Willem van de Velde the Younger, Dutch ships in a calm. Public domain.
Virginia traded food for African workers off a privateer because the colony needed labor and the ship needed supplies.
A servant who owned nothing now worked beside people bought off a ship, and his contract was no stronger for it.
A small planter who needed hands could not bid for them, because the colony’s officers took the purchase.
The men who ran the colony traded public stores for people and kept control of that labor.
In late August 1619 the White Lion, an English privateer, landed at Point Comfort with Africans taken from a Portuguese slave ship, and the colony traded provisions for them.
The report sent to London counted twenty and odd people.
Virginia had not yet written hereditary slavery into a code, but it had bought human beings for field labor.
James Horn, 1619 (2018)