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 where stated, but we can prove that it was within a few years after the first blacks were landed in Virginia. In 1644 Director-General Kieft gave liberty to a number of slaves who had "served the company eighteen or nineteen years." That is to say they had been taken into the company's service in 1625 or 1626.

Of the introduction of negro slaves at other points along the coast nothing need be said here. It was in those earliest years a very small trade. There were no ships engaged in carrying slaves exclusively on the high seas, so far as the record shows, until about 1630, when the Fortune captured the Angola slaver. The slaves were merely a part of the "general cargo" of that day. In 1647 the Dutch on Manhattan Island wrote of "the slave-trade, that hath lain so long dormant, to the great damage of the company." In 1635 the whole number of slaves imported into Virginia was but twenty-six. In 1642 only seven were imported, and in 1649 only seventeen. There is no record of the total importations, but it is certain that the traffic in all the colonies combined amounted to only a few hundred previous to 1650 — certainly fewer in number than would have made a single cargo in later years.

Trivial as were these transactions from a commercial point of view, the facts are all of importance here, not only because they belonged to the beginning of the trade, but because they are helpful to an understanding of the light in which the colonists saw the trade. Did the colonists think, as they bargained for the blacks, that there was the beginning of a "fatal traffic" that was "imposed upon them from without" — did they