Mary relates that this was because Sarah Williams was “too poor to keep so many of us at home” (Prince 2).Ī few months later, Mary was sold at an auction in Hamble Town (Hamilton), Bermuda, along with her younger sisters Hannah and Dinah. The Prudden residence was in the neighbouring parish, Paget. She was put out to work at the Pruden (Prudden) household. When Mary had just turned 12, her situation changed. He worked for them as a sawyer, probably in their shipbuilding yard at Crow Lane. The slave-owner brothers, Daniel and Francis Trimmingham (Trimingham), claimed Prince as property. Mary relates that when she was a child in the Williams’ household it was “the happiest period of my life” but adds that this was because “I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave” (Prince 1). Mary’s mother worked as a domestic in the Williams’ household, and Mary was Betsey’s playmate. The Williams' residence was in Bermuda’s Devonshire Parish. Betsey was close to the same age as Mary, and she was the second person to claim Mary as property.īetsey’s mother was Sarah Williams, and her father was Captain John Williams. Captain George Darrel (Darrell) purchased Mary and her mother from Charles Minors, and gave them both as a “gift” to his granddaughter Betsey Williams. 1 Her mother was enslaved in the Minors' household, and Mary was an infant. Mary’s first slave-owner was Charles Myners (Minors). A merchant-rentier, or a jobber, rented enslaved people to other slave-owners and to people who did not "own" any enslaved people. Two of her slave-owners had residences and business interests in West Indian colonies-one was situated in Grand Turk Island where he was a proprietor in the salt industry, and the other was situated in Antigua where he was a merchant-rentier. All of these slave-owners were Bermudian, although they did not all live in Bermuda. In her lifetime, five different people claimed her as property. Mary was born in 1787, or 1788, in Bermuda to enslaved parents. In the British Empire, this was 1 August 1834. Historically, Emancipation was when enslaved people were made free. It was a successful strategy that aided in bringing about Emancipation. The History of Mary Prince went to print three times that year. Abolition was (and still is) a movement to end slavery. The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself was first published in the latter part of February, 1831 at the height of Britain’s Abolition movement. Thomas Pringle, the secretary of London’s Anti-Slavery Society, was the editor, and he was also the financial backer of the project. She listened to Mary tell her story, and then she wrote it down. She was the storyteller of an abolitionist collaborative writing team that brought her story to print. Mary Prince, an enslaved Bermudian-and, thus, a British subject-is the first known Black woman to relate a slave narrative.
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