On December 20, 1606, three merchant
ships...Discovery, Godspeed and Susan Constant...set sail from England loaded
with 104 men and boys charged with starting a settlement in the New World. On May
14, 1607, the three small ships arrived in Virginia, the place chosen was James
Island, and set the course of American history.
NOTE:
The term "Ancient Planter" is applied to
those persons who arrived in Virginia before 1616, remained for a period of three
years, paid their passage, and survived the massacre of 1622. They received the
first patents of land in the new world as authorized by Sir Thomas Dale in 1618
for their personal adventure.
There is the real history and there is the history
you learned in school and they aren’t even close. You will not know the real
history unless/ until you research your own family who were part of that
original settlement. The history and records are quite clear what actually
happened and that does not fit the narrative of academia. Too bad for them but
they simply spun and continue to perpetuate a yarn worthy of a Peter Pan novel.
First Africans to America
In 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses met; the
first representative assembly in the New World. Also, in 1619, the first
Africans arrived on a Dutch trade ship that had run low on food and traded the
Africans for food supplies. These Africans became indentured servants, as
slavery did not develop in Virginia for another 85 plus years. Prior to 1700,
many indentured women had children with African fathers. These mulatto children
were born free.
Around 1700 a law was passed that punished white
women who had children by African men. After 1700, the children of these women
were often taken away from their mothers and sold as "indentured
servants" until they were of age 21. Many if not most of the non-gentlemen
colonists also arrived as indentured servants. Indentured servitude
generally lasted seven to eight years and was usually ended with payment in the
form of land and a stipend of the local currency. Most of our ancestors arrived
as indentures.
For most of the 1600s, white indentured
servants worked the colony's tobacco fields, but by
1705 the Virginia colony had become a slave society.
1619--The ship Treasurer arrived in Bermuda from
Virginia, with Africans brought via Jamestown by Captain Daniel Elfrith (sic). It
was reported that acting Governor Miles Kendall had about 29 Africans from that
ship locked up because he believed they were stolen from a Spanish ship in the
West Indies. It was later discovered they came originally from Angola.
In 1650, there were about 300 "Africans"
living in Virginia, about 1% of an estimated 30,000 population. They were not
slaves; any more than were the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for
passage money to Virginia. Many had earned their freedom, and they were each
granted 50 acres (200,000 m2) of land when freed from their
indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco or
other crops. Although they were at a disadvantage in that they had to pay to
have their newly acquired land surveyed in order to patent it, white indentured
servants found themselves in the same predicament.
Some black indentured servants, however, went on to
patent and buy land. Anthony Johnson,
a black man who settled on the Eastern Shore following the end of indenture,
even bought African slaves of his own. George Dillard, a white indentured
servant who settled in New Kent County after his servitude ended, held at least
79 acres (320,000 m2) of his own land and was able to marry
despite a dearth of women in the colonies at that time.
Between 1618 and early 1619, the governor of the
Portuguese colony of Angola, Luis Mendes Vascelos, captured thousands of
Africans from the kingdom of Ndongo. These captives were likely the cargo for
six slave ships that sailed from Angola to Mexico between 1619 and mid-1620. In
early 1619, one of those slave ships, Sao Joao Bautista, left
Angola to sail for Vera Cruz. In its cargo were 350 African slaves. While en
route to Vera Cruz, the Sao Joao Bautista was intercepted by
two Dutch ships, theWhite Lion and the Treasurer, off
the coast of Mexico. Roughly fifty slaves were stolen by the Dutch ships that
then set their sails for Virginia with the intent to sell their recently
ascertained cargo.
The White Lion arrived in Virginia
in late August 1619. John Colyn Jope, the White Lion’s captain,
sold 20-and-some-odd Negroes in exchange for food. These were the first
Africans to enter the Virginia colony, indentured as servants for a period of
7-8 years. In 1623, Anthony and Isabella, who arrived on the White
Lion in 1619, gave birth to William Tucker, the first documented child
of African descent born in English North America.
See also:
Melungeons:
See also:
Last US Slave Ship
