1619: The Year The Troubles Began

 On August 20 1619 America’s original sin took place. The English privateer White Lion arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia with a cargo of 30 Africans.

These men and women were stolen from a Portuguese ship by the privateers and then when they landed in Virginia the Africans were traded primarily for goods. They went into immediate indentured servitude.

A few days later the White Lion’s companion ship the Treasurer did the same. The first Africans were sold for food as Virginia Governor George Yeardly and his head of trade Abraham Piersey made the deal. 

This initial group of Africans were part of a group of 50,000 war prisoners from the Kingdom of Portuguese’s war with the African Kingdom of Ndongo in what is modern Angola. The Portuguese had already begun using these captured Africans as slaves in their territories in the Americas

These Africans were not the first in what would become the US but they were the first to be used by the English and northern European settlers that would form the majority of Americans. There were Spanish slaves in Florida. 

From this point forward things began to snowball and by 1661 Virginia set the standard for African chattel slavery. In 1661 the laws stated a free white man can own Negro slaves and that a child born to a woman is also a slave.

History Snapshot: The Zong Slave Massacre of 1781

November 29, 1781 Captain Luke Collingwood of the British slave ship the Zong ordered 132 captive Africans from Ghana thrown into the sea. The Zong departed the coast of Africa on 6 September 1781 with 470 slaves. Human chattel was such a valuable commodity at that time, many captains took on more slaves than their ships could accommodate to maximize profits. The Liverpool-based ship was en route from Africa to Jamaica, there to exchange its human chattel for New World produce bound for the European market. The Zong’s captain, Luke Collingwood, overloaded his ship with slaves and by late November many of them had begun to die from disease and malnutrition. During the journey, sickness caused the deaths of seven of the 17 crew members and over 50 slaves, because they were stranded in the “Doldrums” and needed to lighten the ship the crew felt it was best to also clear the sickest of the slaves. Over a three-day span beginning Nov. 29, Collingwood had 133 still-living, but sick slaves cast overboard; in part, because he felt he could declare it as an insurrection which gave the owners of the ship an opportunity to claim insurance losses. Upon the Zong’s arrival in Jamaica, James Gregson, the ship’s owner, filed an insurance claim for their loss. Gregson argued that the Zong did not have enough water to sustain both crew and the human commodities. The insurance underwriter, Thomas Gilbert, disputed the claim citing that the Zong had 420 gallons of water aboard when she was inventoried in Jamaica. Despite this, the Jamaican court in 1782 found in favor of the owners. The insurers appealed the case in 1783 and in the process provoked a great deal of public interest and the attention of Great Britain's abolitionists. The leading abolitionist at the time, Granville Sharp, used the deaths of the slaves to increase public awareness about the slave trade and further the anti-slavery cause. It was he who first used the word massacre. The case then came before the lord chief justice, Lord Mansfield, who in a previous judgment had ruled that there was never a legal basis for slave ownership within England under English law. This ruling helped propel the abolitionist movement in England, but it wasn’t until 1833 that slavery was abolished in the colonies.

Photo: Underwater sculpture off Grenada commemorating slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.

 

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/jan/19/the-story-of-the-zong-slave-ship-a-mass-masquerading-as-an-insurance-claim

https://aaregistry.org/story/the-zong-massacre-episode-begins/