The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains. The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. Therein lies the mystery: Because if the man who penned "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself" was not African-born, but rather an African American born in South Carolina - as Vincent Carretta, a University of Maryland scholar, suggests - then who was he? Where did he learn to speak fluent Igbo? And how did he get such excruciating details about life aboard an 18th-century slave ship? Olaudah Equiano's tale has long been viewed as the definitive account of the infamous Middle Passage, one of the very first slave narratives, an accounting that gave the fledgling abolitionist movement a ringing moral authority. British readers were riveted by his first-person account of being kidnapped and enslaved at age 11 and dragged from Nigeria to the New World in a horror-filled slave ship. A mystery, that is, involving a man of letters, one who made a very big splash back in '89 - that would be 1789.
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