Olaudah Equiano Facts & Worksheets

Olaudah Equiano, better known as Gustavus Vassa for much of his life, was a writer and abolitionist from Essaka in modern-day southern Nigeria, according to his memoir. As a child, he was enslaved in Africa and sold to a Royal Navy commander in the Caribbean. He was sold twice more until he gained his liberty in 1766.

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Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE AND ENSLAVEMENT

• Olaudah Equiano was born in the Nigerian town of Eboe in 1745. Equiano was kidnapped and sold to slave traders heading to the West Indies when he was eleven. Though he briefly lived in Virginia, Equiano spent most of his time in slavery, serving the captains of slave ships and British navy boats. 
• Henry Pascal, the captain of a British commercial vessel, gave Equiano the name Gustavus Vassa, which he kept throughout his life.
• Equiano was forced to serve various masters, including a Virginia plantation owner, a British Naval officer, and a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania merchant. He was given the name Gustavus Vassa by one of his many owners.  
• Equiano moved through four continents from an enslaved man to a naval officer. Equiano’s extensive experiences in the Atlantic Slave Trade enabled him to create the most popular and evocative slave story of his time.
• Equiano had previously been renamed twice, according to Paul E. Lovejoy, a Canadian historian: Michael aboard the slave ship that carried him to the Americas and Jacob by his first master. 
• This time, Equiano disagreed and informed his new owner that he preferred the name Jacob.
• When Pascal returned to England, he hired Equiano as a valet to accompany him throughout the Seven Years’ War with France. The Seven Years’ War was a global conflict waged mainly in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific, including most of the European great powers. The United Kingdom and France commanded the competing alliances, which both sought to create worldwide dominance at the expense of the other.
• Pascal preferred Equiano and sent him to his sister-in-law in the United Kingdom to attend school and learn to read and write.
• Equiano converted to Christianity and was baptized on February 9, 1759, at St Margaret’s, Westminster, as “a Black, born in Carolina, 12 years old,” according to the parish registry.
• Mary Guerin and her brother, Maynard, served as Equiano’s godparents. Mary and Maynard were interested in Equiano and assisted him in learning English. 
• When Equiano’s origins were doubted after his book was released, the Guerins testified about his lack of English when he first arrived in London.
• Pascal sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the Charming Sally in Gravesend in December 1762, and he was taken back to the Caribbean to Montserrat in the Leeward Islands. He was sold there to Robert King, a Philadelphia-based American Quaker businessman who operated in the Caribbean.

EQUIANO AND HIS FREEDOM

• Equiano was assigned to work on Robert King’s shipping routes and in his businesses. In 1765, when Equiano was around 20 years old, King offered him that he could buy his freedom for 40 pounds.
• King trained him to read and write more fluently, led him along the religious road, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trade for his account as well as on behalf of his employer.
• Equiano was able to buy his release from King in 1766. Equiano was persuaded to stay on as a business partner by the merchant. However, Equiano found staying a freedman in the British colonies unsafe and restricting. He was almost abducted back into slavery while loading a ship in Georgia.
• Equiano had moved to Britain by 1768. He continued working at sea, occasionally as a deckhand in England. In 1773, he embarked on an expedition to the North Pole aboard the Royal Navy ship HMS Racehorse.
• On that expedition, he collaborated with Dr. Charles Irving, who invented a method for distilling seawater and ultimately made a fortune.
• Two years later, Irving hired Equiano for a project in Central America’s Mosquito Coast, where he would use his African heritage to assist in picking enslaved people and managing them as laborers on sugar cane farms. Irving and Equiano maintained a working relationship and friendship for nearly a decade, but the plantation business collapsed.
• Equiano settled in London, where he got involved in the abolitionist movement in the 1780s. 
• The Quaker’s drive to halt the slave trade was compelling. Still, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was created in 1787 as a non-denominational body, including Anglican members, to influence parliament directly.
• Only those prepared to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, according to Church of England rites, were permitted to serve as MPs under the Test Act. George Whitefield’s evangelism had affected Equiano.
• Equiano initially told abolitionists like Granville Sharp about the slave trade in 1783; that same year, he was the first to inform Sharp about the Zong Massacre, which was being tried in London as insurance claims litigation. It became a cause of celebration for the abolitionist movement and aided its expansion.
• The Zong Massacre occurred on and after November 29, 1781, when the crew of the British slave ship Zong executed more than 130 enslaved Africans.
• Equiano was one of eight delegates from Africa in America who presented an ‘Address of Thanks’ to the Quakers at a gathering in Gracechurch Street, London, on October 21, 1785.
• Abolitionists befriended and supported Equiano, and many urged him to write and publish his life story. Philanthropic abolitionists and religious patrons helped him financially in this endeavor. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, encouraged his talks and book production, among others.

EQUIANO AND HIS RADICAL CONNECTIONS

• Britain encouraged African Americans to fight with it during the American Revolutionary War by providing freedom to those who deserted their rebel masters. 
• It also emancipated women and children and drew hundreds of enslaved people to its lines in New York City, which it held, and in the South, where its troops occupied Charleston, South Carolina. When the British forces were evacuated at the end of the conflict, their leaders evacuated the formerly enslaved Americans as well.
• Following the United States’ independence in 1783, Equiano became interested in assisting the Black Poor of London, primarily former African Americans enslaved and freed by the British during and after the American Revolution.
• There were also some formerly enslaved people from the Caribbean and those brought to England by their enslavers and then freed after the conclusion that Britain had no legal foundation for slavery. 
• About 20,000 people lived in the African-American community. Following the Revolution, approximately 3,000 formerly enslaved people were moved from New York to Nova Scotia, known as Black Loyalists, alongside other Loyalists who had also established there. 
• Many freedmen struggled to establish new lives in London or Canada.
• Equiano was a well-known figure in London who frequently spoke on behalf of the African-American community. He was a crucial figure in the Sons of Africa, a tiny abolitionist society of free Africans in London. They collaborated closely with the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. 
• Equiano’s opinions on many matters have appeared in periodicals such as the Public Advertiser and the Morning Chronicle. He responded to James Tobin in the Public Advertiser in 1788, criticizing two of his pamphlets and a related book by Gordon Turnbull from 1786. Equiano had a more assertive public voice than most Africans or Black Loyalists and took advantage of every opportunity to use it.
• Equiano was a radical working-class London Corresponding Society member who promoted democratic reform. 
• In 1791-92, while traveling the British Isles, drawing on abolitionist networks and autobiography, he facilitated ties for the LCS, possibly including the Society’s first meetings with the United Irishmen. 
• In Belfast, where abolitionists had defeated plans to commission vessels in the port for the Middle Passage five years before, Equiano was hosted by Samuel Neilson, the leading United Irishman and publisher of their Painite newspaper, the Northern Star.

EQUIANO’S PERSONAL LIFE

• Equiano married a local woman, Susannah Cullen, on April 7, 1792, in St Andrew’s Church, Soham, Cambridgeshire. The Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies still has the original marriage registration with the entry for Vassa and Cullen. 
• From 1792 forward, he included his marriage in every autobiography publication. The couple resided in the neighborhood and had two daughters, Anna Maria Vassa (1793-1797) and Joanna Vassa (1795-1857), who were baptized at Soham church.
• Susannah died in February 1796 at 34, and Equiano died one year later, on March 31, 1797. Soon after, at age four, the elder daughter died, leaving the younger child, Joanna Vassa, to inherit Equiano’s inheritance when she was 21. 
• In 1821, Joanna Vassa married Reverend Henry Bromley, a Congregationalist preacher. They are both interred in London’s non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery; the Bromleys’ memorial is now a Grade II listed building.

HIS MEMOIR

• “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African” (1789), was published in nine editions during his lifetime. It is one of the earliest known examples of published African writing widely read in England.
• By 1792, it had become a best-seller in Russia, Germany, Holland, and the United States. It was the first significant slave story in what grew to be a vast literary genre. 
• However, Equiano’s enslavement experience was significantly different from that of ordinary enslaved people; he did not participate in fieldwork but served his enslavers personally, traveled to sea, was taught to read and write, and worked in trading.
• Equiano’s firsthand tale of slavery, upward climb, and experiences as a Black immigrant made headlines. The book spurred a burgeoning anti-slavery movement in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Americas. Many people were taken aback by the brilliance of his account’s vision, description, and literary flair.
• Equiano describes his village and the rules and customs of the Eboe people in his tale. 
• He mentioned communities he traveled through as a captive on his trip to the seaside after being captured as a boy. 
• His history describes his passage on a slave ship and the horrors of slavery in the West Indian colonies of Virginia and Georgia.
• Equiano’s popularity grew after Paul Edwards published a newly edited version of his narrative in 1967. Scholars from Nigeria have also begun to investigate him. For instance, S.S. Ogede identifies that Equiano pioneered establishing “the dignity of African life in the white society of his time.”
• In examining his life, some researchers have contested Equiano’s narrative of his origins since the late twentieth century. While editing a new version of Equiano’s memoir in 1999, Vincent Carretta, an English professor at the University of Maryland, discovered two records that led him to doubt the claims of formerly enslaved of being born in Africa. His findings were first published in the journal Slavery and Abolition.

Olaudah Equiano Worksheets

This fantastic bundle includes everything you need to know about Olaudah Equiano across 26 in-depth pages. These ready-to-use worksheets are perfect for teaching kids about Olaudah Equiano, better known as Gustavus Vassa for much of his life, who was a writer and abolitionist from Essaka in modern-day southern Nigeria, according to his memoir.

Complete List of Included Worksheets

Below is a list of all the worksheets included in this document.

1. Olaudah Equiano Facts
2. Vocabulary
3. Get to Know Olaudah
4. Journey of Olaudah
5. The Abolitionist
6. Equiano Memoir
7. Finding Freedom
8. Digging Deeper
9. Equiano Talk
10. Reading Comprehension
11. Modern Day Slavery

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Olaudah Equiano?

Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was a prominent African involved in the British abolitionist movement during the late 18th century. He was born in what is now Nigeria in the mid-1700s and was enslaved as a child. He eventually gained his freedom and became a key figure in the fight against the transatlantic slave trade.

How did Olaudah Equiano gain his freedom?

Equiano gained his freedom through a combination of hard work, determination, and some fortunate circumstances. He worked as a slave on plantations in the Americas and eventually earned enough money through trading and other activities to buy his own freedom. He was able to secure his freedom in 1766.

What was Olaudah Equiano’s role in the abolitionist movement?

Olaudah Equiano played a significant role in the British abolitionist movement by sharing his personal experiences as a former slave. In 1789, he published his autobiography, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” which became a bestseller and helped raise awareness about the brutality of the slave trade. His book and public speeches made a compelling case for the abolition of slavery.

Where did Olaudah Equiano live and travel during his life?

Equiano traveled extensively during his life. After gaining his freedom, he lived in London, England, and worked as a free man. He also spent time traveling throughout the British Isles, the American colonies, and the Caribbean. His experiences in these regions influenced his views on slavery and the slave trade.

What impact did Olaudah Equiano have on the abolitionist movement?

Olaudah Equiano had a profound impact on the abolitionist movement. His personal story and writings helped humanize the suffering of enslaved people, making a moral and emotional appeal to the public. His work contributed to the growing momentum for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the late 18th century, leading to the passage of the British Slave Trade Act in 1807, which banned the transatlantic slave trade. Equiano’s legacy continues to be celebrated as a symbol of the struggle for freedom and the fight against slavery.

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