Abstract
In 1777, James Field Stanfield (1749-1824) was one of only three sailors who returned from a voyage disastrous even by the grim standards of the eighteenth-century slave trade. Ten years later, he would publish two separate accounts of his experiences. The first was a series of prose letters (1788) and the second was "The Guinea Voyage," a narrative poem of over 1,000 lines (1789). This chapter examines how Stanfield navigates the problems of representing evils that he both witnessed and contributed to. It focuses on questions of language and style, in particular as they relate to the depiction of evil, to suggest how Stanfield's Catholicism may inform his representation of the horrifying events he experienced.