‘Slavery is a curse to the oppressor, scarcely less than the oppressed: its natural tendency is to brutalise both.’ — Thomas Pringle 1831‘Whilst America hath been the land of promise to Europeans and their descendants, it hath been the vale of death to millions of the wretched sons of Africa.’ — St George's Tucker, 1796Last week, a new person was added to the roster of National Heroes of Bermuda at a ceremony in a public park in Pembroke Parish on the edge of the City of Hamilton.Mary Prince, a Bermuda-born slave, was placed in the panoply of Bermuda’s new ‘aristocracy of achievement’ for the account of her life, which was published in England in 1831. Controversy surrounds some aspects of the book, but the fact is that hers was the first published account by a female slave and Bermudian abolitionist. The other Bermudian abolitionist was St George's Tucker, who wrote another polemic against slavery that was published in 1796 as A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia.The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself was a “best-seller” and went through three editions in its first year and helped further to turn public opinion in Britain against slavery. Part of the purpose of the work was to gain her a declaration of her own manumission, as slavery itself had been illegal in Britain for several decades, but the odious practice continued in the colonies, or what would now be called ‘Overseas Territories’. Mary Prince wanted to return to the West Indies as a free woman, but without such a declaration, she would have become again a slave the moment she set foot in those territories.Mary Prince’s autobiography came towards the end of the fight in Britain to abolish slavery in the homes, businesses and fields of English overseas dominions. Within two years, the Houses of Parliament passed a Bill abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire, including Bermuda, the oldest member in that conglomeration of islands, lands and countries around the globe. The battle to win that war had begun almost half a century earlier, about the time Mary Prince was born at ‘Brackish Pond’, aka Devonshire Parish, Bermuda, in 1788. It is possible, to paraphrase the clarion call on the 1807 medallion for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, that Mary Prince’s account swayed some Parliamentarians to admit that ‘They had heard her Cry’ and thus voted for the historic Act to abolish slavery itself in 1833.While the Spanish and Portuguese had been garnering New World possessions and importing African slaves therein for some decades, Britain had yet by the early seventeenth century to join the bandwagon and obtain some real estate in the Americas. All that changed in 1607 with the establishment of the first English colony in this hemisphere at Jamestown, Virginia, followed by the settlement of Bermuda five years later, 2012 being the 400th anniversary year of that event. Other islands to the south on the eastern perimeter of the Caribbean Sea soon followed, with the acquisition of the large island of Jamaica in the northern sector of that hurricane-prone body of water in 1655.Sugar, or ‘white gold’, became the staple and highly successful commercial crop especially in the last-named place and Barbados, and the thirst for that taste in England and Europe fuelled the rush for free, that is to say slave, labour from the lands of sub-Saharan African. Some places, like Bermuda, were unsuitable for sugar cane production, but slaves appeared nonetheless and were employed in many areas of life, eventually including shipbuilding and shipping.In regard to the latter, there is a watercolour by Thomas Driver in the Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, Bermuda Archives, dated December 2, 1816, which shows persons of African descent engaged in gathering cedar, apparently for shipbuilding activities at nearby Paynter’s Vale, on the coast of Harrington Sound. The artist, sad to say, does not relate if the men or free or slave, but the present of a white overseer might suggest the latter. Four men carry off a tree branch, followed by one with a saw, while another uses an axe on a log. Perhaps Driver happened on this scene that “afternoon”, for her records a comatose individual who has been left behind, apparently after an injury to his right leg or foot: just another day, perhaps, in the Harrington Sound boatbuilding trade, nine years after the Abolition of the Slave Trade, but not slavery itself in overseas British territories.After its beginnings in the 1787 by Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, the Abolishment movement in Britain gained ground when William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament took up the cause. Two books by African men, one was by the slave Ottobah Cugoano, who gained his freedom in Britain in 1772, and who published in 1787 a call to action entitled, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Two years later appeared The interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, whose account of slavery caused a sensation and helped to bring about the banning of the British Slave Trade in 1807.Other writings followed that supported the eventual success of the Abolition Movement and on ‘Jubilee Day’, namely, 1 August 1834, all slaves were freed throughout the global British possessions. Perhaps in tribute to Mary Prince and other abolitionist writers, it might be said that in the end, the pen is mightier than the sword, or slavery, or indeed any major infringements of the fundamental human rights of people.For further readings, see the bibliography on slavery at http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Slavery/books.htmlEdward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480.