Comparing Life Of Olaudah Equiano, And Gustavus Vassa

The Slave Ship by Robert Riggs and The interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself by Olaudah Equiano has many similarities depicted within the works. Upon viewing the painting, the first item that attracted my eye was the man leaping overboard through the gap in the net around the top left of the painting (Riggs). When I saw this, I immediately thought of Equiano’s description of the three men that had jumped overboard to escape the horrors of the ship. Two of the men perished, but one man was rescued and punished by a vicious flogging for trying to escape (Equiano 698). This leads to the next similarity that these two works share. Equiano wrote “one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid

The mental health of the slaves, which was so evidently tarnished, was completely disregarded by these people. Riggs’ detail of each slave’s face shows the anguish and torture that each one is going through. The reader could also imagine this through the imagery that is displayed throughout Equiano’s narrative. One example of this is when Equiano described the lower deck of the second ship he was on. He stated that “the shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable” (697). The last common practice, which is the most obvious one, is how Equiano and Riggs portrayed the white men. In the painting, each white man is seen performing a task that shows them as more powerful than the captives. Two men are holding whips, another two are holding a slave down on his knees while something is being poured down his throat, and the last man is seen resting near the ship’s ledge (Riggs). Equiano, however, shows this in a different way. He writes that one day the white men had plenty of fish and after they ate, instead of giving the slaves the leftovers, they threw them overboard to go to