every vessel having slaves on board which could not show a license from that corporation.[1] The promptness with which the Governor sought to enforce the commands received from England was probably due in a measure to an event of the same year, which proved that there were shipmasters who, in the absence of this license, would seek to bring their cargoes of negroes into the Colony by stealth. In October, for want of provisions it was afterwards alleged, one hundred and twenty slaves were landed at a lonely point on the Eastern Shore, from the English ship Society of Bristol, which, we may infer, had come directly from Africa, since a large quantity of elephants’ tusks formed a part of its cargo. The vessel on the same day was allowed to drift on the shore and go to wreck. The Collector of the district seized it, its crew and cargo. The negroes and ivory were sold for tobacco, because they had been forfeited under the law by the failure of their owners to pay the port duties.[2]
In the last decade of the seventeenth century, the number of African head rights in the Patent Books[3] show a notable increase in the importation of slaves. They become now the most important basis of the acquisition of title to land. In numerous cases, the list of names are restricted to negroes, as many as twenty-seven, sixty-four, seventy-nine, and eighty-four being included at one time. The average number, however, was only nine or ten. It had grown now to be a comparative rarity for a patent to be obtained on the basis of head rights representing white servants alone, the proportion of slaves to white servants even in the smaller grants being as high as one-third or even one-fourth.
