however, Equiano's most important work is his autobiography, which became a best seller, rivaled in popularity by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. He published nine different editions before his death in 1797; including an American edition (1791), and German and Dutch editions, 1790 and 1791 respectively. By 1837, nine more editions had been published. Three editions were bound together with the poems of another former slave child Phyllis Wheatly, whose Poems on Various Subjects (1773) was the first collection of poems published by an African American. Together, their works form the genesis of a Black written literary tradition. "A MULTITUDE OF BLACK PEOPLE...CHAINED TOGETHER" Olaudah Equiano vividly recounts the shock and isolation that he felt during the Middle Passage to Barbados and his fear that the European slavers would eat him. Their complexions, differing so much from ours, their long hair and the language they spoke, which was 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 of my own country. When I looked around the ship 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 my fate. 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, and I believe some were those who had brought me on board and had been receiving their pay. They talked to me in order to cheer me up, 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. They told me I was not. I took a little down my palate, which, instead of ...
