John Rolfe: “Letter to Sir Edwin Sandys”

When John Rolfe related in a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys that “20 and odd Negroes” had been off-loaded by a Dutch ship at Point Comfort in 1619, he had no notion of the lasting importance of his account. The seemingly casual comment recorded the first documented case of Africans sold into slavery bound for British North America. Purchased as indentured servants in the labor-starved Virginia colony, these twenty-some souls disappeared into the anonymous pool of workers transported to the colony during its first decades. The origins of the Africans and their ultimate fates have long been debated by historians and others studying the account. Rolfe provided little detail and made no further mention of the group. Rolfe's statement was part of a much longer missive written from the Virginia colony to one of his benefactors back in England. Rolfe hoped to endear himself by relating the recent events of the colony to the new treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, Sir Edwin Sandys. Under Sandys's leadership, the Virginia enterprise had entered a new phase in its existence and had recently undergone reorganization. Part of that process involved the establishment of the headright system (a system of land grants to settlers), which, in part, was responsible for the growing labor shortage of 1619 and 1620 as well as the rapid increase in the demand for unfree workers obtained through contracts of indenture.