This morning John Thornton and Linda Heywood asked that I forward to the list some clarifying comments regarding the Washington Post article. Their message follows: Thanks so much for sending us the link to the discussion on the Va history list serve. We don't subscribe to it, but we'd like to make a few comments for that list, if you could pass it on, we'd be grateful. First of all there were some real factual errors in the report which we would like to correct, dealing with Africa. First the article states that Ndongo was converted to Christianity in the 1490s, which is not true at all, the country in questions was Kongo. Second it also states that the Portuguese conquered both Kongo and Ndongo in the 1500s. It did not conquer either then or for centuries to come. The Portuguese did carve their colony of Angola out of territories of these two countries, and to the degree that they took the lands from Kongo and Ndongo, the statement is true. One other small comment. English law did recognize slavery in the early seventeenth century. Law cases in New England and Bermuda at least condemned people to slavery for crimes, the earliest one we know is 1617 for Bermuda. In these cases slavery was for a fixed term though it could be life. Also "Negro" had come to mean slave in Portuguese by that time, and the term was borrowed into English from that language, it may well have meant slave. All this is dealt with in greater detail in our forthcoming book, in production at Cambridge, probably to appear in 2007. John Thornton and Linda Heywood To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html