![]() ![]() Mary Prince was returned to Bermuda in 1812, where Robert Darrell had moved with his daughter. Generally, men were the salt rakers, forced to work in the salt ponds, where they were exposed to the sun and heat, as well as the salt in the pans, which ate away at their uncovered legs. Due to the nature of salt mining, Mary and others were often forced to work up to 17 hours straight as owners of the ponds were concerned that if the workers were gone for too long rain would come and soil the salt. ![]() When the threats posed by the Spanish and French in the region decreased however, the enslaved people were put to work in the salt pans.Īs a child Mary worked in poor conditions in the salt ponds up to her knees in water. Blacks crewed the Bermuda sloops that delivered the rakers to and from the Turks Islands and delivered salt to markets in North America, engaging in maritime activities while the whites raked. Originally, raking had been performed by whites due to the fear of enslaved people being seized by Spanish and French raiders (enslaved persons were considered property, and could be seized as such during hostilities). The production of salt for export was a pillar of the Bermudian economy, but the production was labour-intensive. The Bermudians had used these seasonally for a century for the extraction of salt from sea water. Ingham sold Mary in 1803 to a salt raker, Robert Darrell, on Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands, who owned salt ponds. Mary's new enslaver and his wife were cruel and often lost their tempers, and Mary and others were often severely flogged for minor offences. Her two sisters were also sold that same day, all to different slave traders. Īt the age of 12, Mary was sold for £38 sterling (2021: ~£3,300 ~US$4,500) to Captain John Ingham, of Spanish Point. He gave Mary and her mother to his daughter, with Mary becoming the companion servant of his young granddaughter, Betsey Williams. When Myners died in 1788, Mary Prince, her mother and siblings were sold as household servants to Captain George Darrell. She had three younger brothers and two sisters, Hannah and Dinah. Her father (whose only given name was Prince) was a sawyer enslaved by David Trimmingham, and her mother a house-servant held by Charles Myners. Mary Prince was born enslaved at Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. It was reprinted twice in its first year. This first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, published at a time when slavery was still legal in Bermuda and British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the British anti-slavery movement. Strickland wrote down her slave narrative which was published as The History of Mary Prince in 1831, the first account of the life of a Black enslaved woman to be published in the United Kingdom. Prince was illiterate, but while she was living in London she dictated her life story to Susanna Strickland, a young lady living in the home of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (aka Anti-Slavery Society, 1823–1838). Of times, and being moved around the Caribbean, she was brought to England as a servant in 1828, and later left her enslaver. ![]() , born in the colony of Bermuda (part of British North America until left out of the 1867 Confederation of Canada) to an enslaved family of African descent. ![]() 1 October 1788 – after 1833) was the first black women to publish an autobiography on her experience as a slave ![]()
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