Lesson 174: Equiano, Part 9
Reading assignment: Chapter 12
Chapter 8 is the story of Equiano’s shipwreck. It adds nothing of interest to his autobiography’s central themes: his deliverance from slavery and his adventures as a free man.
Chapter 9 tells of his journey by ship to London. He ran out of money in London. He signed up as a sailor. He went to Turkey. He offers a travelogue on what he saw on his trip: port by port. He also sailed on a ship looking for the Norethwest Passage to India. They got caught in the ice above Greenland. They sailed back. This covers 1767 to 1773.
Chapter 10 is a narrative of his conversion to evangelical Christianity in 1774.
Chapter 11 is his account of a trip to Cadiz in 1775. The ship hit a rock. No one died. He argued with a Spanish priest over the meaning of Christianity. He devoted an additional 15 pages to his trip to Jamaica to start a plantation. One paragraph is seven pages long. It is the longest paragraph I have ever read. It is excruciatingly boring.
Equiano neglected the main rule for writing an autobiography: it must be to be interesting to the readers. If the narrative does not speak directly to the readers’ interests, they will quit reading.
These chapters are examples of an author who writes as follows: “I did this. Then I did that. Then I did something else. None of this was important at the time to anyone except me, but I’m going to tell you all about it.” It is like going to a friend’s house, and the friend shows you photos of his vacation — for about four hours. He includes an hour on his spiritual transformation — not even any photos.
The narrative ends in 1777.
In the final paragraph of the book, he justified his approach to writing the autobiography. I think he sensed that a lot of it was boring — overly concerned with events that applied only to him.
I have only therefore to request the reader’s indulgence and conclude. I am far from the vanity of thinking there is any merit in this narrative: I hope censure will be suspended, when it is considered that it was written by one who was as unwilling as unable to adorn the plainness of truth by the colouring of imagination. My life and fortune have been extremely chequered, and my adventures various. Even those I have related are considerably abridged. If any incident in this little work should appear uninteresting and trifling to most readers, I can only say, as my excuse for mentioning it, that almost every event of my life made an impression on my mind and influenced my conduct. I early accustomed myself to look for the hand of God in the minutest occurrence, and to learn from it a lesson of morality and religion; and in this light every circumstance I have related was to me of importance. After all, what makes any event important, unless by its observation we become better and wiser, and learn ‘to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God?’ To those who are possessed of this spirit, there is scarcely any book or incident so trifling that does not afford some profit, while to others the experience of ages seems of no use; and even to pour out to them the treasures of wisdom is throwing the jewels of instruction away.
The problem was this: historical cause and effect are complex. He did not seek to show how each of his stories illustrated a pattern. He tried at times, but he failed. His stories after he was released from bondage did not deal directly with the main theme of chapters 1 through 7: his life as a slave. He did not perceive that his readers were interested in his life’s story as representative of liberation. By 1789, he had become famous as an advocate of abolition. People wanted to assess his story as representative of the stories of hundreds of thousands of kidnapped Africans. They wanted to stop the kidnapping. They did this by law a decade after his death: in 1807. The slave trade was legally abolished, and the British Navy enforced this law. The Atlantic slave trade went on, but always under the threat of military sanctions. It was reduced.
His life’s story was interesting to his contemporary readers the extent that it offered hope to slaves and motivation to abolitionists. Pages 85 through 152 do not do this.
Chapter 12 begins around 1779. It is a series of letters and petitions he wrote for a decade. These related to slavery and Africa.