Читать книгу The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano - Olaudah Equiano - Страница 8

In the years that followed, Equiano's story shadows the major events of British history. Upon the outbreak of the Seven Years War, he hunts French ships in the English Channel. He docks at Portsmouth during the court-martial of Admiral Byng, whom the authorities famously executed for failing to defend Minorca from the French. Equiano's ship then ferries the Duke of Cumberland – the Butcher of Culloden – from the Netherlands to London, and in 1758 he and his master Michael Pascal convey General James Wolfe to death and glory in French Canada. Soon afterwards, Equiano sees the British fleet at Gibraltar capture the first fighting Temeraire, the third of which Turner would paint so brilliantly in the 1830s. During all of this, Equiano found the time to convert to Christianity, receiving his baptism at St Margaret's Church in the shadow of Westminster Abbey.

Even after the turmoil of the first truly global war, which ended with the British making enormous gains in Canada and India, the young Equiano continued to collide with the actors and places of the age. He claims to have heard George Whitefield, the Methodist who roused American Christians during the Great Awakening, preach at Philadelphia, although this probably happened at Savannah. Equiano also did business on St Eustatius, the tiny Dutch island in the Caribbean which would prove so pivotal in the American Revolutionary War. There, the riches of its warehouses so distracted the plundering British admiral George Rodney that he could not prevent the French navy from surrounding the British forces so decisively at Yorktown.