|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|
THE JAMESTOWN SLAVES --DISCOVERED |
|
|
If you visit
Virginia's Jamestown Settlement they claim you'll learn about the history of
people of 17th century Virginia. In 1607, 13 years
before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, a group of 104 English men and
boys began a settlement on the banks of Virginia's James River. They were
sponsored by the Virginia Company of London, whose stockholders hoped to make
a profit from the resources of the New World. The community suffered terrible
hardships in its early years, but managed to endure, earning the distinction
of being America's first permanent English colony. Sure enough they do
re-enact lifestyles of the Powhatans, Europeans and the African slaves. But
how did the slaves get there? They were not amongst the original colonists. They were known as
the "20 and odd," the first African slaves to set foot in North
America at the English colony settled in 1607. For nearly 400 years,
historians believed they were brought to Virginia from the West Indies on a
Dutch warship. Little else was known of the Africans, who left no traces. Now, new
scholarship and transatlantic detective work have solved the puzzle of who
they were and where their forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began. The slaves were
herded onto a Portuguese slave ship in the southwest African country of
Angola. The ship was seized by the British on the high seas -not
brought to Virginia after a period of time in the Caribbean. They represented
one ethnic group, not many, as historians first believed. The discovery has
tapped a rich vein of history that will go on public view next month at the
Jamestown Settlement museum. It will commemorate the 400th anniversary of
Jamestown's founding by revamping the exhibits and artifacts — as well
as the story of the settlement itself. |
|
|
Jamestown Tallship Replicas: Susan
Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed (photo courtesy Jamestown
Settlement) |
|
|
Although historians
have thoroughly documented the direct slave trade from Africa starting in the
1700s, little was known of the first blacks who arrived in Virginia and other
colonies a century earlier. A story of memory and cultural connections
between Africa and the early New World is being unearthed in a state whose
plantation economy set the course for the Civil War. "We went
entirely back to the drawing board," said Tom Davidson, senior curator
of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation."The problem has always been that
all of the things that make for a human story (of the Africans) were missing.
... Now we can talk about the Africans with the same richness we talk about
the English and the Powhatans." Behind
him, an Angolan man stripped bark from a baobab tree in a re-created village
featured in the museum's new 30,000-square-foot gallery, which will open Oct.
16. It's double the space of the previous one, to cover a long span of the
17th century and the African story, which was barely featured before. |
|
|
How the story of
the charter generation of Africans in Virginia has come to life in a new $25
million museum wing is a tale of two scholars who helped connect two coasts
of the Atlantic Ocean. The
early 1600s were a time of war and empire-building in southwest Africa;
Portuguese traders under the rule of the king of Spain had established the
colony of Angola. The exporting of slaves to the Spanish New World was a
profitable enterprise. |
Virginia slaves from re-enactment |
|
The Portuguese
waged war against the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo to the north, capturing
and deporting thousands of men and women. They passed through a slave
fortress at the port city of Luanda, still Angola's capital. At Jamestown,
tobacco was on the verge of a boom after the British had failed at several
industries. Indentured servants from England were common in the settlement,
now close to 1,000 people strong. John Rolfe,
Virginia's first tobacco planter and husband of the Indian princess
Pocahontas, wrote the widely held account of the African landing in a letter
to the Virginia Company of London. The captain of a Dutch warship that
arrived in Jamestown in August 1619 "brought not any thing but 20 and
odd Negroes, wch the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victuale ... at
the best and easyest rate they could." Rolfe explained that the ship and
another called the Treasurer had embarked from the West Indies. A retired
University of California at Berkeley historian, Engel Sluiter, made a
startling discovery in the Spanish national archives in the late 1990s as he
did research for a book on Spanish America. A colonial shipping document he
uncovered in an account book identified a Portuguese slave ship called the
San Juan Bautista. About 350 slaves were bound for Veracruz, on the east
coast of modern-day Mexico, when the ship was robbed of its human cargo off
the coast of Mexico in 1619 by two unidentified pirate ships, the record
said. Sluiter, who died
in 2001, published his discovery in the William and Mary Quarterly. It caught
the eye of historian John Thornton, an expert on the Portuguese colonies in
Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries. The outlines of the
other half of the story took shape. "I said, 'I
can figure out how these people were enslaved,'" said Thornton, a Boston
University professor who, with his wife, historian Linda Heywood, is
publishing a book on the slave trade between Angola and the North American
colonies. Previous scholarship has documented the slave trade from Ghana,
Senegal and other parts of West Africa. "We know Angola was a big
exporter of slaves to Brazil and the Spanish colonies, but now we know that
they showed up here," Thornton said. Through records of
a legal dispute between the pirate ships, Thornton identified the vessels as
the British-owned Treasurer and the the Dutch White Lion. Each took 20 to 30
slaves before the San Juan Bautista continued to Veracruz. They landed at
Jamestown within four days of each other and traded the Africans for
provisions. The Treasurer then sailed to Bermuda, dropping off more slaves,
and returned to Virginia a few months later, trading the final nine or 10
more. Many Angolans
followed — not just to Virginia, but to New York and New England, say
Thornton and Heywood, who are consultants to the Jamestown Settlement. Their
research draws a portrait of the first Africans as urban people connected by
common languages, who had had contact with Europeans for many years. Virginia's first
Africans spoke Bantu languages called Kimbundu and Kikongo. Their homelands
were the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, regions of modern-day Angola and
coastal regions of Congo. Both were conquered by the Portuguese in the 1500s.
The Africans mined tar and rock salt, used shells as money and highly valued
their children, holding initiation ceremonies to prepare them for adulthood. And they most
likely had been baptized as Christians, because the Kingdom of Ngondo
converted to Christianity in 1490. Many were literate. This background may be
one reason some of Virginia's first Africans won their freedom after years as
indentured servants, the historians said. The Portuguese and
Catholic roots figure prominently on a glass wall in the new gallery at the
Jamestown Settlement. Mareo, Christian, Nando, Acquera, Palmena, Cuba, Salvo
— they are among 400 African names engraved on the wall, one for each
anniversary year. One is Angelo,
whose name appears on a 1624 census of the colony discovered in the past
decade. She is listed as a "Negro woman" who came on the Treasurer
and worked as a servant in the home of Capt. William Pierce and his wife,
June. Historians assume the slave's name was Angela. It is Angela,
played by a young Angolan actress, who stars in the new introductory film
visitors will see as they watch the new story of Jamestown unfold. The
23-minute movie was filmed on a beach in Luanda in 2004, when museum curators
traveled there for research. The film will
replace a 15-year-old version that gives the first Africans only a passing
glance. Now visitors will be transported to a Portuguese cathedral in Luanda,
where a Jesuit priest breaks bread with the captains of the San Juan
Bautista. They discuss the souls to be saved and riches to be made from the
continued shipment of slaves from Massangano, an inland city. The film cuts
to a hut on the shore of the Kwanza River, where Angela, a young woman in her
20s, pounds grain and smiles. Then she and thousands of others are captured
and taken to a beach at Luanda. A Jesuit priest asks her if she has been
baptized, and she answers yes. "That
she is a child of God. When she dies she will go to heaven," the priest
says. And the slave ships sets sail against the evening sun. |
|
|
|
|
