Although Equiano portrays 'good' whites in his narrative, perhaps to make his condemnation of slavery more persuasive to his audience, he is also unsparing in his presentation of its horrors. African girls as young as ten are defiled, and men are branded with their master's initials to prevent them from escaping: "And yet in Montserrat I have seen a negro man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears Cut off bit by bit" (206). Equiano, a converted Christian, stresses the departure from true Christian values in these actions by whites. He implies that his Christianity is a gift to him, but because white slavery is a betrayal of such values white cruelty is therefore even more horrifying a moral betrayal.

The lessons of what slavery was like, the mechanisms of the slave trade, and the particularly barbaric forms of slavery in the West Indies are...
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