1605: London. A popular play, Eastward Hoe, depicted Virginia as paradise on earth. Hakluyt records that Englishmen referred to North Carolina as the Land of Parrots.
1606: January. The London Company charter is granted.
1607: April. 105 colonists founded Jamestown.
1607: Jamestown founded with indentured servants as a labor force.
1607: Maine. The tiny colony of Sagadohoc fails to survive.
1608: January and September. Jamestown resupplied.
1608: December. Captain John Smith journeys to the Powhatan capital in search of the lost company of Sir Walter Raleigh.
1608: Virginia. Wahunsonacock Indians raid the Piankatank Indians for slaves.
1609: Carolina. first use of smoke signals by Indians noted by Mariners
1609: March. Having discovered English survivors living among the Indians as slaves, John Smith reports to The London Company that no members of the company survived.
1609: May. Sir Thomas Gates dispatched to Jamestown to impose martial law.
1609: September 3-4, New York. Henry Hudson lands on Manhattan Island and meets with Indian dignitaries, who suspected Hudson of being a representative of “The Supreme Being.”
1609: By September 6, New York. illusions of divinity clearly dispelled, John Colman a member of Henry Hudson’s expedition to find a northerly passage around North America, was killed by Indians with an arrow to his neck.
1609: December 14. The Virginia Company Stationers’ Register reports English slaves among Indians.
1611: London, England, King James Bible translated into English, terms for slaves are all translated as servant, and servant becomes the term for unfree person.
1612: England. A pamphlet promoting gathering riches in Virginia.
1613: New York. Dutch slave trade established on Manhattan Island, dealing in red, white and black property.
1614: First Dutch fort is built on Manhattan Island.
1616: Virginia. English farmers are barely surviving.
1617: Jamestown, Virginia. The first shipment of tobacco is sent to England.
1617: Jamestown, Virginia. Only two categories of settlers were recognized: master and servant.
1618: England. Economic Contraction.
1618: London, England, Parliament decrees that vagrant children might be captured at the age of eight or older, with the boys to be sold for 16-year indentures and the girls to be sold for 14-year indentures.
1618: Virginia, Sir John Sandys states that servants bought by the treasurer’s office would “belong to said office forever.”
1618: New England. Epidemics introduced by explorers reduces the Indian population and was thought to be the work of God.
1618: Jamestown, Virginia. Indians murdered a group of settlers.
1619: Jamestown, Virginia. John Rolfe informs the Virginia Company that Jamestown officials have begun buying and selling men and boys, often to cover land rent and that servants have had their contracts broken by the masters.
1619: Jamestown, Virginia. John Porey describes a successful tobacco farmer with six servants. This will be the minimum for a tobacco farmer who will have 6–200 servants.
1619: Virginia. There are 44 private tobacco plantations.
1619: Virginia, planter John Porey said that slaves were “our principal wealth.” Note that black slaves had yet to arrive in Virginia.
1619: London, the Privy Council authorized the Virginia company to capture, imprison, punish and sell children.
1619: Virginia, first shipment of 100 white child slaves received in Jamestown from London.
1619: Virginia. The Dutch sell 20 blacks in Jamestown.
1619: Virginia. 50 acre “freedom dues” established, most of which were taken as a “headright” by the sponsor who paid for the servant’s passage, resulting in 95% of “freedom dues” acreage going to these speculators in servants as most servants died within their seven year term from overwork and beatings with many of the remainder failing to win their freedom.
1619: Virginia. Statute states “if a servant willfully neglects his master’s commands he shall suffer bodily punishment.”
1619: Jamestown Virginia. The first meeting of the House of Burgesses.
1620: January, Bridewell, England. A shipment of children revolted. The King’s secretary wrote a letter denouncing the revolt.
1620: January 31, Bridewell, England. The Privy Council decreed that the children would be severely punished, and one child may have been executed. They were forced on board the ship, Duty, and sold in Virginia; thereafter English slave boys were known as Duty Boys.
1620: December, Jamestown, Virginia. George Thorpe claimed in a letter that most of the servants died from depression, “disease of theire minde,” rather than physical disease and that this was primarily due to them having discovered that they had been lied to in England as to food and working conditions prior to agreeing to serve a term in Virginia.
1621: England. Economic Contraction.
1621: March, London, England. Captain Thomas Nuce informs the officials of the Virginia Company that servants barely live and that their labor is infinite.
1621: April 30, London, England. Sir Edwin Sandys presented a plan to Parliament for mass enslavement of the poor which was well received with the Martial of London and other officials receiving a cut of the profits.
1621: Virginia. English Slaves shipped to Jamestown on the James.
1621: Marmaduke Parkinson discovers escaped English servants living among the Indians in English-style houses on the Potomac River.
1621: Virginia. Governor Wyatt is directed to extend terms of labor on behalf of the colonial government, to be performed after the servant fulfilled his original indenture.
1621: Jamestown, Virginia. Richard and Isabella Pace arrive aboard the Marmaduke with six servants for whom they paid passage in return for the rights to the fifty acres owed to each servant by the Virginia Company and seven years’ service by the bound servants who would be released without a claim to the fifty acres allotted to each settler by the Virginia Company. The Paces added to their original 100 acres the three hundred acres due to the servants. There was no cash in Virginia. There was only produce, the only produce being tobacco. One person skilled at tobacco harvesting could only produce enough tobacco to feed himself, not clothe himself for the year. Once released from their indenture, they had a choice of contracting themselves as servants to the Paces or another land owner or of attempting to join the Indians who had agreements to return escaped servants in return for guns and ammunition or of becoming a “rogue” or “vagabond.”
1621: Jamestown, Virginia. Aboard the Marmaduke. Twelve young women arrive, having been recruited by the Virginia Company to marry men settled in Virginia. Of these 12 women, 11 were sold on the auction block, and one, Ursula Clarkson, having influential friends aboard the ship, received a fifty acre “head right,” the standard allotment for an arriving settler. Had she not had her passage paid for by a relative in England, her passage would have stood as a debt by the Virginia Company, her 50 acres forfeited to the person to whom she would be indentured.
1621: New England. Governor William Bradford of New Plymouth noted that despite the advantages of youth, the death toll among servants was much higher than among masters.
1622: Virginia. Peter Arundel assured English friends, “…Any laborious, honest man may in a shorte time become ritche in this Country.
1622: English slaves shipped aboard the John and Margaret to Jamestown.
1622: William Atkins and other English boys sold in Morocco.
1622, March 22: Powhatan uprising leaves 350 dead in Jamestown. The Indian slave boy owned by Richard Pace, gave warning of the pending Powhatan Uprising, thus saving the colony.
1622: April 18, Bow Church in London. Reverend Patrick Copeland preaches a sermon about the lost colonists.
1622: August, Jamestown, Virginia. Most settlers refuse to fight Indians, putting slaves to work in the fields rather than arming them. There are exceptions, such as master Gookins at Newport Newes, who defended his plantation with 35 armed white, black and Indian slaves, and Captain Crawshaw, who along with five servants and allied Indians defended his property, and the dissident Samuel Jordon of Beggar’s Bush, who armed his servants rather than retreating to the capital and defended his property. The Virginia administration was more concerned with the peril of arming the servants than the very real threat of Indians, who had nearly wiped them out in a single morning. They had good reason to fear armed servants, as evidenced by the presence of escaped whites or “vagabonds and rogues” among the attacking Indians.
1623: English slaves shipped to Jamestown aboard the Swan.
1623: March, Martins Hundred, Virginia. Richard Freethorne, a slave on a small plantation, wrote a letter home to his parents [In case the reader thinks this means he was not a slave, consider that prison inmates, incarcerated for life, are permitted to write letters to the outside world, and that some black slaves wrote letters while in bondage in later years and had them taken to the outside world by sympathetic whites.] that his fellow servants were being slaughtered by Indians and white “rogues” and that they were outnumbered “32 to fight against 2,000.”
1623: Jamestown, Virginia. George Sandys claimed that most newly arrived servants simply lay down and die of melancholy.
1623: Virginia, the treasurer, George Sandys sells his last seven white slaves for 150 pounds of tobacco.
1623: New England, the pilgrims on the Mayflower settle with 12 white slaves, all boys, most of whom died the first winter. According to their masters, they died at a higher rate than the pilgrims because they refused to accept Christ as their savior.
1624: Virginia, English slaves are referred to as “freight,” and child slaves are referred to as “half-freight.”
1624: Virginia. 22 black slaves, delivered to Jamestown by Dutch ships stopping over on the way up the coast to land colonists and their chattel on Manhattan Island.
1624: Virginia. According to The Tragicall Relation of the Virginia Assembly, white servants were whipped, shot, hung, burned alive, and broken on the wheel.
1624: England. Forced conscription in England martials over ten thousand poor men a year into the army, often described as starving and wretched.
1624: Virginia. Four out of five immigrants die within their first year, primarily servants.
1625: Jamestown, Virginia. Captain John Smith writes that masters in Virginia who buy servants from the Company for eight or 10 pounds sell them for 40 to 60 pounds. He also states, “I would not give twenty pounds for all the pillage…to be got amongst the salvages in twenty yeeres.”
1625: Virginia, a census determines that of the hundreds of children kidnapped in 1619, seven remained alive; and, of the hundreds of children kidnapped in 1620, only five remained alive.
1625: 800 English men sold in Morocco.
1625: New York. Holland establishes Manhattan as the capital of New Holland.
1625: Maryland. Four out of five immigrants die within their first year, primarily servants.
This is really awful. I don't want to read anymore but probably need to. As awful as it is the behavior of Englishmen was it was probably enlightened compared to many other societies on the planet and they did eventually work towards a more free environment. That's rapidly receding unfortunately.
It's a shame too. I've been reading a lot about fusion and cold fusion lately. It definitely works. There's been multiple megawatt installations working off of cold fusion. Just water and cheap nickel powder. Recently they've figured out why they don't see neutrons and radioactivity. Apparently the reaction makes something called a muon that very rapidly breaks down so it's not easily seen. There's a guy who's figured a way to make some strange stuff called collapsed deuterium hydrogen. You can hit it with a laser and it gives of massive amounts of energy. We are right now about ten years from limitless super, super cheap energy. It's been envisioned you could have a machine the size of a refrigerator that supplies all your energy needs for a modern home. With this sort of tech the owners could be told to go to hell. With enough energy you can make and do most anything. I bet you they won't like this. It's going to be a big battle. I've only mentioned the cold fusion. There's a whole slew of hot fusion guys making big progress on small reactors. We're at the cusp of being completely free or they will destroy us all. There will probably not be any middle ground.