Mary Prince (c. 1 October 1788 – after 1833) was a British abolitionist and autobiographer, born in the colony of Bermuda (part of British North America 'til left out of the 1867 Confederation of Canada) to a slave family of African descent. After being sold a number of times, and being moved around the Caribbean, she was brought to England as a servant in 1828, and later left her master. 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). 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 slave woman to be published in the United Kingdom. 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. It was reprinted twice in its first year. Early life and education Mary Prince was born a slave at Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. 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. She had three younger brothers and two sisters, Hannah and Dinah. When Myners died in 1788, Mary Prince, her mother and siblings were sold as household servants to Captain Darrell. He gave Mary and her mother to his daughter, with Mary becoming the companion servant of his young granddaughter, Betsey Williams. At the age of 12, Mary was sold for £38 sterling (2021: ~£3,300; ~US$4,500) to Captain John Ingham, of Spanish Point. Her two sisters were also sold that same day, all to different slave traders. Mary's new master and his wife were cruel and often lost their tempers, Mary and others were often severely flogged for minor offences. Ingham sold Mary in 1806 to a salt raker on Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands, who owned salt ponds. The Bermudians had used these seasonally for a century for the extraction of salt from sea water. The production of salt for export was a pillar of the Bermudian economy, but the production was labour-intensive. Originally, raking had