one of the first Quaker travelling preachers. She and Mary Fisher became the first Quakers to visit the English North American colonies. Austin was a resident of London and the mother of five children when she left England with Mary Fisher to take the Quaker message of George Fox to the New World. She may well have then been in her sixties as she was described at the time as being ‘stricken in years’. They were subsidised in their mission by Quaker charitable funds and first sailed to Barbados in the Caribbean where they were well received and where they converted the Lieutenant Governor of the island to Quakerism.
