Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/92

 ; but this statement does not appear to have been wholly accurate. There was undoubtedly an arrangement with that corporation for the introduction of negroes into the Colony in 1678; the agent, however, seems to have been a private person, for he was charged with importing a larger number than he was authorized to do. Culpeper was instructed to allow no ship to sail from Virginia to that part of the Guinea coast which lay within the territory of the Royal African Company, with a view to exchanging tobacco for slaves, unless it had received a special license from the Company itself. He denied, in his reply to this instruction, that any Virginian vessel had at any time in the history of the Colony carried on a traffic with the people of that coast. This, however, could not be said of ships from New England which visited Virginia. In 1682, there arrived in the Rappahannock River a Captain Jackson, in command of a vessel belonging to persons who resided in Piscataqua, N. H., among them Mrs. Cutts, a lady of prominence in that community. Having disposed of his merchandise, he expressed to Colonel Fitzhugh, his principal purchaser, a strong desire to furnish him with a cargo of slaves in the following year. The letter which Fitzhugh wrote in reply to this proposition is of unusual interest, as showing the attitude of the people both of Virginia and of New England towards the race which, nearly two centuries later, were to raise so serious a barrier between