Olaudah Equiano — the first Black man to cross the Arctic Circle

It has been more than two centuries since Britain abolished the slave trade in the British Empire.

One remarkable and controversial man who worked in Britain as part of the abolition movement was himself a former slave, Olaudah Equiano. He had a number of firsts in his event-filled life. One of them was that he was the first Black man to cross the Arctic Circle.

Equiano claimed to have been born in Africa around the year 1745. In his autobiography, he claimed he was the son of a chief and that he and his sister were kidnapped one day while playing and sold into slavery.

His terrifying account of the dreaded “middle passage” across the Atlantic bound for slavery in the West Indies was crucial in galvanizing British opinion against the slave trade.

More recent scholarship has cast doubt on his African origins, claiming he was born into slavery in South Carolina and had only heard accounts of the middle passage from other slaves born in Africa.

Birthplace aside, it is undisputed that he was a Black slave.

When he was about 10, Equiano was sold to a Royal Navy officer, Michael Pascal, who gave him the improbable name Gustavus Vassa, the name of a Swedish nobleman who had freed his people from Danish rule.

Pascal took Equiano to England, where he attended school and learned to read and write. With Britain at war against France, his education was punctuated by periods at sea, where his job aboard ship was as gunpowder carrier.

After the end of the Seven Years’ War, he was sold to another sea captain and taken to Montserrat. There, because of his education and despite being a slave, he was able to save enough money to purchase his own freedom. He promptly returned to England.

In 1773, he joined an expedition led by Constantine Phipps (later to be Lord Mulgrave) aboard the ship the Racehorse to find a passage to India across the North Pole. (The companion ship of this expedition carried as a crew member a teenager, Horatio Nelson, much later to be the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar.)

Equiano wrote about his experiences on the Racehorse.

“On the 28th of June, being in lat. 78, we made Greenland, where I was surprised to see the sun did not set. The weather now became extremely cold… We saw many very high mountains of ice; and also a great number of very large whales, which used to come close to our ship.”

The land he saw was not Greenland but rather Spitsbergen. At that time, the term Greenland was often applied by whalers and explorers to the east coast of Greenland and Spitsbergen.

At the end of July, in 80 degrees north latitude, the Racehorse fastened to an ice floe.

“We had generally sunshine and constant daylight, which gave cheerfulness and novelty to the whole of this striking, grand, and uncommon scene,” he wrote.

The sailors killed nine polar bears and Equiano found them to be “course eating.”

The Racehorse was very nearly crushed in the ice and this took some of the excitement out of Equiano’s descriptions of the Arctic.

He wrote, “On the 19th of August we sailed from this uninhabited extremity of the world, where the inhospitable climate affords neither food nor shelter, and not a tree or shrub of any kind grows amongst its barren rocks; but all is one desolate and expanded waste of ice, which even the constant beams of the sun for six months in the year cannot penetrate or dissolve.”

On Sept. 30, the Racehorse reached the Royal Navy dockyard at Deptford, near London.

“And thus ended our Arctic voyage, to the no small joy of all on board,” wrote Equiano.

They had been much farther north than any previous navigators. The result of the expedition, Equiano wrote, was that “we fully proved the impracticability of finding a passage that way to India.”

In 1789, Equiano published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. It went through nine editions and was an important document in building the case against slavery.

He married an English woman and they had two daughters. The first Black man known to have crossed the Arctic Circle, Equiano died in London in 1797, 10 years before his abolitionist colleagues succeeded in abolishing slavery in Britain.

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for more than 50 years. He is the author of “Minik: The New York Eskimo” and “Thou Shalt Do No Murder,” among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.