Content note: This piece contains graphic descriptions of torture, execution, self-mutilation, and suicide under colonial slavery, drawn from the testimony of Aphra Behn (1688) and John Gabriel Stedman (1796). John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam* (London, 1796), written more than a century after Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), independently corroborates Behn's account of the Surinam plantation system category after category. Behn was the first to write Surinam's violence for English readers; Stedman is another witness to the same colony, and to read the two together is to read one continuous testimony. The piece sets Behn's passages beside Stedman's: the sheep that Ernest Bernbaum (1913) insisted could not have lived in Surinam, yet Stedman finds; the colonial curiosities shipped to the cabinets of Europe; the numbing (electric) eel, tested by a skeptical hero in both accounts; the pipe of tobacco held through dismemberment; the prisoner who reclaims his own broken body at the moment his captors pause; Indian pepper and the Spanso Bocko, a caustic worked into flogged wounds; the Coromantee pattern of chosen death before submission; the recognition of royal rank within slavery; the captors' false faith; and a shared testimonial purpose, Stedman's "to make cruelty ashamed of itself, and humanity gain ground" answering the warning Behn addresses to Lord Maitland. The essay reads Behn's dedication as a coded letter to Maitland, a James II loyalist months from the Glorious Revolution, and introduces four diagnostic moves: the negative-evidence diagnostic, the medical literacy of the wounds, the two-register reading, and the writing-for-the-times argument. It builds on the authors' prior pieces, The Cousheree Diagnostic and Fingerprints in Oroonoko, and on recent scholarship by Helen Wilcox (2025) and John Kuhn and Carolyn Arena (2024). George Warren's 1667 Impartial Description of Surinam, the source Bernbaum said Behn copied, is held for a separate three-witness piece.
Braun et al. (Tue,) studied this question.