Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/85

. The custom was not always followed, but was observed, as we will show hereafter, with sufficient strictness to give much valuable information as to the origin of the negroes who were entered to secure head rights. The Africans forming the cargo of the Dutch privateer that arrived in 1619 were known after their distribution among the plantations by such English names as Peter, Anthony, Frank, and Margaret, but these might have been the anglicized forms of the original Spanish names.

Five years after the census of 1624-25 was taken, from which it appears that there were twenty-two Africans in the Colony at that time, an important addition was made to the slave population by Captain Grey, who, during a cruise in the ship Fortune of London had encountered a vessel loaded with negroes from the Angola coast, captured her and brought her cargo into Virginia. This cargo he exchanged there for eighty-five hogsheads and five butts of tobacco, which were afterwards transported to England for sale. It would seem that no difficulty was found in disposing of these slaves, although they were rude savages stolen only a few weeks before from their native country. The demand for labor was now so urgent that these untrained barbarians were doubtless purchased in haste.

So far as can now be discovered, all the negroes imported into the Colony in the course of the first half of the seventeenth century were brought in like the cargoes of the Dutch privateer in 1619, and the Fortune in 1629, by independent ships and by individual enterprise. The first charter for the acquisition of slaves which was granted in this century to an organized body by the