Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A True History
By Aphra Behn

Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup by Students and Staff of the University of Virginia, Malcolm Bare, Ankita Chakrabarti, Neal Curtis, Alison Glassie, Robert Hoile, Rebeccca Rosenblatt, Simon Sarkodie, Kristian Smith, Michael Van Hoose, Alissa Winn, Agnes Redvil
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Sources

London : Printed for William Canning, 1688 This edition has been prepared from the edition undertaken by the Oxford Text Archive, which reproduces the copy of the first edition in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. This is Oxford Text Archive record number A27305. We corrected errors in the Oxford Text Archive against the Google Books digitized page images of the first edition.

Editorial Statements

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not. Where pages break in the middle of a word, the complete word has been indicated prior to the page beginning.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section.

Citation

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko; ; or, The Royal Slave; a True History, Printed for William Canning, 1688 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Behn/behn-oroonoko. Accessed: 2025-03-13T04:22:09.224Z

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TEST Audio
[Title Page] OROONOKO:
OR, THE
Royal Slave.
A TRUE
HISTORY.

By Mrs. A. BEHN.

 LONDON,
Printed for Will. Canning, at his Shop in
the Temple-Cloysters. 1688.
Page [Title Page]Page [Title Page]

Footnotes

Presidents_Precedents. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Eye-Witness_Not only one who has observed something firsthand, but in a legal sense, one who is "able to describe or testify to it." Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Surinam_The name for land that had been carved out as a colony neighbored by Brazil to the south and Guiana to the West. At the time of the action of the story, the colony was in British control, but it was lost to the Dutch shortly thereafter
Marmosets_A particularly tiny species of monkey that is, indeed, about the size of a mouse. Notably adorable.
Cousheries_It is not clear what kind of animal Behn is referring to here, but it probably a species of feline.
Antiquaries_An "antiquary" was a collection of unusual and exotic items. The singular form "antiquary" could describe a collector of antiques or rare objects. "His Majesty's Antiquaries" might, as Behn's biographer Janet Todd has suggested, refer to the Royal Society of London.
Queen_Here is an image of the actresses Anne Bracegirdle, dressed as the title role in John Dryden's play The Indian Queen, (1664) while wearing the feathered headdress referred to in this passage. Whether this headdress was something that Behn herself brought back to England from Surinam in the 1660s is impossible to know at this point. Image of Anne Bracegirdle dressed as a native American womanSource: Engraving of Anne Bracegirdle dressed as a native American woman (courtesy British Library under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Holes_Behn is describing the process of piercing ears and other parts of the body
Coramantien_Coramantien, or Kormantine, was the name both of a slave-trading castle, depicted here, and of the coastal area of what is now the nation of Ghana where several such fortified trading posts were located. In the 1660s, when this story is set, both English and Dutch slave traders used the fort at Coramantien. By the late seventeenth century, it was controlled by the Dutch, who renamed it Fort Amsterdam. Its ruins can still be visited today. Engraving of fortress known as CoramantienSource: Wikimedia Commons
Civil_The English Civil Wars of 1642 1649 between the supporters of the Stuart monarchy and the supporters of Parliament, which led to the execution of Charles I in 1649.
French_Behn's emphasis on Oroonoko's knowledge of French and English associates him with civilized Europeans; eloquent Africans in European literature were often imagined as here, as more European than African.
Statuary_An artist who makes statues, a sculptor of statues. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
awful_awe-inspiring
bating_excepting
politickprudent, shrewd, sagacious. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Mantle_a protective cloak or garment; a loose, sleeveless cloak. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Royal_A veil delivered by the king as an invitation to his harem.
injuring_That is, the King is impotent. It's notable that the narrator thinks first of the potential cost to Oroonoko rather than the cost to Imoinda.
Otan_"Otan" seems to be derived from the Turkish word "odan," referring to a room or small enclosure in a harem. This is one of the moments when this part of the story, though set in Africa, feels more like an "Oriental" tale.
Son_Oroonoko is actually his grandson.
Cast-Mistress_Discarded, former mistresses
Clouds_Here Behn seems to be informed by knowledge of African religious traditions, as such references to a sky deity appear there, but we do not know her source for this term.
maugre_In spite of
Shagrien_Chagrin; that is, disappointment or vexation
Person_The commander of the ship
Parole_Pledge, oath
Pickaninies_Dark-skinned children, usually of African descent. The term is likely a pidgin form of the Portuguese word pequenino.
Lord_Lord Willoughby was the governor of Surinam and the owner of the Parham plantation. Trefy was there to oversee the plantation in Willoughby's absence.
Oroonoko_clothing
Backearary_An altered from of bakra, buckra, or buccra, a word used in Surinam for master.
River_The Suriname River
Osenbrigs_A kind of coarse linen used for hard-wearing clothing that was produced in Osnabruck, Germany. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Caesar_Slaves were often given the names of powerful Romans, which was often a way of mocking their profound lack of power. Here, too, as Janet Todd notes, Behn sometimes referred to James II as Caesar, so this forms another link between Oroonoko and the Stuart monarchy.
Country_Surinam was turned over to the Dutch in the Treaty of Breda in 1667, just after the action of this story takes place.
Parham_The main house on the Parham plantation.
Grandee_A Spanish or Portugese nobleman of the highest rank. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Eye-Witnesses_In the first edition, there is a page number skip from page 112 to page 129. One possible explanation for this as that a sheet, which would have had exactly sixteen pages in the original octavo format of this book, was removed for corrections. When he returned the sheet with the corrected type, the printed continued with the original pagination of the preceding sheet, perhaps forgetting that sixteen page numbers would then be missing. No text is missing; it's simply an error in pagination.
Novel_To Behn and her readers, the word "novel" would have been associated with short romantic stories set among the aristocracy; the story of Oroonoko and Imoinda that Trefry has just heard fits that definition. "Novel" only gained its modern sense decades later.
Cut_To cut or slash (a shoe, item of clothing) for decorative purposes. Source: Oxford English Dictionary, “race”)
Japan_Lacquered, or covered with a glossy material; in this period, highly-lacquered glossy black surfaces were associated with Japan, which exported such goods to Europe.
Picts_The Picts were an ancient tribe in the northern part of Britain who were known to paint and tattoo their bodies. The engravings of Picts in Thomas Hariot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) are accompanied by the comment that "the markings of the Picts were similar to those of the Native Americans in Virginia.” Source: Wikipedia
Alexander_The reference here is to Alexander the Great, who by legend met Thallestris, the Queen of the Amazons, a race of female warriors, whose home was near the river Jaxartes, which reportedly had brightly-colored poisonous snakes. There is no historical evidence for this, but the stories were told over and over again in historical romances from antiquity onwards, which is the context that Behn is invoking here.
Majesty_Charles II, who ruled from 1660 to 1685. As a staunch supporter of the Stuart monarchy, Behn laments his comparatively recent death, and also that he allowed Surinam and by extension the British foothold in South America, to go to the Dutch as one of the terms of the Treaty of Breda in 1667.
Nosegays_Fragrant bouquets
Mall_Pall Mall, one of the straightest avenues in London, well known in Behn's era as a place for the socially ambitious to promenade.
Tigers_There are, of course, no tigers in Surinam, so either Behn is thinking of some other kind of large carnivore such a jaguar (which does exist in Surinam), or is fancifully adding this detail.
Dams_Mothers
Oliverian_Follower of Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliamentary forces in the Civil War and head of the Commonwealth government that ruled England in the 1650s.
Numb_An electric eel
Ell_An ell is a unit of measurement; it varied from place to place and at different times, but an English ell of this period would have been about 45 inches
shiningBehn’s description of Native American gentleness and fascination with European dress and trinkets is an exploitive theme common throughout early colonial American literature. In most of the colonial writings regarding Native Americans, the tribes encountered are often depicted as subservient and attracted to lustrous items rather than those things which might possess monetary value. Writers of the period employed instances of civil exchange, fascination, and amity between white Europeans and Native Americans to engender merchants to settle the New World as well as convince wealthy aristocrats and merchants to patron campaigns to westernize and impose dominion by means of Christian conversion.
Tiguamy_Janet Todd notes that the phrase "Amora tiguamy" appears in Antione Biet’s Voyage de la France équixonale en l’isle de Cayenne (1654, pp. 395-7). Todd argues that Behn records a traditional greeting and provides the translation herself; however, it should be noted that the term Amora has connection with the Latin Amore, suggesting that Behn plays with contemporary accounts and phonetics to further depict the indigenous characters as loving and peaceful. The phrase likely developed out of interactions between the natives and the Spanish.
Reverenc_Behn describes the tribe as passing down its highest artistic and scientific knowledge to a select member who undergoes rigorous training from youth. This pattern relates to ideal models of aristocratic education in European society.
Comitias_Todd notes that Behn may have borrowed from Biet yet again. Biet claims Indians wore a small piece of clothing called a camison.
Heartburn_Jealousy, resentment, or discontent; grudges. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Moons_Months
Mountains_Europeans still believed that a golden city, or El Dorado, existed in the South American mountains
Amazons_Todd explains that this is a geographic blunder. The mouth of the Amazon is in Brazil, but cartographers had drawn it as the south-eastern border of “Guiana” throughout the seventeenth century.
HarangueA tirade. The term first appears c1450, but only in Scottish writings. It was not used in England until c1600. It derives from medieval Latin harenga, which shares the current definition, and the Italian aringo, a place of declamation, arena.
Friday_The Day of Judgment.
Slaves_Oroonoko here is expressing what was known as the "just war" doctrine of slavery, that those who lost a war could rightly be enslaved. It is on this basis that Oroonoko himself owns slaves. The distinction he is making here is that, according to this doctrine, slaves gained through conquest are justified while slaves acquired through trickery or commerce are not.
Runagades_Renegades
Tuscan_Tuscan’s name derives from the late Latin Tuscānus meaning “of or belonging to the Tuscī or Thuscī, a people of ancient Italy (called also Etruscī Etruscans).” Source: Oxford English Dictionary The Etruscans inhabited ancient Etruria, so Tuscan’s name implies nobility and European origins.
cut-his-way_According to the Roman historian Plutarch, the Carthaginian general Hannibal used vinegar and fire to burn his way through the Alps to attack the Roman army.
fashion_Of high social standing; the upper class
Ill_Poorly treated
Baffled_Subjected to public disgrace. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Deputy_William Byam is a real historical personage, noted both in Antione Biet’s Voyage de la France équixonale en l’isle de Cayenne (1654) and Henry Adis’s A Letter Sent from Syrrinam (1664). As deputy governor of Surinam, Byam ruled the colony in the absence of Lord Willoughby. According to Flannigan’s Antigua and the Antiguans. A Full Account of the Colony and its Inhabitants, after the Dutch takeover of Surinam, Byam led many of the British colonists to Antigua, where became governor and lived until c. 1670. Todd notes that both Biet and Adis, otherwise critical of the colony in Surinam, praise Byam: Adis refers to him as “that worthy person, whom your Lordship hath lately honoured with the Title and Power of your Lieutenant General of this Continent of Guinah”; while Biet describes him as brave, honorable, and civil (pp. 263, 279). Behn’s decision to portray him as cowardly and deceitful appears to have been her own. On the other hand, Byam did face accusations of unnecessary cruelty in his governance from an opposition group led by John Allin. Byam wrote a tract An Exact Relation of the Most Execrable Attempts of John Allin (1665) defending the need for harsh measures to govern the unruly colonists and accusing Allin of insurrection.
Cat_More commonly known as a cat-o'-nine-tails, a whip with nine knotted lashes, often used for corporal punishment in the British military until 1881. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Basket-hilts_Defensive hilts on the handle of a sword consisting of narrow plates of steel curved into the shape of a basket
Wit_Followed his own judgment
unconsidered_Unpremeditated
touch_Draw near to
tedious_Tiresome, exhausting
Fury_An allusion to the Furies, three mythical Greek goddesses of vengeance and punishment, best known for punishing those who swear false oaths and, especially, those who kill their own kin.
Man_Todd notes that a Colonel Marten of the Surinam militia appears in multiple historical accounts of the colony, although the authority under which he was styled colonel is dubious. In contrast to Behn’s positive portrayal, Robert Sanford depicts Marten in Surinam Justice (1662) with many of the negative traits assigned to Byam and other colonists by Behn: he is eager to commit violent acts, cruel, ill-tempered, profane, and “so famous in nothing as his variety of councels: and it seems the whole bulk of Government must dance to the changes of his brain."Colonel Martin indeed appears as a character in Behn's play The Younger Brother, Or, The Amorous Jilt. Behn's self-promotion is premature, however, since the play was not produced until 1696, seven years after her death
ChirurgeonSurgeon
apartment_A room in a house designed for the use of a particular person
menaces_Threats
Burlesque_To mockingly imitate, deride, or amuse. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Newgate_The central prison in London
transported_Throughout this period, many criminals found guilty of crimes against property in Britain were sentenced by being "transported" or exiled for a period of years to the colonies.
nemine_With no one speaking to the contrary.
White-hall_Offices of government in Whitehall, London. Trefry's implication is that Byam, although governor of Surinam, remains as subordinate to the King as any civil servant back in Great Britain.
Mobile_The mob, the rabble; the common people, the populace. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Sensible_Capable of delicate or tender feeling. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
cover-lid_Coverlet, blanket
gashly_Ghastly
Banister_Major James Bannister was responsible for negotiating with the Dutch when England ceded Surinam in 1667. According to Todd, in 1671, he led “about a hundred families to Jamaica where he joined forces with governor Sir Thomas Lynch who was trying to suppress a rival, backed by other ex-Surinam settlers” (Saunders Webb, 97). Bannister then became major-general of Jamaica. Bannister was killed in 1673 by Mr. Burford, a surveyor-general, who was then hanged.