called Jacob at one point. And he's been called Michael at another point.

And he says, well, you know, Gustavus is not my name. And he is thrashed. He's flogged for it. And a few times he doesn't reply, you know, when he's called, you know, Gustavus come here, he doesn't reply. And so he's flogged. He talks about being cuffed repeatedly for not replying to this. He's well treated compared to others who were tortured and thrown overboard, but it's not lovely. And Pascal is not kind either. But again, and this is typical of narrative, you move from these moments of horror to moments of kindness. And it's on that ship. that he meets Richard Baker, a white man, a few years old from him, and they become very close. Well, I mean, a boy, more than anything, like a boy. He's a boy from a family that has slaves themselves. And he, because I suppose the age difference is not great and they're surrounded by big hairy men on this voyage, these two kind of cleave together. And he describes in his book, again, it's really quite touching how, you know, first of all, is that, you know, they sort of move closer together. He doesn't speak English.

But with Richard and Richard trying to communicate with him a little bit. He starts picking up a few words of English here and there. And then they start becoming even more friendly. And then there are terrible storms where they hold each other, hold unto each other's bosoms until the storms pass or these frightening things pass, like little children would. And he and Richard become very, very close. I mean, to the point where he doesn't call him a friend,

but he calls him the most decent person he has ever met, who takes time for him, you know, who sort of would give him food off his plate, who sticks up for him on these voyages, who is the most humane person that he has met in a number of months. And Richard really sort of keeps him sane, I suppose. And it's at this point that he arrives for the first time in England, and it's snowing, a wonderful passage when he's describing the snow on the deck.

It is quite, quite gorgeous. I mean, I don't know whether you've got the passage there, but I'll tell you what actually happens to him. He comes and I think it's Falmouth. They sort of, they dock in Falmouth. And he's been in the cabin and he comes out. He's one of the earliest out onto the deck. And it's been sewing.

And he thinks that somebody's played a prank on the captain and has poured salt all over the decks. And he can't understand it and he doesn't want to get into trouble for it. So he runs down and he tells one of his, you know, shipmates. He goes, somebody has poured salt all over the decks everywhere. And obviously, knowing what this is, the man goes, go, go bring me a hand for of it. Bring me a handful. So he says he describes this feeling of grabbing a handful of this white stuff from the deck and running down with it and it is cold and it's kind of biting his hand.

And then the man's sort of laughing him and goes, taste it. And he puts it in his mouth and it is his very first experience of snow and it's beautiful. This is why I think this book had such an effect because it isn't just that it's new. It isn't just who wrote it. It's very well written and it has very good stories and continues to have extraordinary ups and downs and twists of fate throughout. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. So when he gets to England, Richard Baker and he are still going to be in touch and they're going to be in touch until Richard Baker dies, which is not too far in the future, but until them he always regards Baker as his friend. Baker not only has taught him how to speak English, also on these long voyages, he's taught him how to read.

And there's this beautiful thing that Equiano talks about where he sees Baker and the captain for hours. They're sitting there with books. And he thinks that they're talking to books and that the books are talking back. So secretly, sometimes he gets hold of books and he talks to them. You know, saying, hello, hello? And then it doesn't talk back. And he's very upset. And the book doesn't talk back and he's distraught that the books don't talk back. But anyway, look, through his trip to England, he gets to stay with Pascal's cousin, Mary Guerin. And it sounds as if she's fairly okay to him. Yes, I mean, he gets very sick there and he nearly has his leg amputated, but I think she helps him recover. Yeah, they want to take his leg, but he absolutely is adamant, no, no, no, because he knows, you know, if you are a young black boy with no leg, there is basically no hope for you.

And he talks about being delivered that he survived, you know, he's strong enough to survive this. And then he goes off to the seven-year war. I mean, extraordinary life. So he's in the middle of what is in many ways the First World War. It's a war that encompasses the Caribbean, Scotland, Ireland, the continent, and India. And in the middle of all this, is this boy on board a British ship? So we're talking to 1758, which would make him only 13 years old, William. And we tell us a bit more about the seven years war, because I think, you know, we've sort of mentioned it.

It is as close to, some people call it World War I, don't they? I mean, the first World War. Yeah. So in America, it's known as the French and Indian Wars. and it's all that stuff that Daniel Day Lewis leaping through waterfalls and rescuing blonde girls and playing Scottish reels in wooden forts on Lake Ohio. But it's the same war which at the other end of the world brings Robert Clive and a jugget set together to fight the Battle of Plassy.

And so it's this extraordinary conflict. And it's one of the crucial moments when British naval power is the thing that changes the course of the war. And you have the British Navy sailing all over, attacking West Africa, attacking, capturing Havana, capturing in this part of the world, the slave ports of Gori, which is a French port, I think now in modern Senegal. And here we have our Arman Aquiano, age 13, as a cabin boy in this extraordinary moment of British naval expansion. And he describes the battles, he describes, you know, the ships going past. He describes sort of coming up against a man of war and the crew

are quite relaxed because they think it might be a British ship and then it raises its colours and it's a French ship and how close they are and how lucky they are at one point they're assuming they're sailing towards a British ship but it isn't and this is all in the Mediterranean for him yeah and if only they

knew that his ship was so unprepared all their cannons are still sort of they're not out they're not pointed and if this ship knew they could have sank them at any moment And the Mediterranean in the Seven Year War is one of those conflicts that goes up and down. The British tried to take various islands. There is a complete naval failure at the beginning, which results in the – I think it's Admiral Bing gets shot for failure to do his duty.

And then there's this great moment when the British managed to spring on the entire French fleet, which are sheltering in Kiboron Bay, south of Brittany, and blow it out of the water in a sort of Pearl Harbor-style sort of preemptive attack. And this is what this kid is seeing. He's seeing all this, very, very exciting moments. Yeah. And he's excited by it. And he's also at the same time he's learning. So, you know, his friend Richard or Dick, his best friend Dick, who he's met on that first ship with Pascal,

he's now not with him. They're separated. They're on separate ships now. But his education continues. So Dick has taught him how to speak English. He's also taught him how to, you know, how the books can talk back. So he's taught him rudimentary letters. But then he meets another.

really pivotal man in his life. This man is called Daniel Quinn. He's a man of about 40 years old and he becomes a real mentor to him because he takes the time to say, look, this is how you shave, this is how you dress your hair, this is how you look, you know, not like a savage. This is how you read the Bible. And that is very important. That becomes extremely important. And it also colors a great deal of the style with which Equiano writes about slavery and writes about the morality of slavery, something that's been missing from the debate completely until this point. And it's a black man who points this out to British audience. You keep saying, you nominal Christians, how could you justify this?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'll just, you know, a little bit more about this, this man, Daniel, because I think, you know, the good people need to have a little time spent on them. Because while everybody else could be cruel and awful, you know, at one point on these voyages, they keep telling him that they're going to eat him. So when he's on his first voyage, they, they, the crew take great sport at just torturing this frightened little boy and saying, you know what, we've just got you along because we're going to eat you. And anytime we

does something wrong, they say, well, tomorrow we're going to cook you and eat you. He keeps assuming every time on the first words, not this one, you know, the one during the seven years war, but the one previous to that, every time the wind goes down, he is absolutely convinced, Equiano, that he is going to be offered up as a sacrifice to appease the wind gods so that the wind will blow again. So he keeps, you know, in his heart saying, just blow for God's sake. blow so I don't get sacrifice. So that's the terror that is slowly dissipating as he learns how naval life works. What are his duties? I mean, is he basically a cabin boy? Is he looking at is he basically a servant or what is he doing? No, he's doing hard, hard work. He's sort of dragging

things across the ship. He's doing basically whatever he's told it doing. Putting sails up the rigging and all that kind of stuff. All of it. All of it and all of it. I mean, he doesn't get a cushy number by any stretch of the imagination. He's working hard on these voyages. But when he talks about Daniel Quinn, when he writes about Daniel Quinn, he describes him like a father to me. And, you know, this is actually, you know, somebody longing for a parent who has been ripped away for his parent. I found that really very sweet. And throughout his life, you see Aquiano looking for father figures because he just needs someone. He's still sort of that little boy at heart. They even make plans to work together. They even talk about, and this is really important, that Daniel Queen is the one

who puts it into his head, after you free yourself of slavery, we will make plans, we'll go travelling around the world. You know, they're just, he gives him, he gives him hope and dreams, which is really wonderful. And then as you say, what I think you find in this chapter is that Equiano's identity is significantly shifting at this point. He's part of the British Navy, he's part of the club, he's fighting against this common enemy, the French. And he starts to visualize himself as an Englishman and has this idea that at least he has the hope of becoming one. You can now speak the language at a good level. When he was in London, he'd gone to school, he'd learned to read and write, and he actually starts to model himself

on the English gentleman that he says he admires. He was no longer trying to look on them as spirits, he says, but as men superior to us. So this is this sort of, you know, in a sense, this sort of conscious colonization we'd say today, I think, of Equiano's identity. And he has this sensation that his nature is changing. Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's sort of queen allows him to, but also he proves himself on these voyages. You know, the captains that he serves under, and the way in which he writes about those experiences

means he's pretty handy. You know, he's learning stuff. He's learning about navigating. He's learning about how ships work. He's learning about how warfare works, and he's learning that he likes a life at sea. And he pleases his captains. You know, his captains are kind to him.

Once he can speak the language, once they can no longer take the rise out of him by saying they're going to eat him every five minutes. You know, he can relax into the role of being part of the crew. And it's a very different structure to being on land because you know what, if you don't all pull together as a crew on a ship, your ship's going to sink. And so he becomes de facto part of that family. And then this is a crucial moment in his life. In February 1759, what happens? Well, 1759, the Gherens, this cousin, Mary Geren, the cousin of Pascal, his buyer, the one who owns him, decides to get him baptized. And that is massive. We've touched on this before because it was not a given.

It just, you know, slaves were not baptized. British slaves were not baptized. You find much more of this in the Spanish and the Portuguese slave colonies. They do, the Jesuits are there working away. And this is a huge deal in that world. but the British have always been far more pragmatic about their use of religion. And so, for example, in India, there's far fewer missionaries. Certainly during the 18th century, there's more than the 19th century. Because they're worried they're going to get in the way of profit. And I think there's a similar thing going on here.

And also they start feeling that they're part of the club. And let, for heaven's sake, don't let them think they're part of it. Actually, you know the thing with Indian missionaries? I was really interested that's something I'm writing about at the moment. It's a bit of a dogleg, but it's interesting. But the Raj looked very dimly in the 1900s at missionaries who were trying to prosely in places because they thought, my God, you know what, if chewing a pig-fat covered cartridge can start a mutiny, you challenging the triumvirate of, you know, Shif, Brahma and Vishnu

is going to just kill us here. So they weren't very friendly or supportive to missionaries. Well, I mean, the British were right about that. You have very few British missionaries in the 18th century. then suddenly there's this big evangelical takeover of the company. You have somebody called Charles Grant taking it over, and he changes the rule. And you have not only missionaries allowed, but missionaries sponsored by the East India Company. And you start having colonels reading stuff to the sepoys on parade. And you have missionaries put up in company lodging. So in India, there's this realization that Christianity in the company are one and the same thing.

And that is one of the main causes, certainly in the British analysis. of the mutiny in 1857. So after the mutiny, missionaries are reigned in again. And in the 19th century, there's very little missionary activity. I mean, it is really interesting. And yet, you know,

he gets a card or ticket or a key to the club because the Gherens do baptize him. And he does say, you know, it becomes central to who he is. It also kind of coincides with peacetime because, you know, the seven years war, all of that daring do that was very diverting and he was part of the crew in the midst of a war.

and so, you know, there was lots of things to see and be excited about. It's over, and he allows himself to dream that Queen dream, Daniel Queen's dream, if I will be free soon and I can see the world on my terms. And then, as so often in his narrative, he falls through the trap door again. And this is something that completely breaks his heart, because the person who, in a sense, throws him through the trap door, is none other than Pascal, who he's come to think of his family. And I don't know why he thought of him as family, because actually Pascal is it,

It's not literary, but he's a bit of a shit, actually. He's not a very nice man at all. At this point, it becomes clear that Pascal is not someone to be trusted, and Apsi has no interest at all in looking after Equiano, whatever his cousins, the Garens may have thought. Yeah. So, I mean, he says, you know, I had never once supposed in all my dreams of freedom that he would think of detaining me any longer than I wished.

He thought, you know, this is what he was owed. He thought this is what would happen. And then Pascal makes it quite clear that he's going to sell him. And even though most of his shipmates are saying he should be free, they're sort of saying, you know, and they'll help him be free, because he's one of them, he's one of their gang. But instead, he is sold. He's sold to Captain James Doran, with whom he almost immediately has bad blood.

I mean, they fall out almost immediately. As I said, what's so intriguing about this is that it, The rhythm of his life, he finds a protector, he loses him, he finds his family, he loses them, he gets Christianity, he's sold, has to say exactly this feeling of the novels which are written at the time. And yet, it all checks out. Other than possibly the first section of his childhood, that's the one thing scholars are criticized. Well, criticised or just, you know, question, because they say he said different things to different people. He falls out with his new captain or his new owner, Captain James, Doran. And it's because, you know, he knows that this man is not going to free him. He's not even going to pretend to free him. Pascal, you know, may not have been great, but this guy, Doran is even worse. You know, he says, for I've been baptized and the laws of the land say, no one has a right to sell me. He's sort of saying to Doran, you know, this, what has happened here is not right.

I'm baptized. You can't do this to me. Doran hates it, Creon. I think he's a bit upty and a bit too learned and talks too much. And he says, you know, if you don't. behave yourself, Equiano, I have ways of making you behave yourself. And he stays with Doran for years, he goes, but he's forced to fight on these ships. So for amusement, they match up people of the same kind of heights and sizes and weights, and they make them fight. And he's still just a boy, remember? He's just still, you know, 13, 14 years old now. And he says, he describes it as the first time he ever knows what it feels like to have a bloody nose. So, you know, they're there. He says he fights, you know, they're made to fight these two boys of similar size. So he's

him and everybody's around them in a ring and they're cheering and they're shouting and they're screaming for them and he doesn't really know what to do and so he's just getting pummeled but then he stands up and then they cheer for him when he stands up and so he thinks like this is what I should do it's the first time he ever sees blood coming from his face from his nose and those what a bloody nose is like I think we're going to have to end this episode here but we're going go straight on Thursday and continue with this extraordinary

life of Equiano and we are going to find him back in the Caribbean that he'd left how many ever years earlier or a decade earlier. So that's all from Empire Pod

this week from me William Durempal and me Anita Arnden that was deliberate wasn't it? No no it wasn't really I really wasn't it

I really wasn't it I really wasn't it