Thank you to Jurretta Heckscher for sending along these links. For the
sake of historical accuracy, I would offer just one amendment to the story
told in in the Post article. The late Professor Sluiter was not the first
to posit a connection between the earliest Virginia slaves and the
slave ship, San Juan Bautista. I had suggested the same thing in my
1982 dissertation and 1993 book, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia (see
pp.163-164 and notes 3-6 on p.190 of the book), using works by Pierre and
Huguette Chaunu and Enriqeta Vila Vilar. I should emphasize that Prof.
Sluiter was unaware of my work when he made the discovery in the Spanish
archives that is reported in his 1997 WMQ article. Perhaps my earlier
investigations made no splash because I was unsure about the connection
(one of the sources I used had indicated the ship was robbed *before* it
reached Angola, not after it left for Vera Cruz). As far as I know, the
only other scholar to cite my work on this was Ira Berlin in his
pioneering 1996 WMQ article on Atlantic creoles. By the time his book Many
Thousands Gone was published (1998), Sluiter's article had been published
as well and that became the source of choice for the connection.

It should be noted, finally, that the most interesting and exciting new
work on this general topic is that of John Thornton and
Linda Heywood on the Angolan background of these slaves. In emphasizing
their contributions, the Post article is on the mark.

Douglas Deal
Professor of History
State University of New York at Oswego
Oswego, NY 13126
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(315)-312-3441

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