Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho, an African.

ESTC t180688 locating only in Cambridge, N.L.I., T.C.D and 4 in U.S.A. There was another, even scarcer, issue of this printing with the imprint 'Printed by Pat Byrne' with a cancel title page & the same pagination.

A posthumously published work of black literature which includes one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English by a former slave. 'He gained fame in his time as 'the extraordinary Negro', and to eighteenth-century British abolitionists he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade' (Wikipedia).

Sancho (1729ý–1780), author, was born on the middle passage, on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean en route for the West Indies. His mother soon died of disease in the Spanish colony of New Granada, where the bishop had baptized her son, naming him Ignatius. His father shortly thereafter committed suicide rather than endure slavery. Barely two years old, orphan slave was taken by his owner to England and given to three maiden sisters in Greenwich, who surnamed him Sancho because they thought that he resembled the fictional Don Quixote's squire. He became the only known Afro-Briton to have voted in parliamentary elections and on his death was the first African to be given an obituary in the British press.

From the library of Hon. Mary Archdall (née Dawson), daughter of William Henry Dawson, 1st. Viscount Carlow. In 1762 she married Mervyn Archdall (1725-1813) of Castle Archdale, landowner, volunteer and M.P in the Irish parliament.