Here are images from Stedman’s Narrative:

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Here Voltaire scarcely exaggerates the violence. Runaway and resistant slaves were routinely maimed, tortured, and even killed, both as punishment and as a deterrent to others. In connecting the miseries of this slave with the ubiquitous luxury of sugar on European tables and in European mouths, Voltaire anticipates by more than thirty years the sugar boycotts of the 1790s by which anti-slavery protestors (led by women) sought to bring economic pressure to bear on the whole slave-based system. The poor slave’s recollection of what his mother told him in Africa foreshadows a similar passage in William Blake’s poem of 1789, “The Little Black Boy.” Voltaire’s ironic attack on the hypocrisy of Christians who “declare every Sunday that we are all of us children of Adam” is of a piece with his repeated attacks on organized religion everywhere in his works. But it is also part of a long tradition of anti-slavery writers who savaged nominal Christians for practicing slavery and enjoying the fruits of slave labor. From Defoe’s condemnation of traders who “barter baubles for the souls of men (“Reformation of Manners,” 1702), to Phillis Wheatley’s rebuke “Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain, / May be refin’d and join the angelic train” (“On Being Brought from Africa to America,” 1773), to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lament that black slaves have “for centuries . . . lain bound and bleeding at the foot of civilized and Christianized humanity, imploring compassion in vain” (Preface to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852), a growing tide of writers including Voltaire focused on Christian hypocrisy as the darkest aspect of an already immoral practice.

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Voltaire was far from the first to set a work of literature in Surinam, the slave-holding Dutch colony on the northeast coast of South America. Best remembered today is Aphra Behn’s novella of 1688, Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave. Better known in Voltaire’s era was Thomas Southerne’s tragedy based on Behn’s story, also titled Oroonoko, first staged in London in 1695 and performed more than 300 times in London between 1700 and 1800 (an average of three times per year). In both, the subject of African slavery is central. As late as the 1790s Surinam still figured prominently in literature about the New World. See, for example, John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (London, 1796) which, remarkably, contained engravings by William Blake.

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