European or colonial American governments sought to locate the offenders
and restore the lost people or property. Two famous cases involved Ameri-
cans.
In 1645, the Rainbow,the first American ship known to have taken
part in the slave trade, engaged in a bloody raid one Sunday on a village in
Gambia, in modern Senegal. In the division of the captives with the British
participants, the captain of the Rainbowreceived two blacks as his share.
When he returned to Massachusetts, the captain was charged with “mur-
der, man-stealing and [worst of all] Sabbath-breaking.” The court decided
that it lacked jurisdiction, since the event had happened in Africa, but
it confiscated the slaves and returned them, at the expense of the Mass-
achusetts legislature, to Africa.
Almost a century later, in 1731, the first known Muslims—probably of
the Fulani people, many of whom were literate in Arabic—were brought to
America as slaves. One of them was from the little kingdom of Jalot and was
known to his masters as Job Ben Solomon or, as he would have said, Aiyub
ibn Sulaiman. He had been kidnapped by men of the Mandingo tribe,
eventually sold to an English trader, and shipped to Maryland. From there
he wrote (in Arabic) a letter to his father. How he managed to do this or
how he thought the letter would ever reach Africa would tell us a great deal
about both Africa and America but, unfortunately, we do not know. In any
case, his letter was intercepted and passed to James Oglethorpe, one of the
founders of Georgia, who somehow managed to get it translated—there
cannot have been many Americans or Englishmen who were literate in
Arabic. For reasons that are not specified, but perhaps because of Aiyub’s
family’s importance in what is today Mali and along the West African coast,
he was sent to England in 1733. From there, he was escorted by an
employee of the Royal African Company to his home on the Gambia River.
Conditions of slavery varied from place to place and time to time, from
awful to tolerable. In Atlantic Africa, according to contemporary observers,
slaves may not have been notably worse off than serfs in France or Russia at
that time. Indeed, some slaves in the military forces and the bureaucracy of
the various states were probably better off. Generally, all Africans regarded
slavery as normal and proper. John Thornton argues that slavery was the
only form in which Africans could accumulate wealth, since “African law
did not recognize the right to own land.... Private wealth derived instead
The African Roots of American Blacks 95