BLACK HISTORY MONTH
The Mother of African-American History
How Angela came to be the first documented African woman in Virginia
Portuguese slavers called her Angela, but her real name in Kimbundu, a West Angoloan Bantu language, could be Nzinga, Zinga, or Njinga as the hero Queen of Ndongo and Matamba.
I like to think of her as the mother of African-American history. Her story took me to Torre do Tombo, the Portuguese National Archives, where I did part of the research for this piece.
Angela arrived on the United States’ east coast more than 400 years ago. She was one of the first enslaved captives from Africa to set foot in the first permanent English settlement in North America.
I can’t even imagine the ordeals the “Eve of Enslaved Africans” suffered during what must have been a horrifying crossing of the Atlantic, but the story goes that almost a third of the 350 captives died before the ship reached its final destination.
The Atlantic alone bore witness to unimaginable atrocities, as Portuguese and Spanish traders had been selling Africans into slavery in the Americas for almost a century.
This is Angela’s story.
The American Eve story begins long ago in the cradle of humanity, on a settlement in the hills of the Kingdom of Ndongo in Angola, at the time under the rule of the Portuguese Colonial Empire.
In Angela’s womb sailed the cradle of African-American culture and American culture in general.
As President Biden states in his Proclamation on National Black History Month, 2024:
“National Black History Month, we celebrate the vast contributions of Black Americans to our country and recognize that Black history is American history and that Black culture, stories, and triumphs are at the core of who we are as a Nation.”
Every word in the president’s statement is a tribute to the young woman who was seized from her ancestral land and sailed in chains half across the world
Angela was probably one of the thousands of people taken at some point between 1618 and 1619 by a slave-raiding force primarily consisting of African raiders.
Operating under the Portuguese flag, the raiding party that took Angela came from a faction at war with the Kingdom of Ndongo, an African state located in the highlands between the Lukala and Kwanza Rivers, in what is now Angola.
The captives were then sold to a Portuguese slaver. In the capital, Luanda, Angela was taken on board the Portuguese Man-O-War, São João Bautista, captained by Manuel Mendes da Cunha.
The Portuguese slaver held an asiento (license) from Spanish investors in Seville to sell his “human freight.”
The slave ship route would take it to the Portuguese capital, and from there, it was to set sail to Vera Cruz, in the Spanish colony of modern Mexico.
All those poor souls trapped in the ship’s hull were marked for an ominous fate. They were to be sold to plantations in the Caribbean and beyond.
During its journey across the Atlantic, the Portuguese ship was intercepted by the Treasurer and White Lion, two English privateers operating under the aegis of Dutch letters of marque from Maurice, Prince of Orange.
Somewhere on the Gulf coast of New Spain (present-day Mexico), the English marauders raided the São João Bautits and took many of the enslaved Africans—some accounts mention around 50.
The African captives were then divided and packed onto the makeshift decks of both ships.
The conditions were beyond awful. I’ve read here how, in “an extreme case, it was reported that people were packed onto a deck which only had eighteen inches between the floor and ceiling.”
Records show the White Lion captain, John Colyn Jope, sailed for the Virginia colony to sell the African captives, first landing in Point Comfort, in modern-day Hampton Roads.
John Rolfe, secretary of the colony of Virginia, wrote to Virginia Company of London treasurer Edwin Sandys:
About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunnes arrived at Point-Comfort, the Comandors name Capt Jope, his Pilott for the West Indies one Mr Marmaduke an Englishman. They mett with the Treasurer in the West Indyes, and determined to hold consort shipp hetherward, but in their passage lost one the other. He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victualls (whereof he was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rates they could. — Encyclopedia Virginia
The White Lion landed at Point Comfort, now Fort Monroe, near Jamestown, at the end of August 1619.
After casting anchor, the crew disembarked the twenty enslaved people on board, who were then sold in exchange for provisions.
Three or four days later, the Treasurer arrived with a second group of enslaved people; some were put ashore before the ship fled, fearing arrest.
Of those put ashore, one of them was likely Angela. What a bizarre landscape caught Angela’s eye that day!
How strange must it have seemed when compared to the highlands of Ndongo?
Angela would have been around 20 years old when she first set foot on the muddy banks of Jamestown.
As Angela’s chained limbs set foot in America, this marked the beginning of a dark period in the history of the United States.
250 years of slavery ensued.
It is around her saga that the celebration of the arrival, 400 years ago, of the first African slaves in this part of the world takes place, a process that has placed Jamestown and Point Comfort in the annals of US history.
At the beginning of 1620, there were 30 Africans registered in Virginia. The records show Angela’s name appeared on the colony’s census documents in 1624 and 1625.
The Encyclopedia Virginia recounts how Angela had been sold to Captain William Peirce, a tobacco planter and merchant, to serve as help for his household and to tend to the estate’s grounds.
In 1622, local indigenous people attacked the colony and killed 347 of the inhabitants; Angela survived.
The attack was followed by a period of famine, which Angela also survived. In 1625, she was listed in the Virginia Colony muster as one of four servants enslaved by the Peirces and the only black person.
After 1625, Angela no longer appears in the historical record.
The history of the first Africans in America is still open for debate and continues to divide the opinions of scholars and historians.
In 2019, an article published in Time Magazine claimed that the first slaves arrived in St. Augustine, Florida, at the time a Spanish colony, in 1565 on board a Spanish slave ship.
What is indisputable is the hard truth of the hard figures. According to data from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson, between 1525 and 1866, 12 million Africans were sent to the New World. Of those, only 10.7 million survived the crossing, landing in North America, the Caribbean, and South America.
The numbers are staggering, but what seems surprising at first sight is how only a small percentage, 388,000 Africans, were shipped directly to North America.
Some historians estimate that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans were sent to the United States after landing first on the Caribbean shores.
The latest estimates conclude that around 450,000 Africans arrived in the United States throughout the slave trade.
February is National Black History Month in the United States, and on the 25th, here in Portugal, we’ll be celebrating the 155th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.
Angela’s legacy binds our nations and will forever be linked to the twists of fate that took a young woman from her ancestral home in the hills of Ndongo to the Portuguese capital, and from there to the New World.
You can never know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.— Amelia Boynton
General references:
- “How Many Slaves Landed in the US?,” The Root, January 6, 2014.
- “EUA comemoram chegada de Angela, a “Eva” dos escravos africanos,” Estado de Minas, 2017.
- “Meet ‘Angela,’ One of the 1st Slaves to Arrive in America,” The Root, December 5, 2017.
- First enslaved Africans arrive in Jamestown, setting the stage for slavery in North America, History, August 13, 2019.
- “The First Africans in Virginia Landed in 1619. It Was a Turning Point for Slavery in American History — But Not the Beginning,” Time Magazine, August 20, 2019.
- “America’s History of Slavery Began Long Before Jamestown,” History, August 26, 2019.
- “Chamava-se Angela, embarcou em Lisboa e foi a primeira escrava dos EUA,” Sábado, August 20, 2019.
- “Eram angolanos os primeiros escravos que chegaram à América do Norte,” Club-K, August 27, 2019.