Richard Ligon

Born around 1585, he was an English gentleman and writer whose reputation rests mainly on A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. He spent time on Barbados in the 1640s, and the book he later published in 1657 drew on those experiences to describe the island’s landscape, economy, and social world in unusual detail.

The book remains important because it captures an early English colony at a formative moment. Readers and historians return to it not only for its firsthand observations of sugar production and daily life, but also because it records the brutal realities of slavery and colonial expansion from the perspective of an observer deeply embedded in that world.

He died in 1662. Reliable portrait images do not appear to be readily available from the pages I could confirm, so no profile image is included here.