Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/82

 the Colony in this vessel. If all had arrived in Virginia in her bottom, the same fact would have been stated in connection with each slave. It is equally significant that a large proportion of the Africans introduced in 1619 were placed upon the lands assigned to the office of the Governor. It seems improbable that Yeardley, a man of prudence and discretion, would, even as a feint, send a dispatch to England in open condemnation of the piratical voyage of the Treasurer at the very moment he proposed to reap important benefits from that voyage by purchasing, for the use of tenants in his service, the negroes who constituted the principal prize of the incursion from which the Treasurer had just returned.

In the space of five years immediately following 1619, the number of Africans in the Colony was increased by two. The muster taken of the population in 1624-25 discloses the presence of twenty-two as compared with the twenty brought in by the Dutch privateer, but one of these two additions is accounted for by the fact that the Treasurer had landed a negro in Virginia in 1619, and the other had been imported in the Swan in 1623. The two children included in the lists of the muster, it may be, were born on the North American continent. Their ages are not given, which makes it impossible to state this with confidence. If under five years, they were natives of the Colony, but