Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/78

 impression that they could be disposed of with ease because of the growing demand for labor in the cultivation of tobacco. The system of indented service had by this time been firmly established, and under the wise administration of Sir George Yeardley the Colony itself had entered upon that course of expansion in wealth and population which, with the exception of a brief interval occasioned by the massacre of 1622, was to show a steady progress with the passage of each decade. In 1619, at the moment when the settlers were beginning to feel the first beneficent effects of a milder government, twenty Africans were disembarked from a Dutch privateer, presumably at Jamestown, as the place where a market was most readily found for a cargo of laborers. The ill-fated vessel, which was destined to earn by this single act in its career a sinister immortality in history, was sailing under letters of marque from the Prince of Orange, and had been cruising in the Spanish Main for the purpose of capturing Spanish prizes. The rapacious and unscrupulous Argoll seems to have been indirectly connected with this introduction of the negro into the Colony, and was, therefore, partly, although remotely, responsible for it. Before the close of his term as Governor he had dispatched to the West Indies a ship, sent to him by the Earl of Warwick and sailing under a commission from the Duke of Savoy, to make raids upon Spanish shipping. This vessel was ordered to bring back to the Colony a load of salt and goats, but it was suspected at the time that its real object was to ravage the commerce of Spain.

Argoll during his administration had sought to reduce all the resources of the Colony to his own immediate profit, without regard to public or private interests. It seems probable, therefore, that the introduction of slave