Ndongo

Every once in a while an historian tests the prevailing interpretation of an event or era by digging into the available primary sources in a new or innovative way and doggedly pursues every lead until the truth wills out. Tim Hashaw is just such a Sherlock Holmes and his discoveries have transformed how people view a vital event in the history of Colonial America. In 1619, two English pirate ships that had raided the Spanish Main and captured the San Juan Bautista with its cargo of African prisoners destined for the slave markets of Santa Cruz, Mexico, put in at the first permanent English colony in North America at Jamestown, Virginia. The Englishmen purchased thirty two Africans (17 women and 15 men).

For many years the common theory was that the anonymous Africans were forever deprived of their liberty and the institution of race-based, perpetual slavery was thus born in the very cradle of American civilization. Hashaw doesn’t buy it and can prove that the story is much more complex, colorful, and interesting than previously thought.

Four months prior to their arrival at Jamestown, the Africans were taken prisoner when an army of Portuguese and tribal allies invaded the Bantu-speaking kingdom of Ndongo on the Kwanza River in Angola. The parents and grandparents of the prisoners had converted to Roman Catholicism and even adopted Latinized names. From the census records of Jamestown, Hashaw found the names of some of the Africans of 1619: John Pedro, Anthony and Mary Johnson, Antonio and Isabell Tucker, John Graweere, Margaret Cornish etc.

A number, probably most, of the Angolans worked off their indentures, acquired property and took to farming, some even using white indentured servants to help raise the tobacco. Some married into English families. In his book entitled The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown, Hashaw traces the history of the captives from their kingdom in Africa to their capture, enslavement, and life in Virginia. The rich history of the imperial struggles of coastal Africa is remarkably documented, as is the colonial record, hitherto un-mined for the purposes of tracing the individuals usually just passed over as enslaved cargo.

The author also found Jamestown/African connections with the New England settlement, further expanding the overlooked contributions of the unwilling Angolan immigrants. The story of Joseph in the Bible came to mind as I read the tale of the Christian Africans who became settlers in America. The analogy even persists as some of the descendants of the first colonists were enslaved a century later but eventually experienced freedom once again about one hundred seventy years later. It is no wonder the slaves of the 19th century were fond of singing gospel hymns with Old Testament deliverance themes.

When I lived in Charles City County, Virginia, there were black families who claimed their kin had never been slaves in America. This book proves that indeed, there was a strain of freemen of African descent from the very beginning of English colonization and that the institutionalization of slavery after 1700 did not include every African descended person.

Bill Potter