[3] The Interesting Narrative gained renewed popularity among scholars in the late 20th century and remains a useful primary source.

[5][10] Carretta's conclusion is disputed by other scholars who believe the weight of evidence supports Equiano's account of coming from Africa.

Also trained in seamanship, Equiano was expected to assist the ship's crew in times of battle; his duty was to haul gunpowder to the gun decks.

Equiano converted to Christianity and was baptised at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 9 February 1759, when he was described in the parish register as "a Black, born in Carolina, 12 years old".

[1] In December 1762, Pascal sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the Charming Sally at Gravesend, from where he was transported back to the Caribbean, to Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands.

[14] King taught him to read and write more fluently, guided him along the path of religion, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trading for his own account, as well as on his owner's behalf.

Two years later, Irving recruited Equiano for a project on the Mosquito Coast in Central America, where he was to use his African background to help select slaves and manage them as labourers on sugar-cane plantations.

Under the Test Act, only those prepared to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the Church of England were permitted to serve as MPs.

The address referred to A Caution to Great Britain and her Colonies by Anthony Benezet, founder of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.

Entitled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), the book went through nine editions in his lifetime.

[7] Equiano's personal account of slavery, his journey of advancement, and his experiences as a black immigrant caused a sensation on publication.

His biography details his voyage on a slave ship and the brutality of slavery in the colonies of the West Indies, Virginia and Georgia.

Equiano commented on the reduced rights that freed people of colour had in these same places, and they also faced risks of kidnapping and enslavement.

Equiano records his and Granville Sharp's central roles in the anti-slave trade movement, and their effort to publicise the Zong massacre, which became known in 1783.

Specifically, he became involved in working in Sierra Leone, a colony founded in 1792 for freed slaves by Britain in West Africa.

During the American Revolutionary War, Britain had recruited black people to fight with it by offering freedom to those who left rebel masters.

In 1783, following the United States' gaining independence, Equiano became involved in helping the Black Poor of London, who were mostly those former African-American slaves freed during and after the American Revolution by the British.

[citation needed] This was an expedition to resettle London's Black Poor in Freetown, a new British colony founded on the west coast of Africa, in present-day Sierra Leone.

In 1791–92, touring the British Isles with his autobiography and drawing on abolitionist networks he brokered connections for the LCS, including what may have been the Society's first contacts with the United Irishmen.

[29] In Belfast, where his appearance in May 1791 was celebrated by abolitionists who five years previously had defeated plans to commission vessels in the port for the Middle Passage,[30] Equiano was hosted by the leading United Irishman, publisher of their Painite newspaper the Northern Star, Samuel Neilson.

On 7 April 1792, Equiano married Susannah Cullen, a local woman, in St Andrew's Church, Soham, Cambridgeshire.

[35] The original marriage register containing the entry for Vassa and Cullen is held today by the Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies.

They are both buried at the non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, London; the Bromleys' monument is now a Grade II listed building.

For example, O. S. Ogede identifies Equiano as a pioneer in asserting "the dignity of African life in the white society of his time".

In 1999 while editing a new version of Equiano's memoir, Vincent Carretta, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, found two records that led him to question the former slave's account of being born in Africa.

[10][47] At a 2003 conference in England, Carretta defended himself against Nigerian academics, like Obiwu, who accused him of "pseudo-detective work" and indulging "in vast publicity gamesmanship".

[10] Carretta interpreted these anomalies as possible evidence that Equiano had made up the account of his African origins, and adopted material from others.

But Paul Lovejoy, Alexander X. Byrd and Douglas Chambers note how many general and specific details Carretta can document from sources that related to the slave trade in the 1750s as described by Equiano, including the voyages from Africa to Virginia, sale to Pascal in 1754, and others.

[15][7][49] Lovejoy wrote that: circumstantial evidence indicates that he was born where he said he was, and that, in fact, The Interesting Narrative is reasonably accurate in its details, although, of course, subject to the same criticisms of selectivity and self-interested distortion that characterize the genre of autobiography.Lovejoy uses the name of Vassa in his article, since that was what the man used throughout his life, in "his baptism, his naval records, marriage certificate and will".

Seldom is one crucial portion of a memoir totally fabricated and the remainder scrupulously accurate; among autobiographers ... both dissemblers and truth-tellers tend to be consistent.