The African Experience of the "20. and Odd Negroes" Arriving in Virginia in 1619

Abstract

E NGEL Sluiter's recent note on the origins of the Africans brought to Virginia in i6i9 to work as laborers in the emerging English colony serves as an opportunity to explore the background of the best known of the founders of African America.1 Thanks to documentary records uncovered by Sluiter, we now know that the 20. and odd Negroes that arrived at Point Comfort in August had been taken on the high seas from the Sdo Jodo Bautista. This ship was a Portuguese slaver captained by Manuel Mendes da Cunha bound from Luanda, Angola, to Vera Cruz carrying slaves in conformity with an asiento, a contract to deliver slaves to Spanish colonies. Sluiter thus establishes that they were not seasoned slaves of many origins brought from the Caribbean, as was previously accepted by most historians, but probably a much more ethnically coherent group just recently enslaved in Africa.2 The information on the time and place of their enslavement in Africa allows us to present them in their own historic context and not simply that of their owners-to-be. Knowing that these Africans came from Luanda, the recently established capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola, allows us to estimate their ethnic background and the likely conditions of their enslavement. In those days the colony of Angola was a sliver of land extending inland from Luanda and along the Kwanza River until its confluence with the Lukala River and not the larger country of the late twentieth century. Some of the cargo of the Sdo Jodo Bautista and the twenty-odd negroes may have been enslaved in the Kingdom of Kongo, the Portuguese colony's northern neighbor, or by its eastern neighbors. Portugal had been exporting slaves from Kongo sources since the early sixteenth century, primarily through the port of Mpinda on the Zaire River. When the colony of Angola was founded, many traders

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