Headright System 49being ill prepared to create suffi cient amounts of food, they
struggled with the Powhatan Confederacy and a sheer in-
ability to locate easily exploitable resources. Th e combina-
tion of famine and wars with local Native Americans meant
that Jamestown would struggle to maintain the population
needed to make the colony a success. By 1611 the colonists
of Jamestown had discovered a means to create enormous
profi ts in the form of tobacco cultivation. However, with
high mortality rates came a severe lack of labor in order
to make this new cash crop reach its profi t potential. In an
attempt to solve the labor crisis, the Virginia Company of
London granted headrights to settlers in Jamestown as a
means of recruiting more people, growing the population,
and meeting the labor demand in the tobacco fi elds.
Beginning in 1618, headrights were legal grants to land
off ered to settlers in Jamestown and could range from 50 to
100 acres of land for those willing and able to make the
Atlantic crossing to Virginia. Moreover, headrights were
granted as bounties to tobacco planters who were willing to
fi nance the transportation costs of anyone willing to serve
a fi ve- to seven-year term of indenture and to be employed,
principally, growing tobacco. In this way, the already es-
tablished tobacco planters received two critical and highlyestablished a factory in Allada in 1674. Up to about 1671,
an estimated annual average of about 3,000 captives were
exported from Aja ports. Within a decade, the fi gure was
probably doubled at Allada, and Whydah went to the fore-
front. Th us, coastal societies were fully exposed to the dam-
aging impact of the European slave trade.
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Bight of Benin; Bight of Bia-
fra; Bosman, Willem; Gold Coast; Kingdom of Dahomey;
Sierra Leone
Moshe TerdimanBibliography
Gray, Richard, ed. Th e Cambridge History of Africa. Vo l. 4 , From
c. 1600 to c. 179 0. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1975.
Headright System
When the fi rst permanent English colony in North Amer-
ica, Jamestown, was founded in 1607 it was immediately
beset by a series of problems. In addition to the colonists
An 18 th-century engraving of a slave compound maintained by traders from four European nations on the Gulf of Guinea in the mid- 18 th
century. (Library of Congress)