"SPEAKS FOR MILLIONS OF OTHER AFRICANS WHOSE VOICES WERE SILENCED BY SLAVERY": ONE OF THE "RAREST HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS," OLAUDAH EQUIANO'S NARRATIVE, 1791, WITH HIS EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE, VERY RARE SELF-PUBLISHED EXPANDED FOURTH EDITION, WITH RARE FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT AND FOLDING PLATE OF A SLAVE SHIP

EQUIANO, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative o the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself… Fourth Edition, Enlarged. Dublin: Printed For, and Sold By, The Author, 1791. Small octavo (4 by 6-3/4 inches), contemporary full brown calf rebacked with original red and navy morocco spine labels retained.

Rare expanded 1791 edition, issued two years after the virtually unobtainable first and second editions, of Equiano's cornerstone slave narrative that gave "millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants… a face, a name, and most important, a voice"—featuring his harrowing account of the Middle Passage. With subscribers' list, rarely found engraved frontispiece portrait of Equiano and engraved folding plate of a slave ship, in contemporary calf boards.

Equiano is widely recognized as the founder of the African American slave narrative and a leader in the movement to end the slave trade. His Narrative stands alone as one of the "rarest historical documents, for millions of men, women and children who crossed the Atlantic during two or three centuries of the slave trade have left no word of their experiences" (Nichols, Many Thousand Gone, xi). Captured by slave traders as a young boy, he became a victim "of the largest forced migration in history—the African diaspora of the transatlantic slave trade… what Equiano's friend James Ramsay called the 'Middle Passage' from freedom in Africa to enslavement in the Americas" (Carretta, Equiano, 17-18). "His memories symbolically bridge the rupture of the Middle Passage… This was not just a book written against the slave trade; it was a book written by an African who had firsthand memories of his childhood in West Africa" (Werner Sollars). Before the 1780s, "evidence and arguments against the slave trade came from white voices only. The only published black witnesses were clearly fictitious." With the initial publication of his self-published autobiography in 1789, "millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants were given a face, a name, and, most important, a voice" (Carretta, 1).

The slave ship that carried the young Equiano and nearly 300 African slaves across the Atlantic left Africa in early 1754. In recalling the struggle to stay alive, he describes the ship's hold as "absolutely pestilential… so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself… [it] brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died… this wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains… the shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying." He writes of a day when "two of my wearied countrymen who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made it through the nettings and jumped into the sea." When the slave ship arrived in Barbados barely 240 Africans had survived. Shipped to Virginia to be sold, he was utterly separated from any of his countrymen and remembers his grief, "wishing for death." In time he was sold again, named Gustavus Vassa by his new owner, and shipped back across the Atlantic to England. After many years Equiano was able to buy his own freedom, crossed the Atlantic several times, survived shipwrecks and finally settled in England, where he died in 1797.

"Equiano's autobiography remains a classic text of an African's experiences in the era of Atlantic slavery. It is a book which operates on a number of levels: it is the diary of a soul, the story of an autodidact, and a personal attack on slavery and the slave trade. It is also the foundation-stone of the subsequent genre of black writing… the classic statement of African remembrance in the years of Atlantic slavery" (ODNB). This rare work is "so richly structured… from African freedom, through European enslavement, to African Freedom… that it became the prototype of the 19th-century slave narrative… It was Equiano whose text served to create a model that other ex-slaves would follow" (Gates, Jr., Signifying Monkey).

Equiano's Narrative stands as "one of the most important literary works published in late 18th-century England." To Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is "the 'silent second text' of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" (Ito, in Early American Literature V.32, No.1). While some sources suggest Equiano was born in South Carolina, that remains substantially unconfirmed, and scholars such as Catherin Obianju Acholonu offer "evidence that Equiano was none other than Olaude Ekwealuo from Issek in Anambra State of Nigeria, an Igbo from the Eastern hinterland" (Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22.1). "Crucial to understanding his Narrative is the recognition that Equiano had two homes rather than one"—his native village in Africa and his eventual home England (Davis in Gates, Jr, ed., Black is the Color of the Cosmos, 85). His Narrative "speaks for millions of other Africans whose voices were silenced by slavery… it is a voice of compelling strength, then as now" (Walvin, African's Life, 14). This fourth edition is preceded only by the 1789 editions and the 1790 expanded third edition. "An unauthorized two-volume edition, based on the second London edition, was published in New York City in 1791. Contains five-page "List of Irish Subscriber" and seven-page "List of English Subscribers": the latter with names of abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, James Ramsay, writer Hannah More, Phillis Wheatley per association with the Countess of Huntington, and the name of "Susan Cullen": reportedly Susanna Cullen, the white English woman Equiano married three years later. Subscription lists such as these "also played a structural role in the Narrative [when] presented as a petition, one of the hundreds submitted to Parliament between 1789 and 1792" (Carretta, Introduction to Penguin edition, xvii-xxxi). ESTC N28777. Sabin 22714. Goldsmith's 14005. See Blockson 9568; Work, 458.

Text quite fresh, contemporary calf boards with light expert restoration to extremities.