1619
The White Lion
In late August of 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort (today’s Fort Monroe) in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies.
The landing of the first Africans in Virginia is one of the most significant events in American history. Although English colonists in Virginia did not invent slavery, and the transition from a handful of bound African laborers to a legalized system of full-blown chattel slavery took many decades, 1619 marks the beginning of race-based bondage that defined the African-American experience.
Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that The White Lion dropped anchor about a year before the Mayflower. It was also one of the most important ships in American history, although there was no ship manifest inscribed with names of its passengers and no descendants’ society. These peoples’ arrival was deemed so insignificant, their humanity so inconsequential, that we do not even know how many of those packed into the White Lion’s hull came ashore, just that “some 20 and odd Negroes” disembarked and joined the British colonists in Virginia.
This timeline focuses on the English Colonies. There is documentation of enslaved Africans being present in Spanish Florida earlier.
Sources
“Arrival,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, in Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain