We know that there was a James Bannister in Surinam during the period in which the story is set he is recorded as having, with Byam, negotiated the surrender of Surinam to the Dutch in 1667. Trefry was Willoughby’s agent and seems to have run a plantation on his behalf. Byam was the Deputy Governor of Surinam, exercising day-to-day control over the colony, a role that had been delegated to him by his patron, Francis, Lord Willoughby, who owned the patent rights to the colony and supervised Byam from his home base in Barbados. Several of the British men who appear in Behn’s work, such as William Byam, John Trefry, and James Bannister, really existed. England did try to colonize Surinam in the middle of the seventeenth century, dividing the land into plantations and attempting to grow tobacco, sugar, and coffee. Many of the story’s specific details are true and can be verified.

That the hero is African, the exploiters English, and the setting South America makes the message particularly tricky to figure out for modern readers.

The overkill in the formulation of “true History” (as opposed to “false History”?) betrays the urgency of Behn’s desire to have the reader take this story seriously, to treat it not as a fairy tale but as a realistic depiction of heroism in the face of cruel exploitation. Oroonoko is a work of fiction, though it claims to be something else, a “true history” written by an eyewitness to at least some of the events that the narrative describes.

Oroonoko was, like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, a character who was introduced in a work of fiction in the decades around 1700 who would go on to have a long life outside the pages of the work in which he originally appeared. Behn’s work was adapted into a play entitled Oroonoko: A Tragedy by Thomas Southerne in 1695, and that version of the story–one that differs in key ways from Behn’s original–was one of the mainstays of the theater in Britain into the nineteenth century. This was even the case for those who never read Behn’s book. The story of a noble African prince tricked into slavery resonated powerfully with people in the English-speaking world for generations. When she published Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave in 1688, Aphra Behn created one of the foundational myths of her period and of the century that followed.

Orinoco aphra behn