ENTRY

Virginia’s First Africans

SUMMARY

Virginia’s first Africans arrived at Point Comfort, on the southern tip of the Virginia peninsula, late in August 1619. There, “20. and odd Negroes” or more from the English ship White Lion were sold in exchange for food and some were transported to Jamestown, where they were sold again. Three or four days later another English ship, the Treasurer, arrived in Virginia, where its captain sold two or three additional Africans. Historians have long believed these Africans to have come to Virginia from the Caribbean, but Spanish records suggest they had been captured in a Spanish-controlled area of West Central Africa. They probably were Kimbundu-speaking people, and many of them may have had at least some knowledge of Catholicism. While aboard the São João Bautista bound for Mexico, they were stolen by the White Lion and the Treasurer. Once in Virginia, they were dispersed throughout the colony. The number of Africans in Virginia increased to thirty-two by 1620, but then dropped sharply by 1624, likely because of the effects of disease and perhaps because of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622–1632). Evidence suggests that many were baptized and took Christian names, and some, like Anthony and Mary Johnson, won their freedom and bought land. In 1628, after a shipload of about 100 Angolans was sold in Virginia, the number of Africans in the colony rose dramatically.

READING LEVEL
Grade 8

Virginia’s first Africans arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, in August 1619.

Around 20 Africans from the English ship White Lion were sold in exchange for food. Some were taken to Jamestown where they were sold again. A few days later another English ship called the Treasurer arrived in Virginia. The captain of the Treasurer sold two or three more Africans. Historians believed these Africans came to Virginia from the Caribbean. But Spanish records suggest they had been captured in West Central Africa. They probably were Kimbundu-speaking people. Many of them likely had at least some knowledge of Catholicism. While on a ship bound for Mexico, they were stolen by the White Lion and the Treasurer. The number of Africans in Virginia increased to thirty-two by 1620, but then dropped sharply by 1624. This was likely because of the effects of disease and war between the English and Indigenous peoples. Evidence suggests that many were baptized and took Christian names. Some, like Anthony and Mary Johnson, won their freedom and bought land. In 1628, a shipload of about 100 Angolans was sold in Virginia. From that time on, the number of Africans in the colony continued to rise.

Arrival

In 1619, a slave ship departed a Portuguese base in west central Africa and sailed for New Spain (present-day Mexico). The captain, Manuel Mendes da Cunha, carried with him 350 enslaved Africans, 200 of whom were meant to be sold in New Spain. When da Cunha arrived at New Spain on August 30, he delivered only 147. According to Spanish records, this included 24 African boys whom he sold in Jamaica. Those same records indicate that da Cunha had been robbed off of present-day Mexico’s Gulf Coast by “English corsairs,” or privateers.

One of those privateers was the White Lion and its captain, John Colyn Jope. The other ship, the English Treasurer (this same ship brought Pocahontas to England in 1616) was captained by Daniel Elfrith. An eyewitness said that when the White Lion and the Treasurer met at sea, Captain Jope took command. Jope loaded 25 men aboard the White Lion‘s pinnace (a small boat used to transport crew members to and from larger ships) and set out to attack the Portuguese slave ship in late July or early August of 1619. The crew returned to their larger ships two or three days later. They brought along sixty or so of da Cunha’s enslaved Africans. Many of the Africans on the Portuguese slave ship, 100 or more, probably died during the Atlantic crossing.

The White Lion and the Treasurer set sail for Virginia, where they hoped to sell their cargo. According to a letter written by the colony’s secretary, John Rolfe, the White Lion arrived first and landed at Point Comfort in late August. “He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes,” Rolfe wrote, which the governor, Sir George Yeardley, and the head merchant, Abraham Peirsey, “bought for [food] … at the best and easyest rate they could.”

Some of the Africans were then taken to Jamestown and Flowerdew Hundred, a plantation on the James River that Peirsey was buying from Yeardley. John Pory, the next secretary of the colony, stated 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 about thirty additional Africans aboard. The ship’s captain sold two or three of them in Virginia, but the residents of Kecoughtan (present-day Hampton) refused to sell supplies to him or his crew.

Port officials may have known that the captain’s legal authority to attack and plunder Spanish ships had expired. This meant that the ship’s owners could now be accused of piracy, a legal complication that Virginia officials probably wanted to avoid.

The Treasurer sailed to the English colony at Bermuda with the twenty-five Africans he still had on board. They were taken into custody and held by deputy governor Miles Kendall until the next 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 produce a profit. He added that “Thes[e] Slaves are the most proper and cheape instruments for this plantation.”

Origins

The first Africans in Virginia were likely taken from the nearby Ndongo peoples. The governor of the Portuguese colony of Angola fought together with an African mercenary (hired fighters) group. He led two campaigns against the people of the region. Thousands of Africans were captured and likely made up the cargoes of six Portuguese slave ships from Angola.

The people of Ndongo raised food crops and animals. Most people of Ndongo followed the local religion. But some had contact with Catholic missionaries who arrived with the Portuguese colonizers. Portuguese law required all enslaved Africans to be baptized before arriving in America. This may have been the case for Virginia’s first Africans. If so, they probably were renamed at baptism. Some of these men and women who arrived in Virginia in 1619 had Portuguese names.

In the following decades, most Africans arriving in Virginia were captured by other Africans who sold them to the Europeans. As a result, enslaved Africans often came from different regions and villages, spoke different languages, and lived by different social, political, and religious customs. The Ndongo, however, were captured more directly by the Portuguese and shared an ethnic identity.

In the Colony

Virginia’s first census (an official count of the population) was taken in March 1620. It listed the “colony’s thirty-two Africans: fifteen male and seventeen female.” Along with four Indians, they were categorized as “Others not Christians in the Service of the English.” We have no record of any other Africans 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. If any births or deaths happened among the African population between their arrival in 1619 and the March 1620 census, they were not recorded.

According to the 1624 and 1635 census reports, Sir George Yeardley, Captain William Pierce, and cape-merchant Abraham Peirsey each had Black servants. This provides a clue that some of the Africans from these first arrivals probably lived on the properties owned by those Virginians.

By 1624, Virginia’s African population had dropped to twenty-one. Some of the Africans probably died during the so-called “seasoning process.” The seasoning process refers to the pattern of summertime diseases that killed most new residents during the colony’s first few decades. Some Africans may have been carrying a blood parasite that spreads malaria. Their close contact with the European slave traders likely exposed them to other diseases. They would have been at risk of the fevers that were common to the Chesapeake Bay region, and probably suffered through the unfamiliar winter cold. Those who did not die of disease may have died after being placed in dangerous positions in fights against Virginia Indians. 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 residents.

Some of the twenty-one Africans listed in the 1624 census had European names. Four of the eleven Africans living at Flowerdew Hundred plantation were identified by name: Anthony, William, John, and another Anthony. Three Africans lived in 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 mainland behind Jamestown and was part of the household headed by Richard Kingsmill. Peter, Antonio, Frances, and Margaret lived on the lower side of the James River at Edward Bennett‘s plantation. Anthony and Isabella were members of Captain William Tucker‘s household in Elizabeth City. (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, a plantation in Charles City.

In March 1622, an African named Anthony was one of just a handful of people who survived Opechancanough’s attack on the plantation. At some point, he gained his freedom and married a woman named Mary.

The two lived as Anthony and Mary Johnson in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore. They raised four children and by the 1650s owned 250 acres of land. Their two sons owned neighboring 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.

The African population in Virginia increased dramatically in 1628. The ship Fortune captured a Portuguese slave ship carrying about 100 Angolans. The captain of Fortune sold the 100 Angolans in Virginia for tobacco. A census planned for 1629 either did not take place or the records did not survive.

Grade 4

The first Africans in Virginia arrived in 1619. About 20 Africans from an English ship called White Lion were sold. Some were taken to Jamestown and were sold again. A few days later another English ship called the Treasurer landed in Virginia. The captain of the Treasurer sold two or three more Africans. Records show that they had been taken from West Central Africa. Many of them had some knowledge of the Catholic religion. While on a ship going to Mexico, they were stolen by the White Lion and the Treasurer. The number of Africans in Virginia grew to thirty-two by 1620, but then dropped by 1624. This was likely because of disease and war between the English and Virginia Indians. Many were baptized (a tradition in the Catholic religion) and took Christian names. Some won their freedom and bought land. In 1628, a ship carrying about 100 Angolans was sold in Virginia. From that time on, the number of Africans in the colony continued to grow.

Arrival

In 1619, a slave ship left west central Africa and sailed for New Spain (present-day Mexico). The ship carried 350 enslaved Africans on board. A total of 200 of those Africans were to be sold in New Spain. When the Captain arrived on August 30, he only delivered 147. The records show that the captain had been robbed by English ships.

One of those ships was the White Lion. The other ship was called Treasurer (this same ship brought Pocahontas to England in 1616). A witness said that when the White Lion and the Treasurer met at sea, White Lion’s captain took command. He loaded 25 men aboard the White Lion‘s smaller transport boat and set out to attack the Portuguese slave ship. The crew returned to their larger ships two or three days later. They brought about 60 enslaved Africans. Many of the Africans on the Portuguese slave ship probably died during the Atlantic crossing.

The White Lion and the Treasurer set sail for Virginia, where they hoped to sell their cargo. The White Lion landed at Point Comfort in late August. “He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes,” John Rolfe wrote. The Africans were sold for food. Some of the Africans were then taken to Jamestown and Flowerdew Hundred, a plantation on the James River. The White Lion was in Virginia for a month. The captain probably sold any other African captives that remained aboard.

The Treasurer arrived at Point Comfort three or four days later. It carried about thirty more Africans aboard. The ship’s captain sold two or three of them in Virginia. The Treasurer then sailed to the English colony in Bermuda with the remaining Africans. The governor of the Bermuda colony later said that if they had not bought the Africans, he would not have been able “to rayse one pound of Tobacco this year.” He added that “Thes[e] Slaves are the most proper and cheape instruments for this plantation.”

Origins

The first Africans in Virginia were likely taken from a group of people called the Ndongo. Thousands of Africans were captured. Often, the Portuguese would pay African fighters to help them capture other Africans. The people of Ndongo raised food crops and animals. Most followed the local religion. Portuguese law required all enslaved Africans to be baptized before arriving in America. This was their way of converting the Africans to their religion. They probably were given new names at baptism.

In the Colony

In 1620, Virginia counted the number of people living in the colony. The count, called a census, listed 32 Africans. There were 15 males and 17 females. By 1624, the number of Africans in the colony dropped to 21. Some of these Africans may have died from diseases that spread in the summertime. Living so close to Europeans exposed them to other diseases as well. Some Africans may have also died during battles between the colonists and Virginia Indians.

The Africans lived in many different places in the colony. Many were listed as “servants.” Others were enslaved in households and on plantations. One man named Anthony gained his freedom and married a woman named Mary. They raised four children and owned 250 acres of land. The number of Africans living in Virginia grew quickly in 1628. Another Portuguese slave ship was captured while carrying about 100 Africans from Angola. The Angolans were sold in Virginia for tobacco.

Grades 11+

Arrival

A Chain of Slaves travelling from the Interior.

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.)

Point Comfort

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.

The Summer Ils.

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

Life in Seventeenth-Century Africa

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.

Portuguese Map of West Africa

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.

African Slave Trade

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.

Tobacco Tamper

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.

Tobacco Wrapper

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.

MAP
TIMELINE
1618—1619
Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos leads campaigns against Kimbundu-speaking people in West Central Africa, capturing thousands. These Africans likely provided the cargo for six slave ships that arrived in Mexico from June 1619 until June 1620.
1619
Sometime in the first half of the year, the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista leaves the port of São Paulo de Loanda, a Portuguese military outpost in West Africa, and sails for Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico). It carries a cargo of 350 enslaved Africans.
July—August 1619
Two English ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, both sailing out of the Netherlands, intercept the Portuguese slaver São João Bautista off the coast of Campeche in present-day Yucatán. After stealing about sixty enslaved Africans, the ships sail to Virginia with the intention of selling them.
Late August 1619
The White Lion, captained by John Colyn Jope, arrives at Point Comfort, where Jope sells "20. and odd Negroes" in exchange for food. These are the first Africans to enter the Virginia colony. Four days later, the Treasurer arrives and its captain, Daniel Elfrith, sells two or three of the enslaved Africans aboard.
August 30, 1619
Manuel Mendes da Cunha, captain of the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista, arrives in Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico), with only 147 slaves. He left West Africa with 350, but some were stolen off the coast of Campeche and transported to Virginia for sale. Others probably died en route.
March 1620
Virginia's first muster, or census, is compiled and lists 892 Europeans and, among "Others not Christians in the Service of the English," four Indians and thirty-two Africans. Fifteen of the Africans are male and seventeen are female.
1621
An enslaved African named Antonio arrives in Virginia aboard the James. The following March, he will be one of only a handful of people who manage to survive an Indian attack on the plantation of Edward Bennett.
1622
An enslaved African woman named Mary arrives in Virginia aboard the Margaret and John.
February 1624
The population of Europeans in the Virginia colony is 906. A muster, or census, lists twenty-one Africans, down from thirty-two in 1620. Twelve of the Africans are identified by name, suggesting they have been baptized.
January 20—February 7, 1625
The population of Europeans in the Virginia colony is 1,232. A muster, or census, lists twenty-three Africans and one Indian, all of them servants. They live on plantations scattered from the mouth of the James River to Flowerdew Hundred.
September 19, 1625
The General Court orders Captain Nathaniel Bass to provide clothing to an African man named Brass, whom he had bought from a Captain Jones. The same decision awards temporary custody of Brass to Lady Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley, who is ordered to pay forty pounds of good tobacco per month for his labor.
October 3, 1625
The General Court revisits its ruling from September 19, transferring custody of an African man named Brass from Lady Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley to Governor Francis Wyatt. The court also voids the original sale of Brass by a Captain Jones to Captain Nathaniel Bass.
1628
The African population in Virginia rises dramatically when the ship Fortune, out of Massachusetts Bay, captures a Portuguese slaver carrying about 100 Angolans, whom the captain sells in Virginia for tobacco.
1650s
By this time, Anthony and Mary Johnson, two former slaves, are living in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore, where they own 250 acres. Their two sons own adjoining farms of 450 and 100 acres each.
1660s
Anthony and Mary Johnson, both former slaves, and their two sons, all of whom own land on the Eastern Shore, move to Maryland.
1677
John Johnson Jr., whose grandfather Anthony was a Virginia slave who bought his freedom, buys a forty-four-acre farm in Maryland and names it Angola, suggesting the origin of his family.
FURTHER READING
  • Breen, T. H., and Stephen Innes. “Myne Owne Grounde”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
  • Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998.
  • Heywood, Linda M. and John K. Thornton. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
  • Mariners’ Museum. Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas. Newport News, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.: The Mariners Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, 2002.
  • McCartney, Martha W. Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607–1635. Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2007.
  • McCartney, Martha W., et al. A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Spring, 1619–1803. Williamsburg, Virginia: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and National Park Service, 2003.
  • Rutman, Darrett B., and Anita Rutman. “Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 33 (1976): 31–60.
  • Sluiter, Engel. “New Light on the ’20 and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 54 (1997): 395.
  • Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Walsh, Lorena S. Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
CITE THIS ENTRY
APA Citation:
McCartney, Martha. Virginia’s First Africans. (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/africans-virginias-first.
MLA Citation:
McCartney, Martha. "Virginia’s First Africans" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 20 Sep. 2023
Last updated: 2023, July 06
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