The Dutch captured the British colony of Suriname during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1667). Under the West India Company it was developed as a plantation slave society and became a primary destination for the Dutch slave trade. The brutal regime caused high mortality; despite the import of 300,000 slaves between 1668 and 1823, the population never grew beyond 50,000. ‘Maroonage’ became the major form of resistance. Fugitive slaves, or ‘maroons’, escaped inland to form permanent communities from where they waged a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Dutch.

In 1774 the Scottish-Dutch soldier John Gabriel Stedman witnessed the brutal oppression of slaves during a campaign against the maroons, which he described in his Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The book, which included illustrations by William Blake, was adopted by those who advocated the abolition of the slave trade, though Stedman was thought to support reform rather than abolition.

In the Narrative Stedman encounters a group of Africans travelling to be sold as slaves whom he describes as ‘walking skeletons covered over with a piece of tanned leather’. However, Blake’s image of a lively group sits at odds with Stedman’s vision of this ‘sad assemblage of my fellow-creatures’.