574
PARTISAN REVIEW
good-hearted families who dote upon
him
like a favored house pet. He learns
the English language, embraces the Christian faith, and adapts tolerably well
to civil society.
Sent back to sea as a cabin boy aboard a merchant of
war,
Equiano wit–
nesses the siege of Louisberg in 1758 and fights in the Mediterranean during
the Seven Years War. With the exigencies of naval combat distracting his over–
seers from a steady application of the prerogatives of ownership, he almost
forgets his status. But the relative security of seafaring life is abruptly termi–
nated when Captain Pascal, his
ersatz
father figure, betrays
him
for a tidy profit.
Taken back to the West Indies, Equiano is sold again, this time to a Quaker
merchant whose religious scruples do not outweigh his business acumen.
In
the service of the enterprising Quaker, Equiano proves himself a bar–
gain. "There
was
scarcely any part of his business or household
affairs
in
which I was not occasionally engaged," he recollects with pride. "I often sup–
plied the place of a clerk, in receiving and delivering cargoes to the ships, in
tending stores, and delivering goods, and besides this, I used to shave and dress
my master, when convenient, and take care of his horse, and when it was nec–
essary, which was very often, I worked likewise on board his different vessels."
At sea in trade throughout the West Indies (sometimes, to his shame, the slave
trade) the still-adolescent Equiano now strides the very decks below which
he once cringed in terror. He masters the skills of the professional sailor, learns
such ciphering and navigation as is permitted
him,
and bides his time. Always,
he keeps his eyes open for the main chance--to insinuate himself into favor,
to learn a profitable skill, to hustle commodities-so to secure his freedom
by purchase or flight. Through the kind intervention of a benefactor and the
caprice of his master (held to a glib promise he made in haste), Equiano
accomplishes the goal in 1769, buying what was rightfully his for forty
pounds sterling.
For an African prowling the West Indies and the seaboard cities of
Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina, the lot of the freeman
holds its own humiliations and dangers. A master at least offered some pro–
tection from white scoundrels who saw a free black man as a walking
incitement. Routinely cheated in business and abused for amusement, Equiano
opts to make his way back to "old England," the less worse of his possible
worlds. There he gets religion, but his roving spirit presently gets the better of
him.
Like Melville's Ishmael, Equiano takes to the sea when bored or broke.
With his new employer (not master) Dr. Charles Irving, he travels with the
Phipps Expedition to the Arctic in search of the elusive Northwest Passage.
Moving from polar desolation to tropical lushness, he next accompanies Dr.
Irving to the Mosquito Coast in Central America, where (more ironies) he
serves as overseer on a plantation carved out of the jungle and the flesh of the
indigenous population. A scrape with involuntary servitude brings him too
