aves), of the astonishment of seeing a ship for the first time and, on the transatlantic journey, of the strange and exotic sight of flying fish and other sea creatures. In the midst of dreadful suffering the child-Equiano asserts the magical beauty of life. A sympathetic white sailor lets him look through a quadrant. "The clouds appeared to me to be land, which disappeared as they past along. This heightened my wonder and I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in another world, and that everything about me was magic."
Fascinating and bestselling material, but how truthful? Vincent Carretta's biography seems to have torpedoed the slave ship and shattered trust in Equiano's veracity. Through years of patient and tenacious research in neglected archives, Carretta has discovered not one but two documents indicating that Equiano was born in Carolina - the first, a baptism record from February 9 1759, in St Margaret's Church, Westminster, stating that he was a "Black, born in Carolina, 12 years old"; the second, a muster list on a ship in which Equiano served in 1773, on which his birthplace is declared to be "South Carolina". In other words, Equiano may never have set foot in Africa, never mind boarded a slave ship, and the narrative of his early life may be pure fiction.
Needless to say, many scholars of African-American studies are furious with Carretta for seeming to suggest that Equiano is a trickster. One of them suggested he should have buried the evidence, for as one journalist in the Chronicle of Higher Education put it: "Carretta's conclusions threaten a pillar of scholarship on slave narratives and the African diaspora. Questioning Equiano's origins calls into doubt some fundamental assumptions made in departments of African-American Studies." Many Nigerians too are up in arms, Equiano being their star writer and witness. The fact that Carretta is white has increased the level of hostility to his book.
So how are we to reassess Equiano? Carretta himself suggests that his possible birth in Carolina rather than Africa in no way diminishes the power of his testimony. Autobiography, after all, is always partly fictional, the narrator excited by storytelling, by shaping and plotting the tale and by dressing up dull facts. Equiano was African in terms of origin, he knew the horrors of the slave trade which by the 1780s were widely broadcast by white abolitionists. What he did was to take it upon himself to write the first substantial account of slavery from an African viewpoint but, as importantly, to write it with pulse and heartbeat, giving passion to the subject so as to arouse sympathy and support for the cause of abolition. With Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and Granville Sharpe, Equiano was a major abolitionist, working ceaselessly to expose the nature of the shameful trade. He travelled throughout Britain with copies of his book, and thousands upon thousands attended his readings. When John Wesley lay dying, it was Equiano's book he took up to reread.
Carretta's biography, far from detracting from Equiano's greatness, calls attention to it. Apart from the doubt about Equiano's birth, Carretta has tracked down records proving that practically everything else he told about his life was factually correct. Carretta reveals a man almost unique in his travelling and experience of different cultures and landscapes. Equiano worked on ships trading in the West Indies, North America, Central America and the Mediterranean. In 1773 he was an able seaman on the Phipps expedition to the North Pole - probably the first African to set foot on Arctic ice. And wherever he went he sought out the strangeness of the place, never allowing his status as an exploited black man to dim his sense of awe. Sailing to Philadelphia he is "surprised at the sight of some whales, having never seen any such large sea monsters before"; in Italy he witnesses an eruption of Mount Vesuvius - "it was extremely awful"; sighting Arctic ice he is moved by "the whole of this striking, grand and uncommon scene; and, to heighten it still more, t