Hello to All on this list:  My apologies to all included concerning the
Washington Post Article.  I am angry at no one.  The people that were a
part of the twenty and odd cargo were human beings caught up in a sad
situation.  Thankfully they worked out their captivity and went onto live
out some semblance of a normal life.  Jane Steele.


> [Original Message]
> From: Lyle E. Browning <[log in to unmask]>
> To: Jane Steele <[log in to unmask]>
> Cc: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 9/6/2006 2:12:36 PM
> Subject: Re: "Mystery of Va.'s First Slaves Unlocked" (Wash. Post)
>
> Whoa now, I may have been asleep through some of this, but I've seen
> nothing that "disses", jokes about or in any other way is dismissive
> of anyone, certainly not in the attached posts to Ms. Steele's
> missive. Where's all the preaching coming from here? And by what
> right does Ms. Steele claim to include the innocent in her scold?
>
> Lyle Browning, RPA
>
>
> On Sep 6, 2006, at 2:02 PM, Jane Steele wrote:
>
> > But just remember this:  these people were brought here against
> > their will.  They did not request nor ask to come.  Some of us are
> > still missing the point and treating this most brutal of
> > kidnappings as a joke and a lark.  Please respect Africans and
> > African-Americans as people.  Grow up!.  Jane Steele,MA.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Anita Wills <[log in to unmask]>
> >> Sent: Sep 4, 2006 2:13 PM
> >> To: [log in to unmask]
> >> Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] "Mystery of Va.'s First Slaves
> >> Unlocked" (Wash. Post)
> >>
> >> Paul,
> >> Thank you for pointing that out. You are right the Africans were not
> >> slaves during that period. You would think that a Newspaper with the
> >> reputation of the Washington Post, would get it right.
> >>
> >> Anita
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> -- Paul Finkelman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >> Typical of newspapers they can't get a simple story right;  first
> >> a "Man
> >> of Warr" was a ship design, and did not designate a warship.  Second
> >> whatever their status on that ship, they were not slaves in Va.
> >> (there
> >> were no laws creating or allowing slavery and no private practice of
> >> slavery yet).  They were indentured servants; some were free and
> >> property owners in a few years.    Ed Morgan in American Slavery,
> >> American Freedom and Tim Breen and Steve Innes in "Myne Owne Ground"
> >> taught us all about this decades ago.
> >>
> >> Paul Finkelman
> >>
> >> Paul Finkelman
> >> President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
> >>     and Public Policy
> >> Albany Law School
> >> 80 New Scotland Avenue
> >> Albany, New York   12208-3494
> >>
> >> 518-445-3386
> >> [log in to unmask]
> >>>>> [log in to unmask] 09/03/06 11:23 PM >>>
> >> Here is the article from the Washington Post--Martha Katz-Hyman.
> >> *********************
> >>
> >> Mystery of Va.'s First Slaves Is Unlocked 400 Years Later
> >>
> >> By Lisa Rein
> >> Washington Post Staff Writer
> >> Sunday, September 3, 2006; A01
> >>
> >> JAMESTOWN -- 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 transported to
> >> Virginia from the West Indies on a Dutch warship. Little else was
> >> known of the Africans, who left no trace.
> >>
> >> 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 Angola, in
> >> Southwest Africa. The ship was seized by British pirates on the high
> >> seas -- not brought to Virginia after a period of time in the
> >> Caribbean. The slaves 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. The museum and living
> >> history program will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's
> >> founding by revamping the exhibits and artifacts -- as well as the
> >> story of the settlement itself.
> >>
> >> Although historians have thoroughly documented the direct slave trade
> >> from Africa starting in the 1700s, far less 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 was depicted stripping 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 was 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. 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 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 British vessels as the Treasurer and the White Lion,
> >> which was flying a Dutch flag. 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 Ndongo 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
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> The film will replace a 15-year-old version that gives the first
> >> Africans only a passing mention. 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 twenties,
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> "Then she is a child of God. When she dies, she will go to heaven,"
> >> the priest says. And the slave ship sets sail against the evening
> >> sun.
> >>
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> >>
> >>
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> >
> > Lillian Jane Steele
> >
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>

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