Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/30

 appears above our horizon like a strange sail at sea, showing unmistakably from our present point of view that something is wrong with her; we pass her close enough at hand to see on her decks men and women in distress whom we are wholly unable to relieve, and then she fades away in the mists astern, and is lost forever.

We are indebted to John Rolfe, the man that married the Indian maiden Pocahontas (and so became the most famous squaw-man in history), for the greater part of what we know about the first slave-trader to visit our shores. Rolfe was in Jamestown when the Dutchman came to Virginia waters, and it is his record that says: "a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars" came to Jamestown late in August, 1619.

In other accounts this ship is called a Dutch trader, instead of a "man of warre," while others still call her a privateer. Taking all the statements together, the truth appears to be that she was built as a cargo carrier, and yet was armed, and had a license permitting her to prey on the commerce of the enemies of Holland. Her chief business was as a trader, but incidentally she was a lawful privateer. At what point in Africa, or how, she obtained the negroes is not known.

The story of how she happened to carry her slaves to Virginia is of especial interest here because it includes that of the first ship fitted in United States territory for the slave trade.

In the year 1619 “the rapacious and unscrupulous" Captain Samuel Argall was ruler of the colony of Virginia. Argall was able, energetic, adroit, and conscienceless. He was what ward politicians would call a "heeler" of the Earl of Warwick, a man at once