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This I thought at first to be no more than the sets of the tide, of going out or coming in; but I afterwards understood it was occasioned by the great-draught and reflux of the mighty river Oroonoko, in the mouth or gulf of which I imagined my kingdom lay: and that the land which I perceived to the W. and N.W. must be the great island Trinidad, on the north of the river.
"Oroonoko" is worthy of notice as one of the earliest attempts on the part of an English novelist to deal with characters which had come under the writer's observation in actual life. It is still more important on account of the presence within it of a didactic purpose; a characteristic which for good or for evil has been a prominent feature of the English novel.
The beauty of Imoinda had brought about her a large number of suitors, all of whom met with a cold repulse. The tenderness of the meeting between Oroonoko and Imoinda prevailed upon their master to allow them to live together. But Oroonoko longed for liberty. He plotted a revolt among his fellow-slaves, and on its suppression was brutally flogged.
To excite indignation against the results of the slave trade, Mrs. Behn took the special instance of Oroonoko. She endowed the African slave with beauty of person and nobility of character. She gave him tastes and qualities of a kind to attract the interest of a European reader. She added a description of his wife Imoinda, dwelling on the details of her beauty and charms.
I asked him the names of the several nations of his sort of people, but could get no other name than Caribs: from whence I easily understood, that these were the Caribbees, which our maps place on the part of America which reaches from the mouth of the river Oroonoko to Guiana, and onwards to St. Martha.
The seventeenth century produced The Pilgrim's Progress, a powerful allegorical story of the journey of a soul toward the New Jerusalem. Mrs. Her best story is Oroonoko , a tale of an African slave, which has been called "the first humanitarian novel in English," and a predecessor of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Fiction in the First Part of the Eighteenth Century.
This she obtained, but with that moderation which the work deserved. She besides had with it the information I thought it my duty to give her, that her piece, entitled 'L'Esclave Genereux', greatly resembled the English tragedy of 'Oroonoko', but little known in France, although translated into the French language.
Her father was appointed to a colonial office in the West Indies, where he took his family while Mrs. Behn was yet a young girl. There the future authoress began a chequered life by living on a plantation among rough and lawless colonists, and there she made the acquaintance of the slave Oroonoko, whose sad story she afterward made known to the world.
Raleigh, whose turn of mind was somewhat romantic and extravagant, undertook at his own charge the discovery of this wonderful country. Having taken the small town of St. Joseph, in the Isle of Trinidado, where he found no riches, he left his ship, and sailed up the River Oroonoko in pinnaces, but without meeting any thing to answer his expectations.
Behn's return from the West Indies that, being introduced at court, she related to Charles the Second the terrible fate of the noble slave Oroonoko. At the solicitation of the king, she put her narrative into the form of a novel, which obtained a large circulation, and was dramatized by Southern in his tragedy of the same name.
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