Born: 1753, Barbados
Died: 23 July 1791
Country most active: Barbados
Also known as: Rachel Lauder
In the 1770s and 1780s, hotelier and brothel owner Rachel Pringle Polgreen was one of the first mulatto women to own and operate a business in colonial Barbados. Born enslaved, she was reportedly purchased and freed by Royal Navy officer Captain Thomas Pringle to save her from her sexually and physically abusive father, a white Scottish schoolteacher. Reputedly, she tried to fake a pregnancy to strengthen her hold on Pringle, which resulted in him ending their relationship and moving to Jamaica, though this could have been due to his naval career rather than relationship drama. She later took the surname of James Polgreen, a prominent white Barbadian, but it is unclear if there was any relationship between them.
In 1780, Rachel Pringle Polgreen converted the house that Pringle had purchased for her into a hotel, which also operated as a brothel servicing the military personnel passing through Bridgetown. In addition to the prominent officers who frequented her establishment, it was reportedly visited by English Prince William Henry, who once caused significant damage and assaulted her while drunk. She sent the future King William IV a large bill for the damages and renamed her establishment the Royal Naval Hotel after he compensated her enough to renovate and upgrade the hotel.
Polgreen herself owned at least dozens of enslaved people and Privy Council records from 1791 depict her as abusive towards them, with a violent temper. By the 1790s, tax records list Polgreen as owning five houses and five tenements on the island, indicating she was likely earning rental income in addition to the highly successful hotel. When she died in 1791, her estate was worth more than £2,900. Of the 19 enslaved people she owned at the time, she freed six of them, and transferred ownership of two others to Joanna, one of the people she had manumitted. The rest were left to “William Firebrace and his female relatives, William Stevens, and Captain Thomas Pringle.”
The Royal Navy Hotel was taken over by Nancy Clarke, another free woman of color, who successfully managed the business for a decade before turning it over to Carolyn (or Charlotte) Barrow. It remained in operation until it was burned down in a fired in 1821.