The Slave Ship (17 page)

“One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual,” Equiano and his sister were left alone to mind the house. For reasons unknown the adults did not take the usual precautions. Two men and a woman soon climbed over the earthen walls of the family compound and “in a moment seized us both.” It happened so suddenly that the children had no opportunity “to cry out, or make resistance.” The raiders covered their mouths and “ran off with us into the nearest wood,” where they tied their hands and hurried as far from the village as they could before nightfall. Equiano did not say who his attackers were, but he implied that they were Aro. Eventually they came to “a small house, where the robbers halted for refreshment, and spent the night.” The bindings of the children were removed, but they were apparently too upset to eat. Soon, “overpowered by fatigue and grief, our only relief was some sleep, which allayed our misfortune for a short time.” The long, arduous, traumatic passage to the coast had begun.
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The next day the small band traveled through the woods to avoid human traffic, emerging eventually onto a road Equiano thought familiar. As people passed by, the boy “began to cry out for their assistance.” But to no avail: “my cries had no other effect than to make them tie me faster, and stop my mouth, and then they put me into a large sack. They also stopped my sister’s mouth, and tied her hands; and in this manner we proceeded till we were out of the sight of these people.” At the end of another fatiguing day of travel, Equiano and his sister were offered food but refused to eat, thereby employing a form of resistance that would be commonplace on the slave ship. Violently disconnected from his village, most of his family, and almost all he held dear, Equiano took deep solace in the companionship of his sister. The “only comfort we had,” he wrote, “was in being in one another’s arms all that night, and bathing each other with our tears.”

The following day the trauma deepened. It would prove to be “a day of greater sorrow than I had yet experienced.” Equiano’s captors pulled him and his sister apart “while we lay clasped in each other’s arms.” The children begged not to be parted, but in vain: “she was torn from me, and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not to be described.” For some time Equiano “cried and grieved continually.” For several days he “did not eat anything but what they forced into my mouth.” The comfort of shared misery, “weeping together” with the last remaining family member, was now lost. His alienation from kin and village was complete.

As if to emphasize the point, now began the endless buying and selling of the young boy. Equiano was soon sold to “a chieftain,” a blacksmith who lived “in a very pleasant country.” Brought into the family in the African style, Equiano was treated well. He took comfort in realizing that even though “I was a great many days journey from my father’s house, yet these people spoke exactly the same language with us.” He slowly gained freedom of movement in his new circumstances, which he used to gather knowledge about how he might run away and get back to his village. “Oppressed and weighed down by grief after my mother and friends,” he took his bearings and imagined his home “towards the rising of the sun.” Then one day he accidentally killed a villager’s chicken and, fearing punishment, hid out in the bushes as a prelude to running away. He overheard people who were searching for him say that he had probably headed homeward but that his village was too far away and he would never reach it. This sent the boy into “a violent panic,” which was followed by despair at the prospect of never being able to return home. He went back to his master and was soon sold again. “I was now carried to the left of the sun’s rising, through many dreary wastes and dismal woods, amidst the hideous roarings of wild beasts.” Here slaving operations seemed commonplace. He noticed that the people “always go well armed.”

Then, amid all the calamity, came a joyous surprise. As he continued his trek toward the coast, Equiano spied his sister once more. Judging by what he wrote here and elsewhere in his autobiography, it was one of the most emotional moments of his life: “As soon as she saw me she gave a loud shriek, and ran into my arms.—I was quite overpowered: neither of us could speak; but, for a considerable time, clung to each other in mutual embraces, unable to do anything but weep.” The tearful embrace seemed to move all who saw it, including the man Equiano considered to be their joint owner. The man allowed each of them to sleep at his side, during which time they “held one another by the hands across his breast all night; and thus for a while we forgot our misfortunes in the joy of being together.” But then dawned the “fatal morning” on which they were separated again, this time forever. Equiano wrote, “I was now more miserable, if possible, than before.” He agonized about his sister’s fate. “Your image,” he tenderly wrote to her years later, “has been always rivetted in my heart.”

The passage to the coast resumed. Equiano was carried and sold hither and yon, eventually to a wealthy merchant in the beautiful city of Tinmah, which was likely in the Niger delta. Here he tasted coconuts and sugarcane for the first time and also observed money he called “core” (
akori
). He befriended the son of a neighboring wealthy widow, a boy about his own age, and the woman bought him from the merchant. He was now treated so well that he forgot he was a slave. He ate at the master’s table, was served by other slaves, and played with bows and arrows and other boys “as I had been used to do at home.” Over the next two months, he slowly connected to his new family “and was beginning to be reconciled to my situation, and to forget by degrees my misfortunes.” He was rudely awakened early one morning and rushed out of the house and back onto the road toward the seacoast. He had the “fresh sorrow” of a new dispossession.

To this point almost all of the peoples Equiano had met in his journey were culturally familiar to him. They had roughly the same “manners, customs, and language”; they were, or would become in time, Igbo. But he finally arrived in a place where the cultural familiarity vanished. Indeed he was shocked by the culture of the coastal Ibibio, who, he observed, were not circumcised, did not wash as he was accustomed to do, used European pots and weapons, and “fought with their fists amongst themselves.” The women of the group he considered immodest, as they “ate, and drank, and slept, with their men.” They ornamented themselves with strange scars and filed their teeth sharp. Most startling, they made no proper sacrifices or offerings to the gods.

When Equiano came to the banks of a large river, possibly the Bonny, his astonishment grew. Canoes were everywhere, and the people seemed to live on them with “household utensils and provisions of all kinds.” The boy had never seen such a large body of water, much less people who lived and worked in this way. His amazement turned to fear when he was put into a canoe by his captors and paddled along the river, around and through the swamps and mangrove forests. Every night they dragged their canoes ashore, built fires, set up tents or small houses, cooked a meal, and slept, arising the next morning and eating again before getting back into the canoes and continuing down-river. He noted how easy the people were, swimming and diving in the water. The travels resumed, now by land and again by water, through “different countries, and various nations.” Six or seven months after he had been kidnapped, “I arrived at the sea coast” and likely the big, bustling slave-trading port of Bonny.

The slave ship that inspired horrified awe in Equiano when he first arrived on the coast was a snow, probably between sixty and seventy feet long, with a mainmast of about sixty feet and a main topmast of thirty. The
Ogden,
with eight cannon and a crew of thirty-two, was riding at anchor and “waiting for its cargo,” of which the boy himself, he suddenly realized, would be a part.
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The African traders would have carried him to the vessel by canoe and brought him, and probably several others, up the side of the vessel by a rope ladder, over the rail, and onto the main deck. Here Equiano saw the terrifying sailors, whose language “was very different from any I had ever heard.” He saw the copper boiling pot and the melancholy captives, and, fearing cannibalism, he fainted. The black traders who had brought him on board revived him and tried to cheer him up, “but all in vain.” He asked if the horrible-looking white men would eat him; they answered no. Then a member of the crew brought Equiano a shot of liquor to revive his spirits, but the small boy was afraid of him and would not take it. One of the black traders took it and gave it to him. He drank it, but it had the opposite effect from what the sailor intended. Having never tasted anything like it, the boy fell “into the greatest consternation.” Soon things got even worse. Once the black traders were paid off, they left the ship, and Equiano despaired at their departure: “I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore.” After experiencing the stench of the lower deck and a flogging for refusing food, he longed to trade places with “the meanest slave in my own country.” Finally he wished in utter despair “for the last friend, Death, to relieve me.”
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The slave trade always brought together unusual agglomerations of people and to some extent leveled the cultural differences among them. Equiano did not immediately find his “own countrymen,” and indeed he had to search for them. In addition to the Igbo, those most likely to have been aboard were Nupe, Igala, Idoma, Tiv, and Agatu, from north of Equiano’s own village; the Ijo from the southwest; and from the east a whole host: Ibibio, Anang, Efik (all Efik speakers), Ododop, Ekoi, Eajagham, Ekrikuk, Umon, and Enyong. Many of these people would have been multilingual, and quite a few, maybe most, would likely have spoken or understood Igbo, which was important to trade throughout the region, on the coast and in the interior. Some would have spoken pidgin languages, English, and perhaps a few words of Portuguese. Communication would be complicated aboard the snow, but many means were available.
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On the slave ship, Equiano and many others began to discover that they were Igbo. In Equiano’s village and indeed throughout the interior, the term “Igbo” was not a term of self-understanding or identity. Rather, according to the famous Nigerian/Igbo writer Chinua Achebe, “Igbo” was originally “a word of abuse; they were the ‘other’ people, down in the bush.” “Igbo” was an insult, a designation that someone was an outsider to the village. Equiano himself suggested this contemptuous meaning when he called the Aro “Oye-Eboe.” But on the slave ship, everyone was outside the village, and broader similarities suddenly began to outweigh local differences. Cultural commonalities, especially language, would obviously be crucial to cooperation and community. Igbo, like other African ethnicities, was in many ways a product of the slave trade. In other words, ethnogenesis was happening on the ship.
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Equiano soon noticed the systematic use of terror aboard the slaver. The whites “looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty” as occurred regularly aboard the ship. The “poor Africans” who dared to resist, who refused to eat or tried to jump overboard, were whipped and cut. Equiano himself was lashed several times for rejecting food. He also noted that the terror was not confined to the enslaved. One day while he and others were on the main deck, the captain had a white sailor “flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast, that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute.” It was no accident that this was a public event. The use of violence against the crew multiplied the terror: “This made me fear these people the more; and I expected nothing less than to be treated in the same manner.”

One of the most valuable parts of Equiano’s account of his time on the slave ship is his summary of conversations that took place on the lower deck. As a child and as someone who came from many miles inland, he was among the least knowledgeable on board about the Europeans and their ways. Continuing the struggle to communicate among a group of people from a variety of cultures, he searched for and found people of “his own nation” among “the poor chained men.” Because of his fears of cannibalism, his most urgent question was, “what was to be done with us?” Some of the men slaves “gave me to understand we were to be carried to these white people’s country to work for them.” This answer gave Equiano comfort, as he explained: “if it were no worse than working, my situation was not so desperate.”

Still, the fears about the savage Europeans lingered and brought forth new questions. Equiano asked the men “if these people had no country, but lived in this hollow place,” the ship? The answer was, “they did not, but came from a distant one.” Still puzzled, the young boy asked, “how comes it in all our country we never heard of them?” It was because they “lived so very far off.” Where were their women, Equiano then demanded; “had they any like themselves?” They replied, they did, but “they were left behind.”

Then came questions about the ship itself, the source of astonishment and terror. Still dazzled by what he had seen, Equiano asked how the vessel could go. Here the men ran out of certain answers but showed that they had been studying the ship in an effort to understand it: “They told me they could not tell; but that there were cloths put upon the masts by the help of the ropes I saw, and then the vessel went on; and the white men had some spell or magic they put in the water when they liked in order to stop the vessel.” Equiano declared, “I was exceedingly amazed at this account, and really thought they were spirits.” The wonder caused by the ship intensified when one day upon deck Equiano saw a vessel bearing toward them under full sail. He and everyone else who saw it stood amazed, “the more so as the vessel appeared larger by approaching nearer.” When the approaching ship eventually dropped anchor, “I and my countrymen who saw it were lost in astonishment to observe the vessel stop; and were now convinced it was done by magic.”