?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION--NARRATIVES.) EQUIANO, OLAUDAH. The Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Two volumes in one. Portrait frontispiece after an oil portrait by Gainsborough, and one additional plate of the Bahama Banks. 294 pages. 12mo, original publisher's patterned green cloth; spine extremities worn; joints worn, but firm. Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837
first american edition following the two volume english edition of 1789. Olaudah Equiano, not unlike Jacobus Capitein, was fortunate enough to have been purchased by a man looking for a companion-like servant. They both received decent treatment and some education at the hands of their owners. Equiano was born in 1745 in Eboe, in what is now Nigeria. When he was about eleven, Equiano was kidnapped and sold to slave traders headed to the West Indies. Though he spent a brief period in Virginia, much of Equiano's time in slavery was spent serving the captains of slave ships and British navy vessels. One of his masters, Henry Pascal, the captain of a British trading vessel, gave Equiano the name Gustavus Vassa, which he used throughout his life.
