Briton Hammon

Briton Hammon was honored in 1998. He was an enslaved person of African descent who lived in British North  America during the middle of the 18th century. On December 25, 1747, by leave of his master, Hammon left his home in Marshfield, Massachusetts to board a ship in neighboring Plymouth to work on a sailing ship headed for Jamaica. On June 15, 1748, the ship wrecked and he and the crew were cast away off the coast of Florida, beginning a series of hardships and adventures he chronicled in an autobiographical account, He was the first published Black American prose writer with his work entitled, "A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man, ---- Servant to General Winslow, of Marshfield, in New-England; Who Returned to Boston, after Having Been Absent almost Thirteen Years". The book was first published in 1760.

His experiences after the shipwreck included being held captive by Florida Indians, spending four years in a Spanish prison in Cuba, rescue by a British lieutenant who smuggles him on board a British man-o-war, and then serving several years in the British navy before suffering wounds during a skirmish with a French warship. Hammon was honorably discharged from the Royal Navy, and recounts being reunited with his old master in London. The narrative concludes with his master taking him back to New England.