Podcast – Slave Girl Priscilla Begins Her Horrible Journey

Slave Girl Priscilla Begins Her Horrible Journey
Today’s episode involves the horrible journey into slavery taken by a ten-year old girl named Priscilla.
From the Book
A Day in United States History – Book 1

Transcript:
April 9, 1754 – Slave Girl Priscilla Begins Her Horrible Journey

Greetings, today’s episode involves the horrible journey into slavery taken by a ten-year old girl named Priscilla.
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Kidnapped in the African interior of the Rice Coast, a ten-year-old girl joined eighty-three other kidnapped Africans on the slave ship, the Hare April 9, 1754. After a ten-week voyage, the girl, whose African name is lost to the ages, was sold to a Carolina rice plantation owner at auction in Charlestown. He named her Priscilla.
Rice Coast
The African Rice Coast stretches from down the West African coast and includes the nations Senegal, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The climate and geography of this area of Africa is similar to the Carolina lowlands that form the nucleus of Carolina’s rice growing region. Through experimentation, the planters of Carolina discovered that Asian rice was an ideal crop for them to grow by 1700. However, the plantation owners did not know much about rice cultivation. The solution was to import slaves from rice growing regions of Africa and use their knowledge to grow the crops. The blacks from the Rice coast, predominantly from the Gullah tribe, were traditional rice growers, having grown the grain for thousands of years. Rice was a profitable crop for the growers to produce, and they needed large numbers of slaves to grow it.
Slavery in Africa
Slavery has existed since the origins of history. In Africa, as in other places, it was customary for African kings to enslave people they captured in battle. The practice became profitable for them when they discovered that European slave traders would pay for the slaves with trade goods that the Africans needed. Thus, they would form expeditions to range into the African interior to capture people to sell to the slave traders. It was just such an expedition that captured the ten-year-old Priscilla. Those that captured her took her to a structure known as a slave castle. The one called Bunce Island was her destination. There were about forty of these slave castles along the Rice Coast of Africa. Between the years 1500 through about 1870, approximately twelve million people were captured in Africa and sold into slavery. Between 400,000 to 700,000 ended up in North America. About forty percent of these ended up at the Charlestown port.
Purchase and Transport
Historians know Priscilla’s story because they have uncovered letters and bills of sale that document her journey. They know that on April 9, 1756 ship’s captain Caleb Godfrey purchased her and put her with about eight-three other slaves on the ship Hare. During the voyage to Charlestown, around fifteen died. These would have been tossed overboard at night. The ship took ten weeks to arrive at Charlestown. Rice plantation owner Elias Ball II purchased her and took her to his Comingtee Plantation. She would live there for the rest of her life, producing ten children, only four of which survived. She died in 1811. Priscilla is one of the very few slaves that historians have documentation covering her life and descendents. Author Thomalind Martin-Polite is a descendent of Pricilla. She has documented her story in the book, Priscilla’s Homecoming.

Written in a “this day in history,” format, each of the two books in this collection of North American colonial history events includes 366 history stories. The historical collection of tales includes many well-known as well as some little-known events in the saga of the United States. The easy to follow “this day in history,” format covers a wide range of the people, places and events of early American history. I is the first book in my series, 366 Days in History Series. Each book includes 366 stories of American history. It is availble, with many of my other titles on gardening, Indiana places and history and United States History, at the Walnut Street Variety Shop in downtown Batesville, Indiana.
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