Arrival
Sometime in 1619, the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista left the port of São Paulo de Luanda, a Portuguese military outpost in west central Africa and sailed for Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico). The captain, Manuel Mendes da Cunha, carried with him 350 enslaved Africans, 200 of whom had embarked under a license, or asiento, held by investors in Seville to sell them in New Spain. When da Cunha arrived at Vera Cruz on August 30, however, he delivered only 147, including, according to Spanish records, 24 African boys whom he at some point sold in Jamaica. Those same records indicate that da Cunha had been robbed off the coast of Campeche (along present-day Mexico’s Gulf Coast) by “English corsairs,” or privateers.
One of those privateers was the 160-ton White Lion, which sailed out of the port of Vlissingen (Flushing), the Netherlands. Its captain, John Colyn Jope, bore Dutch letters of marque, from Maurice, Prince of Orange. This paperwork allowed him, as a civilian, to attack and plunder Spanish ships. The other ship, the English Treasurer, also sailed out of Flushing and was jointly owned by Robert Rich, Lord Warwick, and Virginia’s deputy governor, Samuel Argall. (In 1612, Argall had sailed the Treasurer on what at the time was the fastest-ever voyage from England to Virginia. In 1616, the ship delivered Pocahontas to England.) Its captain, Daniel Elfrith, also bore a letter of marque, his on the authority of Charles Emmanuel I, duke of Savoy, an independent duchy whose land has since been subsumed by present-day France and Italy. An eyewitness said that when the White Lion and the Treasurer met at sea, Captain Jope took command. Afterward, Jope loaded 25 men aboard the White Lion‘s pinnace and set out to attack the São João Bautista late in July or early in August 1619. When the pinnace’s crew, comprised of men from both ships, returned two or three days later, one man admitted that they had attacked an Angolan ship and another claimed that they had found at sea “an empty Angolan ship.” They brought along sixty or so of da Cunha’s enslaved Africans and substantial quantities of grain and tallow. (A large number of the Africans on the São João Bautista, 100 or more, probably died during the Atlantic crossing.)
The White Lion and the Treasurer immediately set sail for Virginia, where they hoped to sell their cargo. According to a letter written by the colony’s secretary, John Rolfe, to the Virginia Company of London treasurer, Sir Edwin Sandys, the White Lion arrived first and landed at Point Comfort sometime late in August, having lost its “consort shipp” on the passage from the West Indies. Rolfe described the ship as a “Dutch man of Warr,” perhaps because it bore Dutch letters of marque. “He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes,” Rolfe wrote, which the governor, Argall’s successor Sir George Yeardley, and the cape merchant, Abraham Peirsey, “bought for victualle [food] … at the best and easyest rate they could.” Some of the Africans were then transported to Jamestown and Flowerdew Hundred, a plantation on the upper reaches of the James River that Peirsey was in the process of purchasing from Yeardley. John Pory, John Rolfe’s successor as secretary, indicated that the White Lion was in Virginia for a month. Therefore, it probably sold any other African captives that remained aboard.
The Treasurer arrived at Point Comfort three or four days later, with between twenty-eight and thirty additional Africans aboard. Elfrith sold two or three of them in Virginia, but he also found that the residents of Kecoughtan (present-day Hampton) refused to sell supplies to him or his crew, perhaps because port officials knew that his letters of marque from the duke of Savoy were no longer valid. The duke had made peace with Spain about a month after the Treasurer had left England, which meant that Captain Elfrith and the ship’s owners now could be accused of piracy, a legal complication that Virginia officials probably wanted to avoid. Elfrith and his ship were gone by the time Rolfe, William Peirce, and a Mr. Ewins (sometimes spelled Ewens or Evans) arrived. Some of Thomas West, twelfth baron De La Warr‘s men, who had been aboard the Treasurer, disembarked and the ship’s master’s mate, a Mr. Gray, was taken up to Jamestown where he was interrogated under the penalty of death.
Elfrith sailed to the English colony at Bermuda, where, he arrived with the twenty-five Africans he still had aboard. They were taken into custody and detained by deputy governor Miles Kendall until the incoming governor, Nathaniel Butler, arrived. Butler later told a superior that if not for the Africans, he would not have been able “to rayse one pound of Tobacco this year” to generate revenue. He added that “Thes[e] Slaves are the most proper and cheape instruments for this plantation.”
Origins
The discovery by the historian Engel Sluiter of Spanish records linking the Africans sold in Virginia to the attack on the São João Bautista discredits earlier theories that they had not been brought directly to the Chesapeake from Africa. Instead, following the research of John K. Thornton, Virginia’s first Africans may have been enslaved either in Kongo, south of the mouth of the Congo River, or in a region
just to the south. This is where Portuguese authorities, who by 1618–1619 were under Spanish rule, were taking advantage of the disturbed politics in a Mbundu region in the watershed of the Kwanza River. Most likely the first Africans in Virginia were captured from the forces of the nearby Ndongo polity, where in 1618 and 1619 the governor of the Portuguese colony of Angola, Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos, fighting alongside an African mercenary group called the Imbangala, led two campaigns against the Kimbundu-speaking people of the region. They captured thousands and likely provided the cargoes for six Portuguese slave ships from Angola that arrived in Vera Cruz between June 18, 1619, and June 21, 1620.
Ndongo was composed of a series of enclosed towns punctuated by rural areas. There was one densely populated political center, the city of Angoleme, which the Portuguese in 1564 described as having 20,000 to 30,000 residents living in 5,000 to 6,000 thatched houses. Whether urban or rual, people of Ndongo raised food crops, such as millet or sorghum, and tended domestic animals. Most people of Ndongo followed the local religion, but some had contact with Jesuit missionaries who arrived with the Portuguese colonizers in 1575: a Kimbundu-speaking Christian community existed in Angola by 1619. Portuguese law required all enslaved Africans to be baptized before arriving in America, a pro forma gesture that did not necessarily result in the Africans bringing with them Christian practices. Thornton has pointed out that this may have been the case for Virginia’s first Africans. If so, they probably were renamed at baptism, for some of these men and women who arrived in Virginia in 1619 bore Portuguese names.
In the decades that followed, most Africans arriving in Virginia through the slave trade were captured not by Europeans but by other Africans who sold them to the Europeans at markets. As a result, enslaved Africans suffering through the Middle Passage often hailed from different regions and villages, spoke different languages, and abided by different social, political, and religious customs. The Ndongo, by contrast, were captured more directly by the Portuguese and shared with one another a complex ethnic identity.
In the Colony
Virginia’s first muster, or census, was compiled in March 1620. It listed the “colony’s thirty-two Africans: fifteen male and seventeen female. They, along with four Indians, were categorized as “Others not Christians in the Service of the English.” Because we have no record of any other Africans were arriving in the colony between September 1619 and March 1620, it is possible that all thirty-two could have arrived on the Treasurer and the White Lion. Following this line of thought, if one deducts the two or three Africans that were left by the Treasurer from the thirty-two recorded in the census, then the “20. and odd” Africans exchanged for provisions by the captain of the White Lion might have numbered closer to twenty-nine or thirty. If any births or deaths occurred among the African population between their arrival in 1619 and the March 1620 census, they were not recorded.
Although it is uncertain where the Africans lived, some probably resided at Jamestown in the households of Sir George Yeardley and Captain William Peirce and at Flowerdew Hundred in the household of cape-merchant Abraham Peirsey, all of whom later were identified in the 1624 and 1635 musters as having Black servants. (The use of the word servant reflects the fact that when the first Africans came to Virginia in 1619, English and Virginia law had not yet enshrined the practice of race-based slavery.)
By 1624, when the next muster was compiled, Virginia’s African population had dropped to twenty-one. Some of the Africans probably had succumbed to the so-called seasoning process, whereby summertime diseases killed a majority of new residents during the colony’s first few decades. For this reason, Virginia leaders periodically requested that ships carrying new workers arrive during the winter months, as opposed to August, when the White Lion landed. Research by Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman suggests that some may have been carrying a blood parasite that transmits malaria, while their close contact with the European slave traders likely exposed them to other infectious diseases. They would have been susceptible to the various agues and fevers common to the Chesapeake Bay region, and probably suffered through the unfamiliar winter cold. And those Africans who did not die of disease may have died after being placed in vulnerable positions in fights against Virginia Indians. In particular, this may have been the case on March 22, 1622, when Virginia Indians led by Opechancanough attacked European settlements, killing as many as a quarter of the colony’s inhabitants.
Some of the twenty-one Africans listed in the 1624 muster had European names. Four of the eleven Africans living at Flowerdew Hundred were identified by name: Anthony, William, John, and another Anthony. Three Africans resided at Jamestown, but only one was listed by name: a woman named Angelo (sometimes Angela), purchased by William Peirce. An African named Edward lived in the Neck O’Land, the mainland behind Jamestown, and was part of the household headed by Richard Kingsmill, guardian of the late Reverend Richard Bucke‘s children. Peter, Antonio, Frances, and Margaret resided on the lower side of the James River at Edward Bennett‘s plantation near the former Indian town of Warraskoyack, while Anthony and Isabella were members of Captain William Tucker‘s household in Elizabeth City, formerly Kecoughtan. (Tucker was the brother of Daniel Tucker, governor of the Bermuda colony from 1616 to 1619, and probably was aware of how landowners could benefit from African labor.) One African was listed among the dead at West and Shirley Hundred, in the corporation of Charles City.
The 1625 muster listed twenty-three Africans and a single Indian, all identified as “servants,” who resided on plantations scattered from the mouth of the James to Flowerdew Hundred. They probably lived in houses separate from their European enslavers. And while the 1625 muster included, for most Europeans, the years in which they arrived and the ships on which they came, little such information was provided for Africans. Three male and five female Africans lived in Yeardley’s household at Jamestown; at Flowerdew Hundred, there were four African men, two women, and a child. An African man named John Pedro lived in the household of Francis West, of Elizabeth City, and the same Edward from 1624 still lived with Richard Kingsmill at Neck O’Land. Angelo was still living in Captain Peirce’s household. By 1625, Captain Tucker’s Anthony and Isabella, in Elizabeth City, had produced a son, William; all three had been baptized, as had an Indian living in the household. William is the first named child of African descent in Virginia.
Among the Africans owned by the Bennett family in 1625 was Antonio (also listed in 1624), who had arrived on the James in 1621. In March 1622, he was one of just a handful of people who managed to survive Opechancanough’s attack on the plantation, and he eventually gained his freedom. At some point, Antonio wed a woman named Mary, who had come to Virginia in 1622 on the Margaret and John, and the two lived as Anthony and Mary Johnson in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore. There, they raised four children and by the 1650s owned 250 acres of land. Their two sons owned adjoining farms of 450 and 100 acres each before the whole family moved to Maryland, in the 1660s. Anthony Johnson’s grandson, John Johnson Jr., purchased a 44-acre farm there in 1677 and named it Angola.
Other Africans began to appear in Virginia court records. On September 19, 1625, for instance, the General Court ordered Captain Nathaniel Bass to provide clothing for an African man named Brass (or Brase), who had come to Virginia with a Captain Jones and been sold to Captain Bass. The same decision awarded temporary custody of Brass to Lady Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley, the wife of Sir George Yeardley and a resident of Jamestown, who was then ordered to pay forty pounds of good tobacco per month for his labor “so long as he remayneth with her.” On October 3, the court ruled again, this time transferring Brass to the custody of Governor Francis Wyatt and voiding the original sale Captain Jones had made to Captain Bass.
The African population in Virginia increased dramatically when, in 1628, the ship Fortune, out of Massachusetts Bay, captured a Portuguese slaver carrying about 100 Angolans, whom the captain sold in Virginia for tobacco. A muster planned for 1629 either did not take place or the records did not survive.
