Polar explorer, Royal Navy combat veteran, successful entrepreneur, radical political activist, and author of a global bestseller that helped end the British slave trade. If you pitched that resume to a studio, it would get rejected for being unrealistic. It also belonged to one man. This episode is a deep dive into Olaudah Equiano, known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa, and the autobiography he weaponized against the institution that once owned him.

We trace the journey: the kidnapping from Igbo land, the Middle Passage, his enslavement to a Royal Navy officer who renamed him after a Swedish king, his frontline service during the Seven Years' War, the second cycle of enslavement that nearly destroyed him, his self-purchased freedom in 1766, his ventures in trade and Arctic exploration with Constantine Phipps, and his rise int ...