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setts from the charge with a statement which first disregarded the point in question and then disproved itself:1 "There hath been no company of blacks or slaves brought into the country since the beginning of this plantation, for the space of 50 years, onely one small Vessell about 2 yeares since, after 20 months' voyage to Madagascar, brought hither betwixt 40 & 50 Negroes, most women and children, sold here for 10 l., 15 l. & 20 l. apiece . . . : Now and then, 2 or 3 Negroes are brought hither from Barbadoes and other of his Majestie's plantations, and sold here for about 20 pounds apiece."
The archives of the southern colonies would probably throw much light on this period. Bruce says of Virginia:2 "It is common to find in the county records references to the vessels in which young negroes, who had been introduced into court to have their ages adjudged, had been brought into the colony. The names of New England ships are not infrequently mentioned as the vehicles of their importation." In the same connection Mr. Bruce cites from the records of York County (1675-84) an instance of the sale of a Spanish mulatto by a resident of Boston:3 "Know all men by these presents that I John Endicott, Cooper, of Boston in New England, have sold unto Richard Medlicott, a Spanish Mulatto, by name Antonio, I having full power to sell for his life time, but at ye request of William Taylor, I do sell him but for ten years from ye day that he shall disembark for Virginia, the ten years to begin, and at ye expiration of ye said 10 years, ye said Mulatto to be a free man to go wheresoever he pleases. I do acknowledge to have received full satisfaction of Medlicott." At the close of the century we have an early illustration of the way in which Boston and Newport were associated in the slave trade. In 1696 the brigantine Seaflower, owned by Boston merchants, brought from Africa to Rhode Island forty-seven negroes; Thomas Windsor, master of the vessel, sold fourteen of them in Rhode Island at from £30 to £35 per head, and carried the rest by land "to Boston, where his owners lived."4 Towards the close of the seventeenth century there were frequent complaints against the Royal African Company, both from colonists who were obliged to pay a monopoly price for their slaves and from merchants eager for the advantages of this trade. From the Barbadoes came the lament: "Heretofore we might send to Ginney for Negroes when we wanted them, and they stood us about seven Pound a Head. . . . But now we are shut out of this Trade, and a Company is put upon us, from whom we must have our Negroes, and no other way. A Company of London Merchants have got a Patent, excluding all others, to furnish the Plantations with Negroes; some great Men being joyned with them, with whom we were not able to contend. . . . And now we buy Negroes at the price of an engrossed commodity; the common rate of a good Negro on shipboard being twenty pound. And we are forced to scramble for them in so shameful a manner, that one of the great Burdens of our Lives is the going to buy Negroes."5 The attitude taken by the merchants is shown in "Some Considerations" on the subject of the trade: "Wherefore since it is evidently demonstrable, that it is no charge to carry on and manage the Slave-Trade, and of what great Concern it is to encourage and support the English Plantations, whereby the Navigation of the Kingdom, Revennues of the Crown, and the General Good of this Nation is so much advanced, therefore it is humbly hoped that the Trade from Acra to Angola inclusive may be henceforth judged 2 Bruce, Econ. Hist. of Va., II, 8r. 3 Bruce, Econ. Hist. of va., II, 8r. 4 Weeden, II, 455 5 Quoted by Cunningham, p. 278 n., from Groans of the Plantations, 1689, p. 5.
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