deck and fainted.” Seeing a huge copper pot boiling, he thought he was to
be eaten. As a contemporary witness who took the trouble to interview
some slaves remarked, they believed that “upon their arrival they would be
made into oil and eaten.”
Under sail, Equiano wrote, conditions were
absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the cli-
mate, added to the number in the ship, being so crowded that each had
scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copi-
ous perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a
variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves,
of which many died.... This deplorable situation was again aggravated
by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of
necessary tubs [toilets] into which the children often fell, and were
almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the
dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.One day, he continues, when the sea was calm, the chained slaves were
brought onto the deck, and two managed to break through the netting on
the sides and jumped into the sea, “preferring death to such a life of mis-
ery.” In slavery, life itself was just another form of suicide.
The first blacks bought by English colonists arrived in Virginia one
year before the Mayflower.As John Rolfe reported from Jamestown in
1619, “a dutch man of warre... sold us twenty Negars.” How the
colonists in Virginia understood the transaction is not known. Virginia
then had no law dealing with slavery—not until forty years later would slav-
ery be legalized—and the only local practice under which the blacks could
have been categorized was indenture. Without question, however, the
colonists put the new arrivals to work as slaves.
Slaves are first mentioned in New Netherland in 1628, a decade later
than in Virginia. The following year the Dutch West India Company
promised to furnish each landowner (patroon) “with twelve Black men and
women out of the prizes in which Negroes shall be found (raids on Spanish
slave ships) for the advancement of the colonies in New Netherland.” In
1638, the first black slaves were imported into Massachusetts, transshipped
Blacks in America 167