Who wouldn't have wanted to leave St. Eustatius in 1860? This tiny island of around 21 sq. km – little more than an atoll sticking out of the Caribbean – was over half a century into its decline. In the late eighteenth century, this ‘Golden Rock’ was the ‘Emporium to the World’, a place integral to the success of the American Revolution, and worthy of sacking by a British Admiral. However, these days were long past by the time Mathilda Percival, a free woman of colour, sailed to St. Thomas between late 1859 and early 1860. Hurricanes, the English occupation during the Napoleonic Wars, the decline in the viability of slave labour, marronage, global shifts in sugar production, and the concomitant migration of its population, not to mention the marked disinterest of the Dutch colonial administration, had plunged the island into a malaise from which it still has not recovered. By the mid-nineteenth century, the island's modest sugar plantations were largely abandoned. The island was running a continual deficit, which the Dutch colonial administrators begrudgingly and irregularly refilled. Its population had started to drift away to North America and the other nearby Leeward islands, particularly Swedish St. Barthélemy, and Mathilda's destination – Danish St. Thomas.

Mathilda travelled alone, leaving her husband, John James Percival, and young daughter, Adriana, behind on St. Eustatius. She was separated from her family for at least two years.