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Essay On Olaudah Equiano

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Essay On Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano was born in the year 1745 in an area called 'Eboe' in Guinea. Almost everything we know about Equiano's life we find from Equiano's own account in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789. At the age of eleven he and his sister were kidnapped while out playing, and were carried through the night to a cabin and then put on board a slave ship. It sounds like Olaudah is writing in the document. The document is in first person, Olaudah is talking about his experience on the middle passage. Equiano tells us that “When I looked around the ship too, and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every …show more content…
The Interesting Narrative of the of Olaudah Equiano was intended for the British Empire. One way I know it was intended towards the British is because in the passage Equiano said “I continued to travel, sometimes by land, sometimes by water, through different countries, and various nations, till, at the end of six or seven months after I had been kidnapped, I arrived at the sea.” (V.O.F 65). The British took a big part in the slave trade. The British supplied slaves to Portuguese and Spanish colonist in America. Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves. About 3.4 million slaves were carried on the British ships from Africa to America. The first enslaved Africans landed in Virginia in 1619. The British involvement in the slave trade expanded because of the demand for labor to maintain the sugar plants in Barbados. The Triangular trade route which was a transatlantic slave trade, that functioned from the late 16th to early 19th centuries, carrying slaves, cash crops, and manufactured goods between West Africa, Caribbean or American colonies and the European colonial powers, with the northern colonies of British North America, especially New England, sometimes taking over the role of Europe. Equiano was apart of this triangular trade route; Equiano was transported from Africa to the

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