Mary Prince: Black Rebel, Abolitionist,
Storyteller
Margot Maddison-MacFadyen
“I hope they will never leave off to pray God, and call loud to the
great King of England, till all the poor blacks be given free, and
slavery done up for evermore.”
(Mary Prince, 1831)
Mary Prince is the storyteller of The History of Mary Prince, A West
Indian Slave, Related by Herself. She was born in 1788 in Bermuda
and was recognized as a Bermudian National Hero in 2012. The date
and location of her death is unknown, but scholars assume it to be
London, England, during or after 1833, because historical records
last place her there in that year. She is the first known freed black
woman from the West Indies to author a slave narrative, and she is
understood to have been a rebel, an abolitionist, and a member of a
successful abolitionist collaborative writing team that brought her
History to print in 1831.
In 1829–1830, Prince told her story to Susanna Strickland (later
Susanna Moodie), who compiled it with the editorial assistance of
Thomas Pringle, the secretary of London’s Anti-Slavery Society, and
with contributions from abolitionist pamphleteer Joseph Phillips on
the Antigua section. Phillips had lived and worked in Antigua for over
twenty years. Printed three times in 1831, History was a bestseller.
Her narrative was a significant part of a successful abolitionist
strategy that moved British Parliament to pass the Slavery Abolition
Act in 1833. This Act, which became law on August 1, 1834, liberated
approximately eight hundred thousand British slaves.
However, in spite of this achievement, charges of
fictionalization—that the abolitionist writing team fabricated all or
part of the slave narrative—have been made, one publicly in Bermuda
as recently as 2012. This charge, even if only adhered to by a few,
Mary Prince
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was made because Prince’s History contests the prevailing historical
view that Bermudian enslavement was comparatively benign. The
purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to give an authoritative version
of Prince’s History based on traditional sources, but also based on
my own findings, excavated from the Government of Bermuda
Archives; from the Slave Registers of Former British Territories
for both Antigua and the Bahamas; from oral histories, shared with
me by knowledgeable elders, which I then corroborated through
archival investigations; and from the research of both the National
Museum of Bermuda and the Bermuda National Trust. This version
supports the veracity of Prince’s History. It also broadens the scope
of her story, illuminating the circumstances of her life and the lives
of her family and of other slaves.
It has been said in the past that the prevailing perspective of
Bermudian enslavement was comparatively benign, that the “close
proximity between whites and blacks created an unprecedented
intimacy that led masters to treat enslaved persons like family
members” (Swan 80). Rebecca Peniston’s 1813 will provides a
glimpse into where this idea originated. In her will, she “provided
that three of her slaves, Beck, Kate and Fanny were to be set free.
She specified that Beck, who was ‘very sickly and infirm, may have
her life in the room she now occupies or one as comfortable and
have the attendance of her daughter Dinah’” (Trimingham 13–14).
It is important, however, to tell the whole story, not just a portion of
it. Even the best-treated slaves were still just that, slaves. Certainly,
they never inherited from a deceased slave-owner the way his or her
own children or grandchildren might have.
A second example of a slave-owner who, upon his death,
set slaves free is Samuel Tatem. His will shows that slaves were
assets that a slave-owner might pass on to succeeding generations.
Although he gave his two elderly slaves Moll and “old” Mary their
liberty, he also bequeathed four other slaves, Kitt, Daniel, Marote,
and Mary to his children and grandchildren (Tatem 211–212). These
four continued on as slaves with the next two generations of his
family. A final example is Violet Richardson, who was freed in 1831,
the same year Prince’s History was first published. Her husband,
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Stephen Benjamin Richardson, purchased her for £30 Bermudian
currency from her slave-owner William Hugh Peniston (Harris 63).
A free black, her husband Stephen was “born a slave at St. George’s
in 1800, but had obtained his freedom sometime before 1830”
(Harris 63). Although such narratives might support perspectives
of so-called “benign” enslavement, the details also demand a much
more complex reading.
Laws for crime and punishment also demonstrate that
Bermudian enslavement was not benign. Bermuda Acts, 1704–94,
which were in place when Prince was a child, attest to this. Three
of the several laws that are listed are as follows: “slaves banished
from the Island but returning of their own will would suffer death;
male slaves having bastards by white women would be whipped by
the hangman under the gallows; and slaves convicted of stealing
oranges, pineapples, or other fruit would be severely whipped on
the naked back throughout the parish where the crime took place.
Three lashes, well laid on, were to be delivered at every 30 paces”
(Packwood 149–50). As well, conspiracies and rebellious plots to
overthrow their slave-owners—which demonstrate that slaves were
not content with their status—were also made by slaves at every
opportunity (Packwood 162).
Mary Prince, who was sold at public auction for £57 Bermudian
currency when she was twelve years old, tells more of the whole
story of Bermudian enslavement in her History. Prince, who had
five slave-owners in her lifetime, was treated differently in each of
the households in which she lived. As an adolescent and an adult, she
suffered greatly. According to Swan, her “painful life of violence,
physical and sexual abuse dispels the assertion that whites treated
enslaved blacks as family members” (80).
Prince’s five slave-owners were all Bermudians, although
not all of them lived in Bermuda. When she was an infant, Mr.
Charles Myners (Miners) owned both her and her mother, and
Mr. Trimmingham (Trimingham) owned her father, a man named
Prince, who worked for him in Crow Lane, Bermuda, as a sawyer.
When “old” Mr. Myners died, Mary Prince and her mother were
sold to “old” Captain Darrel (Darrell). He gave them as a gift to his
Mary Prince
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granddaughter Betsey Williams.1 Mary Prince was a playmate for
Betsey, and her mother worked as a household slave.
When she had just turned twelve years old, Prince was hired
out to work for Mrs. Pruden (Prudden).2 Her employment was to
care for the baby, Daniel. His sister, Fanny, taught her the alphabet
and to spell many small words. Not long after this, Betsey’s mother,
Mrs. Sarah Williams, died, and against Betsey’s wishes, Mary and
her two younger sisters, Hannah and Dinah, were sold. Betsey’s
father, Captain John Williams, wished to remarry, and he sold the
three sisters to raise money for the wedding (Prince 60). At the time,
Prince reports having two younger brothers, who were not sold that
day. In a footnote appended to Prince’s slave narrative, its editor,
Thomas Pringle, indicates that Prince eventually had seven brothers
and three sisters (Thomas Pringle History 76).
Mary Prince and her sisters were sold at Bermuda’s “Hamble
Town” (Hamilton) slave auction. Prince was bought for £57
Bermudian currency by Captain I—who has since been identified
as Captain John Ingham (Ferguson 4–5). At the time, this was about
£38 sterling, a large sum of money to be paid for a slave so young.3
Captain Ingham and his wife lived at Spanish Point, in a house
“built at the bottom of a very high hill” (Prince 64).4 They proved
to be cruel taskmasters, which incited Prince’s rebelliousness. Mrs.
Ingham, Prince reports, “caused her to know the exact difference
between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin,
when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand” (Prince 66).
Because of a broken earthen jar, for which she was held responsible,
Captain Ingham, Prince reports, “tied me up upon a ladder, and gave
me a hundred lashes with his own hand” (Prince 68). And when
a cow got loose and ate a sweet potato slip, “taking off his heavy
boot, he struck me such a severe blow in the small of my back, that
I shrieked with agony and thought I was killed” (Prince 69).
Not long after this incident, Prince ran away to her mother who
was living close by at slave-owner Richard Darrell’s.5 Her mother
hid her in a “hole in the rocks” and brought her food at night (Prince
70). When her father Prince found out, he took her back to the
Ingham farm, but admonished Captain Ingham, saying, “The sight
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of her wounds has nearly broke [my heart].—I entreat you, for the
love of God, to forgive her for running away, and that you will be a
kind master to her in the future” (Prince 70). Mary Prince also “took
courage” (Prince 70), saying, “that I could stand the floggings no
longer; that I was weary of my life, and therefore I had run away to
my mother; but mothers could only weep over their children, they
could not save them from cruel masters—from the whip, the rope,
and the cow-skin” (Prince 70). The admonishment was partially
effective, for Captain Ingham did not beat her that day. However, a
few years later, he sold her.
When she was about fourteen or fifteen, Captain Ingham put
Prince on a ship bound for Grand Turk Island. He had sold her to Mr.
D—, whose son was named Dickey. The vendue (auction) master
put Prince up on the Grand Turk auction block to find out how much
she was worth, and she was valued at £100 Bermudian currency,
again a large sum for a female slave at this time. An 1807 letter
from William Astwood, penned in Bermuda, to his uncle, Capt. John
Lightbourn, living on Turks Island, confirms this. He discusses the
purchase of a female slave, saying that she has “every good quality,
but the price Enormous, say one Hundred Pounds” (Butz 27).6
As with Captain Ingham, who was recorded in the slave narrative
as Captain I—, Mr. D—’s identity was concealed by Thomas
Pringle, because these two men, along with Captain Ingham’s
wife, whose identity was also concealed, displayed a “conduct of
peculiar atrocity” (Thomas Pringle “Preface” 56). Furthermore,
Pringle writes that, though they were deceased by the time of the
History’s publication in 1831, by revealing their identities, “it might
deeply lacerate the feelings of their surviving and perhaps innocent
relatives” (Thomas Pringle “Preface” 56).
I lived in the Turks and Caicos Islands in 2005–2009, including
six months on Grand Turk Island. Oral history shared with me by
knowledgeable elders there prompted me to conduct an archival
search, which corroborated what they had told me. The 1822 and
1825 Slave Registers of Former British Territories for the Bahamas
reveal that Robert Darrell, a salt proprietor with two homes, one in
Bermuda and the other on Grand Turk Island, was the infamous Mr.
Mary Prince
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D— (The National Archives of the United Kingdom Slave Registers
Bahamas T/71 456 and T/71 457). His son, Richard, is also listed—
Dickey being an abbreviated form of Richard. No other father
and son proprietors whose surname begins with the letter “D” are
recorded in the Slave Registers.7 Moreover, although this Richard is
not the same person as the man who owned Mary Prince’s mother,
the Darrell family played a large role in her life, since the day she
was purchased by “old” George Darrell when she was an infant.
Rebellious slaves were often split from their families and
sold out of the colony for punishment, and this is probably what
happened to Prince. On Grand Turk, she continued to be treated
cruelly. She had hoped, she reports, “when I left Capt. I—, that I
should have been better off, but I found it was but going from one
butcher to another” (Prince 72). She reports that Mr. D—, “often
stripped me naked, hung me up by the wrists, and beat me with the
cow-skin, with his own hand, till my body was raw with gashes”
(Prince 72–73).
On Grand Turk Island, she worked in very harsh conditions
as a member of a gang of salt pond slaves, making valuable solar
evaporated salt for their slave-owner, Mr. D—. She reports that, “[o]
ur feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours,
soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to
the very bone” (Prince 72). She and the other slaves were fed rations,
corn soup called “blawly” (Prince 72). Here, Prince and other slaves
were locked up at night in a long shed so that they could not escape.
This was because absconding by stolen boat to nearby Haiti—a new
state formed in 1804 at the conclusion of the Haitian Revolution—
where freedom waited, had become a common occurrence.
Around the year 1812, when Prince was twenty-four or twentyfive, Robert Darrell returned to Bermuda, and he took her with him.8
She reports that he “had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite
naked and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water. This
was worse than all the licks. Sometimes when he called me to wash
him I would not come, my eyes were so full of shame” (Prince 78).
This revelation speaks of sexual abuse on the part of Darrell, and,
back in Bermuda, she was able to stand up to him, telling him that
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“he was a very indecent man—very spiteful and too indecent; with
no shame for his servants, no shame for his own flesh” (Prince 78).
She left the house, went to the neighbors’, and “cried until the next
morning” (Prince 78). As a result of her courage in confronting him,
and probable pressure from the neighbors, he put her out to work at
Cedar Hill, but all the money she earned went back to him. Prince
reports “I had plenty of work to do there—plenty of washing; but
yet I made myself pretty comfortable” (Prince 78).
After working at Cedar Hill for approximately two years, Prince
learned that Mr. John Wood was going to Antigua, and she wished
to go there, too. She says “I did not wish to be any longer the slave
of my indecent master” (Prince 78), so she asked Robert Darrell to
let her go “in Mr. Wood’s service” (Prince 78). Thus, Robert Darrell
sent her to Antigua with her fifth and last slave-owner, John Adams
Wood, Jr. Once there, Wood purchased her for £100 Bermudian
currency, and she worked for him and his wife as a household slave.
Though she preferred her name Mary Prince, the Woods referred to
her as Molly. She appears in the Slave Registers of Former British
Territories for Antigua in the 1817, 1821, 1824, and 1828 registers
as Molly Wood, and Wood has designated her “black” (The National
Archives of the United Kingdom Slave Registers Antigua T/71 244
and T71/247-49).9 In the Slave Registers, slave-owners also used
“coloured” and “mulatto” to distinguish the skin tone of slaves.
In some Slave Registers, such as for the Bahamas, for example, a
further category was added that distinguished “African” slaves from
“Creole” slaves.
In Antigua, Prince displayed increasing rebelliousness and was
punished for it. Once, when Mr. Wood was angry with Prince, he
gave her a note, “and bade me go and look for an owner” (Prince
81). She went to Adam White, a free black and a cooper, who
immediately went to Mr. Wood to make the purchase, but he was
informed that she was not for sale (Prince 81). The next day, Mr.
Wood whipped her (Prince 81). She fought over a pig with another
slave woman, and Mrs. Wood sent her to the magistrate (Prince 80).
There, she was put in the Cage overnight, “and the next morning
flogged, by the magistrate’s order, at her desire” (Prince 80). Yet
Mary Prince
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when Justice Dyett heard the case, he said Prince was in the right,
and ordered the pig returned (Prince 80).
Prince’s rebelliousness continued to escalate. Interested in the
Moravian church and its teachings, she relates that “[w]henever I
carried the children their lunch at school, I ran round and went to
hear the teachers” (Prince 83). Disobeying her slave-owners, she
had her name put down in the Spring Garden Moravian missionaries
book, thus joining the congregation. She was taught to read and to
write by them and, eventually, she was admitted as a candidate for
the Holy Communion (Prince 83). Also, without permission from
the Woods, she married Daniel James, a free black man.9 In Antigua,
it was not legal for slaves to marry, but because of their religious
convictions, Moravians at Spring Garden solemnized the marriages
of slaves and recorded them nonetheless. When Mr. Wood heard of
it, he “flew into a great rage” (Prince 84). Mrs. Wood was even more
vexed: “She could not forgive me for getting married, but stirred up
Mr. Wood to flog me dreadfully with his horse-whip” (Prince 85).
Then, in 1828, when Prince was forty and suffering from
rheumatism, the Woods took her to their residence in London,
England, where she was to work as a nanny to their son. She says
that “I was willing to come to England: I thought that by going there
I should probably be cured of my rheumatism, and should return
with my master and mistress, quite well, to my husband” (Prince
86). And her husband Daniel, she says, “was willing for me to come
away, for he had heard that my master would set me free,—and I
also hoped this might be true; but it was all a false report” (Prince
86).10 Once in London, she was also expected to do household work,
such as laundry at London’s washhouse. It was in London that she
walked out their door into the streets a free woman. No longer owned
by Wood, he could not list her in the 1832 Slave Registers of Former
British Territories for Antigua as his property, but his declaration
says, “and except Molly who accompanied me to England, and there
quitted my service” (The National Archives of the United Kingdom
Slave Registers Antigua T/71 250).
Walking out that door was Prince’s penultimate act of rebellion.
Her final act was seeing her story put into print and, thereby, turning
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the tables on her slave-owners. But this begs the question: how was
she able to walk out the Woods’ door to freedom? The following
is a brief history of the abolitionist events that led to Prince’s selfemancipation. At the time, slavery was not supported by the British
legal system, although it was still sanctioned in Britain’s colonies.
English Language Anti-Slavery, which had its first glimmerings in
the late 1600s, had become organized by the 1770s, the decade of
Prince’s birth. Several huge strides had been made, most significantly
Justice Lord Mansfield’s ruling in the 1772 Somersett v. Steuart case,
which severely curtailed the powers of colonial slave owners who
brought enslaved men and women to Britain, and the Act for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade that was passed by British Parliament
March 25, 1807. This Act abolished the slave trade in the British
Empire, but it did not abolish slavery itself. Finally, in 1833, the
Slavery Abolition Act was passed. It became law on August 1, 1834.
Therefore, in 1828, Prince was free in England, but she was not free
in the West Indies or Bermuda.
The beginnings of the Somersett v. Steuart case goes back
to 1765 when Granville Sharp, who afterwards became a major
proponent of the Anti-Slavery movement, found a gravely injured
young black man, Jonathan Strong, on the doorstep of his brother
William’s medical practice. Two years later, when Strong was fully
recovered and working as a free man, his owner, David Lisle, sought
to reclaim him and to ship him to the West Indies against his will.
Because of this incident, Sharp realized that slave owners in Britain
possessed unrestricted power that was a potential threat to British
liberties. Sharp’s worry was that West Indian slaveholding might
gain a foothold in Britain (Brown 93).
Five years later, the Somersett v. Steuart case brought these
issues to a head. James Somersett, a slave owned by Charles Steuart,
landed with Steuart on British soil in November 1769. A few days
later, Somersett attempted to escape but was captured and imprisoned
on a ship bound for Jamaica. Three persons came forward, claiming
to be Somersett’s godparents and demanding his freedom, and legal
action was sought.
Mary Prince
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Justice Lord Mansfield heard the case in February 1772, with
Sharp as Somersett’s chief backer. Mansfield’s ruling, a milestone
on the road to Abolition, implied that slavery was not legal in
England and Wales, but remained legal in the rest of the Empire.
Subsequently, “[t]he Somersett case led directly to a series of court
cases in Scotland, which concluded in 1778 in a ban on slaveholding
in North Briton” (Brown 99). Thus, [t]he Somersett case helped
establish the British Isles, in the minds of the British, as a unique
asylum for liberty” (Brown 101).
A hundred years earlier, in the late 1600s, before the American
War of Independence, when the thirteen colonies were still part of the
British Empire, a handful of travelling British clerics found slaves
in appalling circumstances in both America and in the West Indies,
and they reported these findings back to congregations in England.
Reverend Morgan Godwin, for example, travelled to Virginia in
1667 expecting to teach Christianity to the slaves there, but colonial
settlers repelled him, informing him that the enslaved were “beasts
of burden” (Brown 69).
He then went to Barbados, where he learned that slave owners
resorted to “castration, amputation, maiming, and decapitation as a
means to control their slaves, and [that] there was a law prohibiting
Quakers from converting their slaves to Christianity” (Brown 69).
Upon his return to England, and “enraged against a colonial ethos
that made profit the ‘chief Diety,’” (Brown 69) he wrote scathingly
about his experiences and preached regularly in London and its near
vicinity on “England’s obligation to convert Africans to Christianity
and to treat them with humanity” (Brown 70).
However, in the American colonies, significant gains by
proponents of anti-slavery were eventually made. For example,
slaveholding became a major topic of debate for American Quakers.
They distanced themselves from slave traders and discouraged
slaveholding within the sect. In the 1760s, Quakers located
in communities along the Delaware River became engaged in
promoting their ideas to the broader public for the reformation of
society (Brown 99).
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Anthony Benezet and several others of those Quakers were
attracted to a 1769 pamphlet published by Granville Sharp that
challenged slaveholding in Britain. Thus began a transatlantic
correspondence, in which they shared ideas and information on the
subject of abolitionism that became essential to the success of antislavery campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic, both prior to the
American War of Independence and afterwards.
Mary Prince, born in 1788 in Bermuda and, therefore, a British
subject, was nineteen years old and working as a salt pond slave
on Grand Turk Island for her fourth slave-owner Robert Darrell
when the slave trade was abolished in 1807. The push for this had
begun in earnest twenty years earlier on May 22, 1787 when the all
male, twelve-member London Abolition Committee, also called the
Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed
(Jennings 35). The Committee, whose members hailed from two
Protestant Christian sects, exemplified the non-denominational
nature of abolitionism: there were nine Quakers and three
Evangelical Anglicans (Jennings 35). Although all the founding
members were important to the Committee’s ultimate success, three
people are particularly memorable: a Quaker, Joseph Phillips, and
two Evangelical Anglicans, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp.
The work of James Phillips, a publisher, was vital to
communications. He published tens of thousands of copies of
various abolitionist pamphlets throughout the years, many of which
made their way across the Atlantic to Anthony Benezet and others
in the United States of America. Thomas Clarkson was often on
the campaign trail to abolish slavery. Given the task of collecting
information to support the abolition of the slave trade, his work
included interviewing thousands of sailors and obtaining physical
evidence of the trade, such as equipment used on slave-ships to
restrain captives.11 Granville Sharp, a lawyer, was Chair, and the
Committee’s official correspondence bore his name. William
Wilberforce, an Evangelical Anglican, has been thought of as the
chief champion of the cause because he was the Parliamentarian who
annually brought the Abolition of the Slave Trade Bill to Parliament,
until it finally passed in 1807. However, although he offered the
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Committee his support in 1787, he did not officially join until 1791
(Jennings 35).
English Language Anti-Slavery was a movement of diverse,
but related and coordinated, activism. It included contributions of
influential women, some aristocratic, wealthy and offering patronage,
such as Elizabeth Bouverie, a charitable recluse who owned the
Barham Court estate at Teston (Brown 342–343). This is where the
Evangelical Anglicans Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce
often met with like-minded others (Brown 342). However, it was
her friend Margaret Middleton, who lived at Barham Court with her
husband Charles, who had insisted that Barham Court be used as a
place to discuss issues of slavery. Christian Latrobe, an Evangelical
Moravian who stayed at Barham Court for four months, reported to
his daughter that the “abolition of the slave trade was . . . the work of
a woman” (Brown 349). At the time, Margaret Middleton was called
the “honoured instrument of bringing the monster within range
of the artillery of the executive justice of this kingdom” (Brown
349). White women’s involvement in the movement developed
and grew into a broad pattern of activism. “Women appeared on
the first publicized list of abolitionist subscribers in Manchester in
1787, constituting 68 out of 302” (Drescher 217). And another list
in London in 1788, “included the names of more than 200 women,
about 10 percent of the total” (Drescher 217).
In the 1820s, after the hard-won 1807 date, and in the final
push for Emancipation, women took a much enlarged and more
public role. In 1824, Elizabeth Heyrick, a Quaker, published a
pamphlet entitled, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition (Drescher
249). After 1825, women emerged as an independent organizational
component of British anti-slavery. They joined the national
petitioning for parliamentary reform in 1830–32. In May 1833, on
the day scheduled for the introduction of the Emancipation Bill to
the House of Commons, “the largest single antislavery petition in
British history arrived at the doors of Parliament” (Drescher 250).
Bearing 187,000 women’s signatures, it was “one vast and universal
expression of feeling from all the females in the United Kingdom”
(Drescher 250).
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Finally, the activisms of the slaves themselves made the AntiSlavery movement unstoppable. Prince’s 1831 publication, The
History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself,
played a significant part in moving British public sentiment forward
to Emancipation. Modeled on prior slave narratives penned by men,
such as Olaudah Equiano’s, The Interesting Narrative of the Life
of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by
Himself, published in 1789, which aided in moving British sentiment
forward to Abolition, her History was the first by a woman. As with
Equiano’s narrative, it caused a sensation amongst its readership.
Building on the momentum of Prince’s 1831 publication, the same
collaborative abolitionist writing team produced a second slave
narrative that was also published in 1831. This was Negro Slavery
Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner, a
Native of St. Vincent’s. With an Appendix Containing the Testimony
of Four Christian Ministers, Recently Returned from the Colonies,
on the System of Slavery as It Now Exists.
Historians have acknowledged other black West Indian women
for their activisms and resistance to slavery. Rebecca Protten, for
example, a black Evangelical Moravian, born a slave in Antigua in
1718, worked with other black preachers to establish the earliest
African Protestant Congregation in the Americas at St. Thomas. As
Sensbach observes: “In what became one of the great social and
religious movements of modern history, black women and men began
to blend Christianity with the religions they had brought with them
from Africa, creating a faith to fortify themselves against slavery.
Though hardly anyone knows her name today, Rebecca helped to
ignite the fires of a new kind of religion that in subsequent centuries
has given spiritual sustenance to millions” (3). Mary Prince, who
became a Moravian in Antigua, benefitted indirectly from Protten’s
work, which had branched from St. Thomas to Antigua in 1756
(Peucker and Graf). Yet another example of a black West Indian
woman acknowledged for her activism and resistance to slavery is
Maroon leader Grandy Nanny, who is now recognized as a Jamaican
National Hero. She was the leader of the Windward Maroons, which
was one of two main Maroon groups in eighteenth-century Jamaica.
Mary Prince
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