BookMark: Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl, by Kate McCafferty (Penguin, 2002)

February 13, 2008

It's a little known chapter in colonial history-between 1558 and 1603, the British government sent tens of thousands of Irish citizens to the new world, technically as indentured servants but in practice as slaves. This novel tells the story of Cot Daley, kidnapped from Galway at the age of ten, sent to Barbados to work side by side with African slaves on a plantation, and now, jailed for her part in an uprising against brutal plantation owners.