Question

Read the passage below from Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography:

I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation [greeting] in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness [horribleness] of the stench and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables [food]; and on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across I think the windlass [a part of the ship], and tied my feet, while the other flogged [beaten or whipped] me severely.

What most accurately describes the narrator’s circumstance?

He is a passenger on the Middle Passage, a ship that carries enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas.
He is a slave trader who is hungry, sick, and has trouble breathing on a ship.
He is an enslaved person on a ship who wishes to die rather than endure the inhumane conditions he faces.
He is a one of many prisoners on the Middle Passage, a trade route from West Africa to Spain.

Answer 1

According to the passage in question, it is clear that the individual who is narrating is an enslaved individual who is going through extreme hardships and inhumane conditions. The narrator wishes to die rather than continuing to face the conditions that he is being put through.

Answer 2

Answer: He is an enslaved person on a ship who wishes to die rather than endure the inhumane conditions he faces.

Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was an Igbo (from the Igbo region of what is today Nigeria) writer and abolitionist. He was captured and enslaved as a child, and taken to the Caribbean thorugh the "Middle Passage," one leg of the triangular trade route between West Africa, America and Europe. He was able to earn his own freedom in 1766 and became a prominent figure in the abolitionist movement to end the Atlantic slave trade. His life is mostly known thanks to his autobiographical book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

In this passage, Equiano describes the hardships that he went through while on the slave ship. He explains that the pain and cruelty was so huge, he wished to die.