The Landing of the First Black Slaves "20 and Odd Negroes" in Virginia Occurred in the Summer of 1619

 The landing of the first Negroes (HEBREW ISRAELITE SLAVES WHICH STARTED THE 400 YEAR CURSE, WITH THE TRIBE OF JUDAH SENT TO AMERICA) Virginia’s First So Called Africans Contributed by Martha McCartney. YOU CAN ONLY HIDE THE TRUTH FOR SO LONG: “WHAT’S DONE IN THE DARKNESS SHALL BE REVEALED IN THE LIGHT.”

Virginia’s first  So Called Africans arrived at Point Comfort, on the James River, late in August 1619. There, “20 and odd Negroes (HEBREW ISRAELITE SLAVES)” from the English ship White Lion were sold in exchange for food and some were transported to Jamestown, where they were sold again, likely into slavery. Historians have long believed these Africans to have come to Virginia from the Caribbean, but Spanish records suggest they had been captured in the Portuguese colony of Angola, in West Central Africa. They probably were Kimbundu-speaking people from the kingdom of Ndongo, and many of them may have been urban dwellers with some knowledge of Christianity. The Hebrews would naturally revert to anything dealing with GOD when put under extreme duress. But, the wisest of the groups of Hebrews knew who their GOD was and there was no changing their hearts not even through extreme harsh treatment, torture, beatings, and whippings until their backs were raw sometimes down to the bone.

While aboard the São João Bautista bound for Mexico, they were stolen by the White Lion and another English ship, the Treasurer. Once in Virginia, they were dispersed throughout the colony. The number of Virginia’s Africans increased to thirty-two by 1620, but then dropped sharply by 1624, likely because of the effects of disease and 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. By 1628, after a shipload of about 100 Angolans was sold in Virginia, the Africans’ population jumped dramatically. Meanwhile, their experience in West Central Africa cultivating tobacco contributed greatly to the crop’s success in the colony.

MORE… In This Entry Arrival Origins In the Colony Contributions Time Line Further Reading Share It Share on email Share on twitter Share on facebook Arrival Title: A Chain of Slaves travelling from the Interior A Chain of Slaves travelling from the Interior Sometime in 1619, the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista left the port city of São Paulo de Loanda in Portugal’s West Central African colony of Angola and sailed for Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico). The captain, Manuel Mendes da Cunha, carried with him 350 African slaves, 200 of whom were part of an asiento, or contract, with a slave dealer in Seville. When da Cunha arrived at Vera Cruz on August 30, however, he delivered only 147 slaves, including, according to Spanish records, twenty-four African boys who he at some point sold in Jamaica. Those same records indicate that da Cunha had been robbed off the coast of Campeche (also in present-day Mexico) by “English corsairs,” or privateers. Those privateers were likely two ships.

The White Lion sailed out of the port of Vlissingen (Flushing), Holland, and its captain, John Colyn Jope, bore a Dutch letter of marque, paperwork that allowed him, as a civilian, to attack and plunder Spanish ships. The English Treasurer also sailed out of Flushing and was partly owned by 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. Working as a “consort,” the two ships attacked the São João Bautista late in July or early in August 1619 and apparently robbed da Cunha of about 50 of his African slaves. (A large portion of the ship’s Africans, perhaps as many as 150, probably died during the Atlantic crossing.)

Title: Point Comfort 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 mistakenly described the ship as a “Dutch man of Warr,” perhaps because it bore a Dutch letter of marque. “He brought not any thing but 20 and odd Negroes (THE FIRST HEBREW ISRAELITE SLAVES),” 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 (or perhaps all) of the Africans were then transported to Jamestown and sold.

The Treasurer arrived at Point Comfort three or four days later carrying between twenty-five and twenty-nine additional slaves. Although he apparently managed to sell some of his slaves, Captain Elfrith 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 letter of marque from the duke of Savoy was no longer valid. The duke had made peace with Spain, which meant that Captain Elfrith now could be accused of piracy, a legal complication the Virginia merchants may have wanted to avoid. Elfrith might have heard that Governor Yeardley had sent Secretary Rolfe, Lieutenant William Peirce, and a Mr. Ewens (probably William Ewens) to meet the Treasurer, and decided that he had better leave. Whatever the case, he was gone by the time the Virginia men arrived.

Title: The Summer Ils. The Summer Ils.

Elfrith sailed to the English colony at Bermuda, where, for 50,000 ears of corn, he sold fourteen of his Africans to acting governor Miles Kendall and his successor, Nathaniel Butler. 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 Title: Life in Seventeenth-Century Africa Life in Seventeenth-Century Africa The discovery by the historian Engel Sluiter of Spanish records linking the slaves sold in Virginia to the attack on the São João Bautista discredits earlier theories that the Africans had been bought in the Americas for resale. Instead, following the research of John K. Thornton, Virginia’s first Africans may have been enslaved in the kingdom of Kongo, north of Angola; in territory to Angola’s east; or in the region south of Angola, across the Kwanza River, where the Portuguese had been buying slaves since late in the sixteenth century.

Most likely, though, they were captured from the nearby kingdom of Ndongo, where in 1618 and 1619 the governor of Angola, Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos, fighting alongside a ruthless African mercenary group called the Imbangala, led two campaigns against the kingdom’s Kimbundu-speaking people. Thousands were captured and likely provided the cargo for six Portuguese slave ships from Angola that arrived in Vera Cruz between June 18, 1619, and June 21, 1620. The Ndongo people lived in densely populated cities—in 1564 the city of Angoleme seems to have had 20,000 to 30,000 residents living in 5,000 to 6,000 thatched houses—interspersed with rural areas where farmers tended livestock and raised crops such as millet and sorghum.

As such, Ndongos did not fit what Thornton has called “the stereotyped, parochial image of Africans from precolonial villages.” They may even have been Christians; many in the kingdom attended Mass conducted by Jesuit priests, and the Portuguese required that all slaves be baptized before they arrived in America. Title: African Slave Trade African Slave Trade In the decades that followed, most slaves arriving in Virginia through the Portuguese slave trade were captured not by the Portuguese but by other Africans who sold them to the Europeans at markets. As a result, slaves 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 Ndongos, by contrast, were captured more or less directly by the Portuguese and shared with one another a complex ethnic identity.

That they also may have been Christians is, perhaps, ironic. A Virginia law, passed in 1670, defined as slaves-for-life all non-Christian servants brought to the colony “by shipping.” Such servants were, almost without exception, Africans, suggesting an assumption on the part of lawmakers that Africans were, by definition, non-Christians. The law already precluded freedom through conversion, and in 1682 it expanded its description of slaves-for-life to include all non-Christian servants (in other words, Virginia Indians who were imported into the colony, in addition to Africans). In this way, Christianity served as an early stand-in for racial identification. In the Colony Virginia’s first muster, or census, was compiled in March 1620, at which time the population included 892 Europeans and, among “Others not Christians in the Service of the English,” four Indians and thirty-two Africans.

Fifteen of the Africans were male and seventeen were female. Although it is uncertain where the Africans lived, some probably resided at Jamestown in the households of Sir George Yeardley and Captain William Peirce, both of whom later were credited with having black servants. Title: The Massacre of the Settlers The Massacre of the Settlers 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 servants arrive during the winter months, as opposed to August, when the White Lion landed. This allowed newcomers time to build up immunity before summer.

Research by Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman suggests that, even before their arrival in Virginia, the Africans may have been carrying Plasmodium falciparum, a blood parasite that transmits a virulent form of malaria. Their close contact with the European slave traders likely exposed them to other unfamiliar parasites and infectious diseases, and they would have been susceptible to the various agues and fevers common to the Chesapeake Bay region. And those Africans who did not die of disease may have died on March 22, 1622, when Virginia Indians led by Opechancanough attacked European settlements, killing as many as a quarter of the colony’s inhabitants.

Title: Tobacco Tamper Tobacco Tamper Some of the twenty-one Africans listed in the 1624 muster had European names, suggesting that they had been baptized. This could have occurred prior to their leaving Africa, while they were in the Caribbean, or after they reached Virginia. Four of the eleven Africans living at Flowerdew Hundred—a plantation on the upper reaches of the James River that leading merchant Abraham Peirsey had purchased from Governor Yeardley—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 belonging to 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 the Puritan 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).

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 servants, who resided on plantations scattered from the mouth of the James to Flowerdew Hundred. As servants, they probably lived in houses separate from their European masters. And while the 1625 muster included, for most Europeans, the year in which they arrived and the ship 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.

Captain Peirce’s female African, Angelo, was said to have come to Virginia on the Treasurer in 1619. By 1625, Captain Tucker’s Anthony and Isabella, in Elizabeth City, had produced a son, William; all three had been baptized. Among the African slaves 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 turn up 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.” It was a decision that both distinguished between African servitude and slavery, and put a price on the labor of an African male. 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.

By 1628, the African population in Virginia jumped dramatically when the ship Fortune, out of Massachusetts Bay, captured a Spanish 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. Contributions Title: Tobacco Wrapper Tobacco Wrapper Many of the Africans brought to Virginia during the seventeenth century, like the urban dwellers of Ndongo, had led lives far from the fields and of some social distinction. Others, however, carried with them a specialized knowledge of agriculture and of tobacco production in particular. The Portuguese had introduced the crop to West and West Central Africa during the 1500s. Africans readily took to the habit of smoking and, over time, the practice gradually spread.

In 1607, an English visitor to Sierra Leone noticed that it was planted near most of the houses. In 1620, another Englishman encountered people near the Gambia River who offered to trade tobacco and pipes for English goods. In Senegambia, women often raised tobacco in small family plots, while men typically grew large plots intended for trade. Tobacco was planted on the floodplain, after the corn harvest, and Africans knew that its characteristics depended on the soil in which it grew. The Africans’ method of tilling the ground also readily transferred to Virginia. In West Africa, farmers practiced the same hoe-and-hill method of growing corn and tobacco that the early colonists had learned from the Indians. John Barbot, traveling in West Africa about 1680, noted that “two [African] men will dig as much land in a day, as one plow can turn over in England.” Although tobacco and corn were not staple crops in West Africa, most African immigrants knew how to raise them.

Their knowledge and skill would have been invaluable to Tidewater planters. Many of northern Senegambia’s inhabitants were nomads who tended wandering herds of foraging livestock, usually cattle, sheep, and goats. Farther south, where rain was more abundant, settled people raised poultry and grew peas, beans, peanuts, rice, millet, sweet potatoes, cotton, and indigo. Others worked as fishermen, potters, weavers, blacksmiths, and leather-dressers, all skills that Virginia’s first Africans contributed, against their will, to the colony. Time Line 1618–1619 – Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos, governor of the Portuguese colony of Angola, in West Central Africa, leads campaigns against the kingdom of Ndongo, capturing thousands. These Africans likely provided the cargo for six slave ships from Angola 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 city of São Paulo de Loanda in Portugal’s West African colony of Angola and sails for Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico).

It carries a cargo of 350 African slaves. July–August 1619 – Two English ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, both sailing out of Flushing, Holland, intercept the Portuguese slaver São João Bautista off the coast of Campeche in present-day Mexico. After stealing fifty or so slaves, 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 sells an unknown number of its slaves. 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 Angola in West Central 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 Spanish slaver carrying about 100 Angolans, whom the captain sells in Virginia for tobacco.

The 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.

Categories African American History Slavery Colonial History (ca. 1560–1763) Religion 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, M. Virginia’s First Africans. (2012, July 12). In Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Virginia_s_First_Africans. MLA Citation: McCartney, Martha. “Virginia’s First Africans.” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 12 Jul. 2012. Web. 15 Oct. 2015. First published: August 29, 2011 | Last modified: July 12, 2012 Contributed by Martha McCartney, a historian and independent researcher in Williamsburg. Give feedback about this entry Name (Optional) Email (Optional) Comments submit Feedback A Publication of Virginia Foundation for the Humanities In partnership with Library of Virginia Virginia Foundation for the Humanities 145 Ednam Drive, Charlottesville, VA 22903-4629 Phone 434.924.3296 Fax 434.296.4714 Photo Credits Contact Us Facebook Twitter RSS Click here