On 4 September 1707 the London newspaper, Post Boy, carried the following advertisement:

Similar notices, common in eighteenth-century British newspapers, raise interesting questions about individual lives, communities, and understandings of race and place. Who was ‘Prince’? Did he have another name? How did he get to Kent, and what was his status in Deal? Why did Prince run away? What can we infer from the scattered references to his scarred body, his belongings, and his ‘Master’? Broader questions arise about contemporary labour relationships, about the network of locations mentioned, and other Black people then living in Kent. Prince cannot have packed much and he probably possessed few goods, given his status, and the success of his escape would depend on unfettered speed and motion. But the report of his flight leaves plenty to unpack about how the histories of diverse peoples, maritime spaces, and imperial exchanges entangled communities in Kent.

There is no firm evidence in the advertisement that Prince was enslaved. A handful of Black people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain were referred to as ‘slaves’, having been brought into the country by colonial planters from the Americas, who often continued to treat them as such. English law was ambiguous on the status and rights of Black people in England.