The Project Gutenberg EBook of The History of Mary Prince, by Mary Prince

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Title: The History of Mary Prince
A West Indian Slave

Author: Mary Prince

Release Date: February 24, 2006 [EBook #17851]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

THE
HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE,
A WEST INDIAN SLAVE.

RELATED BY HERSELF.

WITH A SUPPLEMENT BY THE EDITOR.

To which is added,

THE NARRATIVE OF ASA-ASA,

A CAPTURED AFRICAN.

"By our sufferings, since ye brought us
To the man-degrading mart,--
All sustain'd by patience, taught us
Only by a broken heart,--
Deem our nation brutes no longer,
Till some reason ye shall find
Worthier of regard, and stronger
Than the colour of our kind."
COWPER.

LONDON:
PUBLISHED BY F. WESTLEY AND A. H. DAVIS,
STATIONERS' HALL COURT;
AND BY WAUGH & INNES, EDINBURGH.

1831.

PREFACE.

The idea of writing Mary Prince's history was first suggested by herself.
She wished it to be done, she said, that good people in England might hear
from a slave what a slave had felt and suffered; and a letter of her late
master's, which will be found in the Supplement, induced me to accede to
her wish without farther delay. The more immediate object of the
publication will afterwards appear.

The narrative was taken down from Mary's own lips by a lady who happened
to be at the time residing in my family as a visitor. It was written out
fully, with all the narrator's repetitions and prolixities, and afterwards
pruned into its present shape; retaining, as far as was practicable,
Mary's exact expressions and peculiar phraseology