About the Author
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) was born in what is today known as Essaka, Nigeria, to a well-respected Igbo family. Much of our knowledge of him emerges from his own pen. He tells of being captured from his home at about age ten. He was sold numerous times before an English naval officer serving as captain of a West Indian merchant vessel purchased him.Captain Michael Pascal renamed him Gustavus Vassa, after a sixteenth-century Swedish monarch. With Pascal, Equiano served as gunmate and powder boy in the Royal Navy, fighting in several key battles during the Seven Years War. His free time was spent immersed in books, most often the Bible.
