White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (12 page)

Three days later, the Privy Council replied. It paid obeisance to the humanitarian motives of the Common Council of London in

‘redeeming so many poor souls from misery and ruin and putting them in a condition of use and service to the State’ in Virginia.

Then, with venom that King Herod might have approved, it turned to the children:

We authorize and require . . . the City and the Virginia Company, or any of them, to deliver, receive, and transport into Virginia all and every the foresaid children as shall be most expedient. And if any of them shall be found obstinate to resist or otherwise to disobey such directions as shall be given in this behalf, we do likewise hereby authorize such as shall have the charge of this service to imprison, punish, and dispose any of those children, upon any disorder by them or any of them committed, as cause shall require, and so to ship them out for Virginia with as much expedition as may stand with conveniency.17

With this, children could now be transported without reference to their own or their parents’ wishes. The second batch appears to have departed on the
Duty
in the spring of 1620. Simultaneously, the company was beginning to send so-called ‘bridal boats’ packed with women. This was part of the strategy devised by Sir Edwin Sandys to encourage planters to stay and marry. Sandys ordered company officials in the colony to publicise the coming of more marriageable ‘maids’ and also publicise the news that for the ‘further 84

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encouragement’ of men to marry them, those who did would each be offered the chance to buy an ‘apprentice’.18 The maids were to be offered for 120 pounds of tobacco each, the children for twenty pounds. It would become such a profitable business that Sir Edwin would later sink £200 of his own into a joint stock company concerned exclusively with marketing maids.

Two hundred metres from Bridewell, up in St Paul’s Cathedral, the incoming Dean could see nothing but good in these departures to the New World. The Dean was John Donne, the poet. In a rousing sermon, he blessed the Virginia enterprise:

. . . It shall sweep your streets, and wash your doors, from idle persons, and the children of idle persons, and employ them: and truly, if the whole country were but such a Bridewell, to force idle persons to work, it had a good use.

But it is already, not only a spleen, to drain the ill humours of the body, but a liver, to breed good blood; already the employment breeds mariners; already the place gives essays, nay freights of merchantable commodities; already it is a mark for the envy, and for the ambition of our enemies.19

Few of those dispatched to Virginia lived long enough to reach adulthood. The muster records indicate that of the first 300 children shipped between 1619 and 1622, only twelve were still alive in 1624. Evidently, their bodies had not proved more adaptable to the blistering heat of the Chesapeake than those of adults.

While the fate of those youngsters rounded up from the streets of London has been largely forgotten, history would take a keen interest in the destiny of a group of men and women who arrived a few months after the first shipment of children in 1619. They arrived in a ship flying the orange, white and blue colours of the Dutch Republic and were mentioned in a letter to Edwin Sandys from John Rolfe, the husband and now widower of the Native American princess Pocahontas, who had died during a visit to England.

Rolfe wrote:

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About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of war of the burden of 160 tons arrived at Point Comfort. The Commander’s name was Capt. Jope, his pilot for the West Indies one Mr. Marmaduke an Englishman . . . He brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Merchant [Virginia Company trading agent]

bought for victuals (whereof he was in great need as he pretended) at the best and easiest rate they could buy.20

Much would be written over the next 400 years about the significance of this episode. But precious little was known about the ship or her cargo until the late 1990s, when painstaking research through Spanish records revealed where the Africans came from and who it was that sold them.21

The ‘Dutch’ man-of-war was, in fact, not Dutch but English.

She was the
White Lion
, one of the deadly little vessels that Sir Francis Drake had employed against the Spanish Armada thirty years earlier. Her commander, ‘Capt. Jope’, was not Dutch but John Colwyn Jupe, a wild Cornishman who had inherited the vessel from one of Drake’s captains.22

Jupe was an ordained Calvinist minister turned privateer. As with many ardent English Protestants, he married fervent belief in Scripture with fervent insistence on despoliation of the Spanish as God’s holy work. He spent ten years renovating the
White Lion
and then took her to the Caribbean to prey on the Spanish treasure fleets heading home from Hispaniola. Portugal was at the time under Spanish rule and Jupe targeted Portuguese galleons as well as Spanish.

The
White Lion
flew Dutch colours to avoid charges of piracy.

This was possible because the Dutch, unlike the English, were still at war with Spain. The wrath of King James I would descend on any captain attacking the Spanish while under the cross of St George.

It is not known when John Jupe brought the
White Lion
to the Caribbean. However, some time in the spring or summer of 1619 he joined forces there with Daniel Elfrith, skipper of the
Treasurer
. She was the privateer owned by the Earl of Warwick, whose piratical activities had so embarrassed the Virginia Company the previous year.

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CHILDREN OF THE CITY

Spanish records report that in mid-July, ‘English corsairs’

waylaid and captured the Portuguese slaver
Sao Joao Bautista
. She had below decks some 370 Angolans, who had been taken prisoner during Portugal’s bloody war of conquest in Luanda. They were being shipped into slavery at Vera Cruz. The English corsairs were undoubtedly the
Treasurer
and the
White Lion
. According to Spanish records, the two raiders made off with more than 200

Angolans.

Elfrith, whose ship was larger than Jupe’s, evidently took aboard the bulk of them. Jupe’s share seems to have been under thirty men and women.

Both captains then set course for Virginia, which had been such a haven for privateers under the governorship of Sam Argall. Jupe arrived first, four days ahead of the
Treasurer
, and then bartered his human booty.

When Elfrith appeared, he was less successful. Something caused him to up anchor almost immediately and take off before he could sell any of his Africans. He took them instead to Bermuda, where he could be sure of finding them a home – on estates belonging to his employer, the Earl of Warwick, owner of the
Treasurer
.

On the slender basis of those few words from John Rolfe describing the bartering of the ‘twenty and odd Negroes’ history moulded a story of a Dutch slave trader selling the first slaves to America. Book after book listed the barter at Point Comfort as the moment slavery began. In reality, the road to slavery was already being laid through indentured servitude and John Jupe’s Africans were merely joining it, for they too were treated as indentured servants.

No flood of Africans followed them. The transaction was a one-off. Although the Dutch and Portuguese were bringing out slaves in their thousands from Africa, for the moment there was no market for them in Virginia. Six years later, in 1625, there were still only twenty-three Africans in the colony. Many decades later, there were still only a few hundred. That would change late in the century; but for the moment, the poor of England remained the colony’s main source of chattel labour.

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CHAPTER FIVE

THE JAGGED EDGE

When they first set foot in America, convicts and slum children from England must have felt trepidation and even dread. Equally, hope and expectation must have pumped through the veins of those making the trip voluntarily as indentured servants – but many had shipped into a nightmare. These volunteers would come to be called ‘free-willers’ but would discover that they were no more free than the convicts or the street urchins and were wide open to abuse. One of the better-treated servants amongst them would find that the price of bringing his wife and children to join him in Virginia was an extra stretch of bondage, either for him, or for his wife and his children.

The term ‘indenture’ derives from the Latin
indentere
, to cut with teeth. It was used in England from the Middle Ages to describe a contract duplicated on parchment and torn jaggedly in half – indented. Each party to the contract retained one half as evidence of what had been agreed. Land sale documents were called indentures. So were marriage settlements. Labour contracts were not. Generally they did not require indenturing, as a whole body of English law governed the master–servant relationship. That changed abruptly in 1618 when the Virginia Company introduced headrights and revolutionised the labour market.

The headright scheme was essentially an invitation to those with money to secure great tracts of Virginia by populating it with the 89

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poor. The brainchild of Sir Edwin Sandys, the headright was a grant of fifty acres for every new settler. This land went to whoever paid the settler’s passage. News of the scheme led to a frantic scramble amongst speculators and planters to sign up hopeful young people willing to become their servants and be shipped to labour for them in Virginia. Indentures were used to tie them to the deal – and supposedly to tie the planter or speculator to it as well.

Invariably, it was a one-sided affair. Servants were asked to indent to work unwaged for enormous lengths of time – anything from three up to eleven years or more. In return, most were offered little more than their passage to Virginia and the promise of some of the wherewithal for a new life when servitude ended. Sometimes a strip of land was promised but few would ever own an inch of soil.

Such terms were terrible but in an England where enclosures had thrown so many off the land and where an agricultural depression had set in, there were plenty of takers. During the five years to 1624, when the Virginia Company was wound up, 4,500 settlers arrived, which was as many as had been shipped in throughout the previous twelve years. Between a third and a half were servants.1

The first known indentured servant was blacksmith Robert Coopy from the village of Nibley in the Cotswolds. Nibley had already etched its mark on history 300 years before when King Edward II was imprisoned in nearby Berkeley Castle and, according to legend, horribly murdered on the orders of his wife’s lover.

We only know about Robert Coopy because his indenture document survives, the earliest still extant.2 The agreement was between Coopy and a syndicate of local gentry who had just secured 8,000 acres in Virginia. They called this tract of untamed American forest after their corner of the Cotswolds, the Berkeley Hundred. Coopy indentured with them in the summer of 1619. In return for his passage to America, plus food and shelter, he was to be bound to the syndicate as a servant for three years. When that time was served, he would be offered a tenancy on thirty acres of syndicate land.

In the event, something stopped Robert Coopy going through with the indenture. He stayed in England, either too wise or too worried to try the New World. However, another of the Coopy clan, 90

THE JAGGED EDGE

Thomas Coopy, did go, presumably in Robert’s stead. Like Robert, he was a skilled man, a carpenter and turner, and the evidence is that he had the same deal as Robert, plus the syndicate’s agreement to pay his wife a few shillings while he was in America. That made it very generous compared to the deals other servants would get but Thomas Coopy would not live long enough to appreciate his relative good fortune.

In September 1619, Coopy embarked from Bristol on a 40-ton barque called the
Margaret
, one of the smaller ships on the Virginia run. She was chartered to take an advance party of thirty-three indentured servants plus three or four gentlemen to the Berkeley holdings in Virginia. Few of the servants were as multi-skilled as Thomas Coopy, and their indentures reflected it, most being far more onerous than his. Some of his fellow servants had to agree to be indentured for five years, some for seven, some for eight years to pay for their passage; some did not even have the promise of a yard of ground to rent on being freed.

All went well with them to begin with. The syndicate’s advisers had wisely counselled against arriving in the heat of the Chesapeake summer – ‘a most unfit season’ when passengers arrived ‘very weak and sick’, there to fall under ‘the great heat of weather’. As a consequence, considerable numbers died either at sea or soon after disembarkation before they could be ‘seasoned’ to the summer temperatures. The
Margaret
’s departure in September was designed to avoid these problems and seems to have succeeded. No lives appear to have been lost en route.

Nor were there any fatalities or attacks by the Algonquin after the party reached the Chesapeake and found their designated tract of forest. Today, the spot houses a national monument, marked by a grand Georgian mansion where America’s ninth president, William Henry Harrison, was born. In 1619, it was a daunting chunk of wilderness. The advance party arrived on 4 December and celebrated with a ‘thanksgiving’ service that they vowed to repeat each year. It was these Gloucester men on the banks of the James River rather than the Pilgrim Fathers a year later in New England who first established a Thanksgiving Day in America.

The gentlemen of the syndicate certainly had reason to be 91

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thankful. Thanks to the headright system, the party of men they brought on the
Margaret
entitled the syndicate partners to an extra 1,900 acres. Another fifty-three servants later recruited in the south-west of England would add a further 2,650 acres. On top of that, many more thousands of acres became due because of shares the syndicate bought in the Virginia Company. All told, the gentlemen from the Cotswolds more than doubled their American holdings in little more than a year.