Indeed, the ample evidence of the autobiography of Igbo-born ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, first published in 1789, provides historians with the earliest attempt, in the modern era, to articulate and contest a sense of Igbo identity as opposed to the "other" - or what Equiano qualified as "primitive Europe." Equiano's graphic and prideful description of his "Eboe" (i.e. Igbo) life and customs in the eighteenth century mirrors similar accounts by Archibald Monteith, an Igbo-born "Aniaso" in 1799 and enslaved in Jamaica from around 1802. Similar mentions of the Igbo or Heebo (as it appeared in the early slave trade) as a cultural group exist in documented memoirs of early European visitors to the Bight of Benin and Biafra. Both Duarte Pacheco Pereira, a fifteenth century Portuguese sea captain and geographer and John Grazilhier, who made a voyage to Old Calbar in 1699, wrote about the "Hakbous [Igbos] Blacks" in their separate memoirs.
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