It took many decades of tireless campaigning to bring an end to the slave trade which wrecked the lives of millions of people over hundreds of years.

The Slave Trade Act, which banished Britain’s part in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, was finally passed on March 25, 1807, following the extraordinary efforts of British social reformer and MP William Wilberforce.

Even then, it took many more years of protests before an act was passed in 1833 which abolished slavery in the British colonies, finally finishing a shameful chapter in human history. That act led to Emancipation Day in Bermuda, on August 1, 1834, when Bermuda’s 4,200 slaves, almost half the population, won immediate freedom.

Wilberforce’s campaign was helped, in no small part, by a number of remarkable characters with strong links to Bermuda. The most celebrated is Mary Prince, who was born into a family of slaves in Brackish Pond, Devonshire, in the late 18th Century.

After suffering a torturous existence as a slave in Bermuda and the Caribbean, being sold from one abusive master to another, Prince ended up working as a servant in London.

Deciding she wanted to make the people of Britain aware of the horrors of captivity, Prince set to work on a chillingly descriptive book about her life.

In 1831, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, became the first account of the life of a black woman published in England.

The book galvanised the anti-slavery movement, and helped ensure the abolition of slavery just two years later.

Another abolitionist was the former slave Olaudah Equiano, who spent four years as a crew member aboard a Bermudian sloop in the West Indies.

Equiano bought his own freedom from his American master in the 1760s, after raising $40 by engaging in his own profitable trading. He then travelled to Britain, where he joined Wilberforce’s campaign.

With his 1789 book, An Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, became the first black African to publish an attack against the slave trade.

And in a testament in 1814, he described his time as a captive in graphic detail.

“When I looked round the ship, too, and saw a multitude of black people, of every description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted,” he stated.

Just one year after slavery was abolished here, Bermudians helped use the new legislation to free captives in a way which has become a key part of the Island’s history. The brig Enterprise was carrying 78 slaves from Alexandria, Virginia, to Charleston, South Carolina, when a storm blew it into the path of Bermuda.

It pulled into the Island, and word about the slaves quickly spread.

A black lodge, the Young Men’s Friendly Institution, immediately petitioned the Government for the captives’ release, stating that the vessel broke Bermuda’s laws.

As a result, the slaves were allowed to choose whether to return to the US or live free in Bermuda. Just one woman and her five children opted to go back — the rest stayed on the Island.