John Gabriel Stedman

John Gabriel Stedman was a Dutch-British army officer and writer best known for writing The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). This narrative covers his experience in Suriname between 1773 and 1777, where he was a soldier in a Dutch regiment deployed to assist colonial troops fighting against groups of maroons. He first recorded his experiences in a personal diary that he later rewrote and expanded into the Narrative. The Narrative was a bestseller of the time and, with its firsthand depictions of slavery and other aspects of colonialism, became an important tool in the fledgling abolitionist movement. When compared with Stedman's personal diary, his published Narrative is a sanitized and romanticized version of Stedman's time in Surinam.