The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey
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 OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.