Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam

Stedman, John Gabriel, Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, Ed. Rudolf van Lier, Amherst: U. of Massachusetts Press, 1971.

Reviewed by Gert Oostindie.

Landeg White’s Ph.D. thesis Stedman’s Narrative: Its Origins & Transformations.

Journal Article by Mario Klarer: Humanitarian Pornography: John Gabriel Stedman's "Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam".

John Gabriel Stedman (1744 – 7 March 1797) was a Dutch-born Scottish soldier who wrote The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). This narrative covers his years in Suriname as a soldier in the Dutch military deployed to assist local troops fighting against groups of escaped slaves.[1] He first recorded his experiences in a personal diary that he later rewrote and expanded into the Narrative. The Narrative was a bestseller of the time and, with its firsthand depictions of slavery and other aspects of colonialism, became an important tool in the fledgling abolitionist movement. When compared with Stedman's personal diary, his published Narrative is a sanitized and romanticized version of Stedman's time in Surinam.