A Primary Source Of The West Indies By Henry Nelson Coleridge

The document I chose to analyze as a primary source is Six Months in The West Indies by Henry Nelson Coleridge. This is a small journal published in 1825 that follows Henry N. Coleridge’s trips around the West Indies with his uncle, William Hart Coleridge who is a bishop of Barbados. While on his trip throughout the isles, Coleridge not only comments on the local governments and ecosystems but the treatment of slaves and the institution of slavery as well. His viewpoints are in no way abolitionist, but he does appear to have a vein of sympathy for slaves of the West Indies. Many of his viewpoints are on how society and slave owners in the West Indies could better the lives of their slaves, none of them abolition, but for instance he suggests that â€Å"one of the most effectual ways for bettering the slaves would be thorough and humanizing education of the masters themselves (p.54).† While this argument, I feel, is not uncommon of a well-educated, English, relative of a high ranking religious official during this time period, I find it interesting to compare Coleridge’s accounts of slavery throughout the West Indies with that of an actual slave, Mary Prince, in the same region. Mary Prince was a slave in the Caribbean, who was bought and sold to multiple owners, on multiple isles, eventually gaining her freedom in Britain in 1828. This secondary source, The History of Mary Prince, was transcribed by Suzanna Strickland and edited by the abolitionist who took her in, Thomas Pringle