author
John Gabriel Stedman
1744–1797
A soldier’s journal from colonial Suriname became one of the late 18th century’s most vivid and unsettling firsthand books about slavery, war, and everyday life in the Americas. His writing is remembered not only for its adventure and detail, but also for the troubling contradictions it reveals.
7 Audiobooks
Reize naar Surinamen en door de binnenste gedeelten van Guiana — Compleet
by John Gabriel Stedman
Reize naar Surinamen en door de binnenste gedeelten van Guiana — Deel 4
by John Gabriel Stedman
Reize naar Surinamen en door de binnenste gedeelten van Guiana — Deel 2
by John Gabriel Stedman
Reize naar Surinamen en door de binnenste gedeelten van Guiana — Deel 1
by John Gabriel Stedman
Narrative, of a five years' expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana on the Wild Coast of South America; from the year 1772 to 1777 ... Volume 1 (of 2)
by John Gabriel Stedman
Reize naar Surinamen en door de binnenste gedeelten van Guiana — Deel 3
by John Gabriel Stedman
About the author
Born in 1744 in Dendermonde, in the Austrian Netherlands, John Gabriel Stedman was a Dutch-British army officer of Scottish family background. He served in the Dutch military and is best known for Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796.
That book grew out of his time in Suriname between 1773 and 1777, when he joined a campaign against Maroon communities formed by formerly enslaved people. Stedman recorded battles, landscapes, plants, animals, and colonial society in striking detail. He also wrote about the brutality of slavery, which gives the book much of its historical power, even though his own role in the colony was deeply entangled with the system he described.
His Narrative had a long afterlife because readers valued it as travel writing, military memoir, and a rare eyewitness account of Suriname under slavery. The book is also known for its illustrations, including engravings associated with William Blake, and it remains important to historians and literary scholars interested in empire, abolition, and the Atlantic world.