The White Lion was a 160-ton English privateer ship operating under a Dutch letter of marque which brought the first Africans to the English colony of Virginia in August 1619, a calendar year before the arrival of the Mayflower in New England (November 1620).McCartney, Martha W. Documentary History of Jamestown Island: Narrative history. United States, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2000. pp 49. Though the African captives were sold into a mixture of both chattel slavery and indentured servitude, the event is regarded as the start of African slavery in the colonial history of the United States.
The first enslaved Africans in the current boundaries of the United States landed in 1526 in the expedition of Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón on the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. Some escaped and are thought to have joined Native Americans, if they survived. In 1527, Estevanico, an enslaved Moor, participated in the Spanish Narváez expedition. Enslaved Africans were also part of the Spanish expedition to Florida in 1539 with Hernando de Soto, and the 1565 founding of St. Augustine, Florida.
The Africans on the White Lion were probably among the thousands who had been captured in 1618–1619 by a slave raiding force primarily consisting of African raiders, under nominal Portuguese leadership, who were at war with the Kingdom of Ndongo. These particular enslaved Africans were taken on the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista from Luanda, Angola, capital of the Portuguese settlements in Angola.
The White Lion, along with another privateer, the Treasurer, commanded by Daniel Elfrith, intercepted the San Juan Bautista on its way to modern-day Veracruz on the Gulf coast of New Spain (present-day Mexico). The two ships captured and divided part of the Spanish ship's African captives, under the aegis of Dutch letters of marque from Maurice, Prince of Orange. White Lion captain sailed for the Virginia colony to sell the twenty-four African captives, first landing in Point Comfort, in modern-day Hampton Roads.
As John Rolfe, secretary of the colony of Virginia, wrote to Virginia Company of London treasurer Edwin Sandys:
After being sold off the White Lion, two of the slaves, Isabella and Anthony, married and had a child in 1624. William Tucker, named after a Virginian planter, was the first recorded person of African ancestry born in English America.
See also
Clotilda, the last known slave ship to bring slaves to North America. The 1619 Project
References