John Jea

Little is known about John Jea's life apart from what he wrote in his autobiography.

Jea stated that he was born in Africa in 1773 near Calabar in the Bight of Biafra,[1] and that he, his parents and siblings were kidnapped by slave traders and sold into slavery in New York City when he was two and a half years old. Some historians have expressed doubts over these claims (the likelihood of an entire African family managing to survive capture and the high death rate of the Middle Passage, then to be sold collectively to a single owner, is extremely low), and suggested that they may have been fabricated or embellished.[2]

Jea was purchased and held by a Dutch couple, Oliver and Angelika Triebuen. His master initially sent him to church services as a punishment, but Jea became a devout Christian and was baptised in the 1780s.[2] After passing through a series of slave owners, Jea seems to have convinced the final one that his recalcitrance as a slave merited manumission.

In the 1790s Jea traveled to Boston, New Orleans, South America, and various European countries, where he worked as an itinerant preacher and as a mariner and shipboard cook.[2]

Between 1801 and 1805 he lived and preached in Liverpool, England.[3] He then worked as a cook on ships traveling around North America, the East Indies, South America, the West Indies and Ireland until 1811, when his ship was captured by French forces.[3] Jea spent four years being moved around northern France before his eventual release at the close of the Napoleonic Wars.[3]

After returning to England, Jea settled in Portsea near Portsmouth in England, where he published his autobiography and hymnbook during the 1810s.[4] He was still traveling as late as October 1817, when he was preaching in St. Helier in Jersey.[5]

Jea reported marrying three times: firstly to a Native American woman called Elizabeth, whom he said had been executed for killing their child; then to Charity, a Maltese woman who died; and finally to Mary, an Irishwoman.[2]

Jea was one of the first African-American poets to have written an autobiography.[6] His autobiography was written in Portsea between 1815 and 1816, but was largely unknown until it was rediscovered in 1983.[5][6]

Henry Louis Gates Jr. has argued that Jea's autobiography forms a "missing link" between 18th-century slave narratives which tended to focus on spiritual redemption and later 19th-century narratives which rhetorically championed the political cause of abolition.[7] Religious themes dominate Jea's autobiography. Indeed, Jea describes his acquisition of literacy as the result of a miraculous visit from an angel, who teaches him to read the Gospel of John.[8] But political themes are mixed together with these religious aspects, and the work consistently argues that slavery is a fundamental injustice in need of abolition. Gates calls Jea's work "the last of the great black ‘sacred’ slave autobiographies." [7]

Jea also published a hymnbook called A Collection of Hymns. Compiled and Selected by John Jea, African Preacher of the Gospel (1816). It contains 334 songs, including twenty-nine apparently of Jea's own composition.[9]

• The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher. Compiled and Written by Himself. Portsea, England: John Jea, 1811.