Olaudah Equianothe VaultISTJ

Early in 1787, on a transport ship waiting to sail for Sierra Leone, Olaudah Equiano went to take charge of the spare stores and found that many of them had never been bought, though the government had paid for them. He was about 41, by his own reckoning.

Making sure the money reached the people was his job. In November 1786 he had been appointed “Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the Black Poor going to Sierra Leone,” for a scheme to settle black Londoners in West Africa. He was one of the first Africans ever employed by the British government.

Stores had been laid in for 750 people, and only 426 had mustered. When he went to account for the surplus, “it appeared they had never been bought, though paid for by government.” Meanwhile, he wrote, many of the settlers on board lacked beds and clothing.

He knew what it meant when the people keeping the books stopped caring about the people in them. By his own account he was born in Igboland around 1745 and enslaved as a child. A naval officer who bought him renamed him Gustavus Vassa, and he bought his own freedom in 1766, at about 21. He had once been an entry in someone else's ledger.

So he did what Vaults do. He used the proper channel, in order, in writing. He raised it first with the expedition's agent, Joseph Irwin. When that got nowhere, he brought in the naval captain commanding the escort, as a witness. Then he reported the whole business to the Navy commissioners.

Before the fleet sailed, he was dismissed. He blamed the banker Samuel Hoare, one of the scheme's backers. By his own account, the same commissioners who removed him said they were satisfied with his conduct.

He felt the injury, and he filed the paperwork. He sent the Treasury a formal memorial, setting out the facts in order and itemizing what he had spent fitting himself out for the voyage. Months later the Treasury paid him £50. He did the sum in public and added one line: “Certainly the sum is more than a free negro would have had in the western colonies!!!”

Three exclamation marks. Vaults do not spend those lightly.

The settlers paid far more than he did. About 411 sailed in April 1787, and 96 died on the voyage. His warning had been right. It had not saved them.

In 1789 he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, with both his names on the title page. Its last chapter told the Sierra Leone affair in full, with the official papers printed so readers could judge for themselves. It ran to nine editions in his lifetime.

He had been hired to keep a faithful account. He kept it at his own cost, all the way into print.