Mary Prince (born 1788)
Mary Prince was born in about 1788 to a slave family in Brackish-Pond, Bermuda. She was sold to brutal owners on a number of occasions and suffered terrible treatment at their hands, working both as a domestic slave and in the plantations. In the early 1800s after she had already been sold three times she was working in the saltponds in the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. In 1818 she was re-sold to John Wood, a plantation owner in Antigua. There, in 1826, she married Daniel James, a free slave, in the Protestant Moravian Chapel to the extreme disapproval of her owner. She was suffering from rheumatism by this point in her life.
Mary Prince was freed from slavery when the Woods travelled to England in 1828 and she chose to stay rather than return to her husband and enslavement. She was helped by the Moravian Church and the Anti-Slavery Society (whose secretary, Thomas Pringle, gave her employment). They had her experiences as a slave written down by Susanna Strickland, a Quaker friend, in 1831.