if over five years, they were born at sea or in the West Indies. While the mind cannot contemplate the birth of the first negro on North American soil with the same emotions as those aroused by the birth of Virginia Dare,[1] the event nevertheless was one which cannot be regarded without a feeling of the profoundest interest when we reflect upon its association with the great events which were to come after. Whichever of these children, if either, was born in Virginia, it was the first of his race who could claim a nativity in the soil and an absolute identification with its history.[2]
It is an interesting fact that no African perished in the massacre of 1622, when three hundred and forty-five of the colonists fell by the tomahawks and arrows of the Indians. This can only be explained on the ground that their color had been influential in saving them from the ferocity of the savages. More than two years had passed since their arrival in Virginia, which allowed a sufficient interval for their partial distribution among the different settlements. Many of the negroes were doubtless still at Jamestown, one of the few places in the Colony from which the massacre was averted, but a number must have been at Fleur de Hundred, which did not escape that terrible visitation. Of the twenty-two negroes in Virginia in 1623, eleven were living at Fleur de Hundred, four at Warrasquoke, two at Elizabeth City, one at Jamestown Neck, three at Jamestown, and one on the plantation on the banks of the Powhatan opposite to that place. Their failure to increase in number during the five years imme-
- ↑ The first English child born in North America.
- ↑ The Spaniards are said to have occupied Jamestown Island in the previous century and to have sought to make a permanent settlement there, partly by means of the labors of their negro slaves. See Prof. John Fiske’s valuable and interesting Short History of the United States, pp. 42, 43.
