I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom – and for the many blessings I enjoy in it – shall ever have my warmest wishes, prayers and blessings) I say it is with reluctance, that I must observe your country's conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West-Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea. At the age of 20, shortly after the Duke's death, Sancho fled the household of the sisters to become the butler at the Montagu household, where he worked for the next two years until her death. Sancho took to visiting the Duke and Duchess regularly, where he was encouraged to read, and was also lent books from the Duke's personal library. Sancho would escape the grip of the sisters, when, by chance, he met the Duke of Montagu who took a liking to his "native frankness of manner".
The sisters were far from kind, and "the petulance of their disposition" bestowed upon little Ignatius his surname, "from a fancied resemblance to the Squire of Don Quixote". After "a disease of the new climate put an early period to his mother's existence and his father defeated by the miseries of slavery by an act of suicide", Ignatius, just two years old, was brought by his master to England, and given to the man's three maiden sisters who lived in Greenwich. 1729, onboard a ship in the Slave trade, a few days after it had quitted the coast of Guinea for the Spanish West-Indies". As the memoir which begins this third edition of his Letters tells us, Sancho was "born A. Known during his lifetime as "the extraordinary Negro", Ignatius Sancho (c.1729–1780) was the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election, and the first person of African descent known to be given an obituary in the British press.
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