“Visitors to England were forcibly struck by the number of Blacks to be seen in town and countryside alike. Writing of London in 1710 a visitor remarked: There are, in fact, such a quantity of Moors of both sexes in England that I have not seen before. “
“round the bends of distant rivers, where, he claimed, lived those people ‘which we now call Moores, Moorens or Negroes, a people of beastly living, without god, law, religion, or commonwealth, and so scorched and vexed with the heat of the sun, that in many places they curse it when it riseth.”
Indeed Sancho’s life in England was an immediate result of the English involvement with slavery. ‘Dear sir,’ he beseeched Sterne, ‘think in me you behold the uplifted hands of thousands of my brother Moors.’ Despite his influential contacts, he was aware that he must forever remain isolated; ‘one of those people whom the call “….”
Source: Black and white: the Negro and English society, 1555-1945