Mary Prince

Born Into Chains: Bermuda in the Age of Slavery

Mary Prince was born around 1788 at Brackish Pond, in the parish of Devonshire, Bermuda — a small British colonial archipelago whose economy, though distinct from the plantation-driven islands of the wider Caribbean, was nonetheless thoroughly embedded in the institution of slavery. Unlike the sugar-producing islands of Jamaica, Barbados, or Trinidad, Bermuda's enslaved population was primarily employed in domestic service, maritime labor, and the harvesting of salt from the island's pans. This did not make the institution less brutal; it simply gave brutality a different face.

Mary Prince was born into bondage, the property of Charles Myners and later the Darrell and Williams families. From her very earliest years, she existed in the condition that defined so many thousands of lives across the British Caribbean: legally invisible, economically exploited, physically vulnerable, and without recourse to any law or institution that recognized her humanity. Yet the story of Mary Prince is not simply a story of victimization. It is, above all, a story of voice — of a woman who refused to let the machinery of slavery silence her, and who found a way, against enormous odds, to force the world to hear her testimony.

The front page of the first edition of The History of Mary Prince, published in London in 1831. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Childhood and the First Rupture

Mary Prince spent her earliest years in relative proximity to her family, serving in the household of Captain and Mrs. Williams, who treated her with what she later described as comparative kindness. But this tenuous stability shattered when she was approximately twelve years old: she was sold away from her mother and siblings in a public auction, a scene she recounted in her narrative with harrowing specificity. The separation was not merely an economic transaction; it was a deliberate severing of human bonds that the slave economy required in order to function, and it inflicted psychological wounds that Mary Prince carried for the rest of her life.

"I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or lamb he was about to purchase." — Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831)

She was sold to Captain John Ingham, whose household became the site of the first of many sustained regimes of violence. She and the other enslaved people in his care were subjected to regular physical beatings, psychological cruelty, and overwork — experiences that she documented in her narrative with a directness that shocked Victorian readers.

The Salt Ponds of Turks Island

Perhaps the most physically devastating chapter of Mary Prince's enslavement came when she was taken to Turks Island — a salt-producing dependency in what is now the Turks and Caicos Islands — by her then-owner, Mr. D— (widely understood to be Mr. Darrel). The labor on the salt ponds was grueling beyond description. Enslaved workers stood in brine for hours at a time, raking and carrying salt under a tropical sun, their skin cracked and bleeding from the corrosive salt water. The conditions caused permanent damage to Mary Prince's joints and health, injuries from which she never fully recovered.

This period represents one of the most significant chapters in her narrative, because it reveals the overlooked geography of Caribbean slavery. When people in Britain imagined slavery, they imagined sugar plantations in Jamaica or Barbados — not the brutal salt industry of smaller, less celebrated islands. Mary Prince's testimony placed these overlooked sites of suffering onto the map of the abolitionist imagination.

Antigua: Marriage and a Sharpening Resistance

After years of suffering in Bermuda and Turks Island, Mary Prince was eventually taken to Antigua, where she was enslaved by John Adams Wood, a merchant, and his wife. In Antigua, despite continuing to endure physical abuse and overwork, Mary Prince found space for two important developments in her interior life: she joined the Moravian Church, finding in its communal religious practice a form of dignity and community that slavery sought to extinguish; and she entered into a marriage with Daniel James, a free Black man, whom she wed in 1826.

The Woods refused to allow her to purchase her freedom, a denial that was not uncommon but that represented, in Mary Prince's case, a particular cruelty, because the law technically allowed enslaved people in some circumstances to buy their way out of bondage. Her growing awareness of both her legal rights and of the abolitionist movement sharpened her determination to find freedom by another means.

London and the Path to Freedom

In 1828, John and Mary Wood brought Mary Prince to London as their domestic servant, a decision that would prove to be a crucial miscalculation. While slavery was still perfectly legal in British Caribbean colonies, the legal status of enslaved people on English soil was far more ambiguous following the Somerset case of 1772, which had established that an enslaved person could not be compelled to return to a colony against their will.

Mary Prince exploited this legal grey zone. After enduring continued mistreatment in London, she left the Woods' household — not without enormous courage, given that departure meant losing any chance of returning to her husband in Antigua as a free woman, since the Woods refused to grant her manumission. She sought refuge first with the Moravian Church and then made contact with the Anti-Slavery Society, whose secretary, Thomas Pringle, took her into his household and became her advocate.

The Autobiography: Dictating a Life into History

Because Mary Prince was illiterate — a direct consequence of the deliberate policy of keeping enslaved people uneducated — she could not write her own story. Instead, she dictated it to Susanna Strickland (later Susanna Moodie), a writer residing in Pringle's home. Strickland transcribed Prince's words, and Pringle edited the manuscript, adding a preface and supplementary materials. The resulting book, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, was published in London in 1831.

It was the first autobiography by a Black woman ever published in Britain — a fact whose significance cannot be overstated. In an era when enslaved people were legally classified as property, when their testimony was inadmissible in court and their personhood unrecognized by law, Mary Prince's narrative broke through the silence with the force of an indictment. The book ran through three editions in its first year, a testament to its explosive impact on a British public already primed by decades of abolitionist organizing.

Legal Battles and Parliamentary Petitions

The publication of the narrative was not without consequence. John Wood, furious at the portrait of him in the book, brought a libel suit against Pringle, claiming the narrative was false and defamatory. Mary Prince appeared as a witness in the proceedings — making her, in a profound historical irony, a subject of law who had never been recognized as a legal person. The court ultimately ruled against some of the narrative's allegations, but the legal battles only amplified public attention on the book and on the cause of Caribbean emancipation.

Mary Prince also acted in her own name: she petitioned the British Parliament directly — making her arguably the first woman in Britain to petition Parliament in her own right — calling for the freedom of herself and all enslaved people in the British Caribbean. Though her personal petition for freedom was unsuccessful (the Woods refused to sell her, and she could not return to Antigua without being re-enslaved), her political action was part of a rising tide of pressure on Parliament that could not be ignored.

The Abolition Act and an Unknown Ending

The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, just two years after the publication of Mary Prince's narrative. While no single document or action can be credited with passing such landmark legislation, historians consistently recognize her autobiography as one of the most powerful catalysts of the final phase of the British abolitionist movement. It gave the abstract arguments of politicians and philosophers a human face, a human voice, and a catalogue of human suffering rendered in precise and unflinching detail.

What happened to Mary Prince after 1833 is not known. The historical record falls silent, and she disappears from documentation. Whether she was able to return to Antigua, whether she was reunited with her husband Daniel James, whether she lived to see Emancipation fully enacted — all of this remains unknown. This silence is itself historically significant: it reflects the structural invisibility of enslaved and formerly enslaved women, whose lives were considered worth recording by official institutions only when they were useful to larger causes.

A Legacy Across Two Centuries

In the two centuries since its publication, The History of Mary Prince has never been out of print. It is studied in universities across the English-speaking world as a foundational text in the literatures of slavery, women's autobiography, and Caribbean writing. Bermuda has honored her with a national monument and commemorations, and her story has been adapted for theater, film, and documentary. She is widely recognized as one of the most important figures in the history of Caribbean resistance to slavery and in the history of women's political action in the British Empire.