They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of fore‐thought. […] They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient … In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection … Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous. […] [N]ever yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry – Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar centrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism … Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honour to the heart than the head. They breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy, and shew how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong religious zeal. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his stile is easy and familiar, except when he affects a Shandean fabrication of words. But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration.
* * *
I advance it … as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people … Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
IIB10 Olaudah Equiano (c.1745/50–97) On the Middle Passage
Modern historians have ascertained that Olaudah Equiano may have been born on a plantation in South Carolina and not, as his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself describes, in the Kingdom of Benin, in West Africa. Nonetheless, his account of African society, of the indigenous institution of slavery and its distinction from the Middle Passage of organized transatlantic slavery, even if not subjects of his own experience, were learned by an enslaved black man from other enslaved black men and women who had experienced it. In later life, Equiano became a Christian and a significant literary figure in late eighteenth‐century England, one of the most prominent and effective voices in the campaign for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. The present extracts are not concerned with art (though in his account of West African societies, Equiano does discuss practices of material culture similar to others in the present anthology). What earns his description of the Middle Passage its place in a book on art, however, is the fact that insofar as this book is devoted to plotting the changing representations of other cultures by Western artists and writers from the Middle Ages to the present day, the transatlantic slave trade marks a ne plus ultra in the evolution of those relations. The experience to which Equiano’s Narrative speaks, stands at the heart of the web of representations out of which much art was made: not only the subsequent emergence of black music and literature in America – hence impacting the modern world in general – but also in then‐contemporary art. A number of works, ranging from the Wedgwood medallion to Wordsworth’s poem in memory of Toussaint L’Ouverture to Turner’s Slave Ship, all circulate around this central point (cf. IIB12, IIIC5, IIIC13). The present extract is taken from Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative [1789] and Other Writings, edited with an introduction and notes by Vincent Carretta, London: Penguin Books, 1995, rev. edn 2003, pp. 55–6 and 58–61.
The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave‐ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, nor the then feelings of my mind. When I was carried on board I was immediately handled, and tossed up, to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too, and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate, and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair? […] I was not long suffered to indulge my grief; I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste any thing. I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced any thing of this kind before; and although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it; yet, nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not; and, besides, the crew used to watch us very closely who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water; and I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating.