Phillis Wheatley Kidnapped from West Africa at Age Seven, Enslaved in Boston

In 1761, a child approximately seven or eight years old — almost certainly born among the Fulani peoples near the Gambia River in West Africa — was kidnapped, transported to the Windward Coast, and loaded aboard the brigantine Phillis, owned by Boston merchant Timothy Fitch of Medford, Massachusetts. She boarded with 95 other captive Africans; 76 survived the voyage of 245 days, the survivors arriving in Boston wearing scraps of carpet as their only clothing. She was purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley of Boston and named after the ship that transported her. She would become Phillis Wheatley, the first African American and first American woman to publish a book of poetry (1773). Her enslavement at the height of colonial Boston's commercial prosperity — and her later literary output, which invoked the language of freedom — made her a living contradiction of the patriot rhetoric building toward the American Revolution.