The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey - Hardcover

Sparks, Randy J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674013123 ISBN 13: 9780674013124

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2004

Synopsis

In 1767, two "princes" of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers. The princes, Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors--and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement. Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare firsthand account of the Atlantic slave experience.

Randy Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the princes' correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it. They were transported from the coast of Africa to Dominica, where they were sold to a French physician. By employing their considerable language and interpersonal skills, they cleverly negotiated several escapes that took them from the Caribbean to Virginia, and to England, but always ended in their being enslaved again. Finally, in England, they sued for, and remarkably won, their freedom. Eventually, they found their way back to Old Calabar and, evidence suggests, resumed their business of slave trading.

The Two Princes of Calabar offers a rare glimpse into the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and slave trade from an African perspective. It brings us into the trading communities along the coast of Africa and follows the regular movement of goods, people, and ideas across and around the Atlantic. It is an extraordinary tale of slaves' relentless quest for freedom and their important role in the creation of the modern Atlantic World.

About this title

About the Author

Randy J. Sparks is Professor of History at Tulane University.

Reviews

While researching a topic in early Methodism, Sparks discovered letters by former slaves to Charles Wesley. The writers were brothers from an elite family in a slave-trading community on the Bight of Biafra. During a 1767 conflict with another slave-trading clan--an altercation abetted by English slave merchants--the two were seized by a slave-ship captain and launched on a seven-year struggle to get home. They were owned by masters in Dominica and Virginia before succeeding in being taken to England, where their cause was taken up by Methodists, to whose faith they converted. Eventually, freed by English law, they went home, though only upon their second attempt, the first being aborted in a wreck in the Cape Verde Islands. There is every reason to think that they afterwards participated again in the slave trade. Often in dire straits, they prevailed because they were already literate in English and familiar with English manners. Seamlessly weaving great chunks of eighteenth-century documentation into the narrative, Sparks makes the brothers' saga an absorbing true-life adventure. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674013123
• ISBN 13: 9780674013124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208