"The Cause of Her Grief": The Rape of a Slave in Early New England Slavery

The author presents an excerpt from An Account of Two Voyages to New England, written by John Josselyn in the seventeenth century. The paragraph relates the story of a female slave owned by Samuel Maverick of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Mavericks was attempting to "breed" slaves and ordered the rape of one of his two female slaves by his male slave. The brief recounting of the incident causes the author to question the boundary between history and fiction. The author also describes the problems inherent in colonial studies because most of the documents are written by white men for white men. [EBSCO]