BEN AND JERRYS

Ben andJerry’s are awfully smug and lippy for a sub-brand of the massive Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever. I’m not sure they fully understand the legacy of the respective Dutch and British colonial powers.THE BRITISH COLONY IN VIRGINIA First enslaved Africans arrive in Jamestown, setting the stage for slavery in North America Hulton On August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists. The arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World marks a beginning of two and a half centuries of slavery in North America. Founded at Jamestown in 1607, the Virginia Colony was home to about 700 people by 1619. The first enslaved Africans to arrive in Virginia disembarked at Point Comfort, in what is today known as Fort Monroe. Most of their names, as well as the exact number who remained at Point Comfort, have been lost to history, but much is known about their journey. They were originally kidnapped by Portuguese colonial forces, who sent captured members of the native Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms on a forced march to the port of Luanda, the capital of modern-day Angola. From there, they were ordered on the ship San Juan Bautista, which set sail for Veracruz in the colony of New Spain. As was quite common, about 150 of the 350 captives aboard the ship died during the crossing. Then, as it approached its destination, the ship was attacked by two privateer ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer. Crews from the two ships kidnapped up to 60 of the Bautista’s enslaved people. It was the White Lion which docked at Virginia Colony's Point Comfort and traded some of the prisoners for food on August 20, 1619. WATCH: The Middle Passage on HISTORY Vault Scholars note that the arrivals were technically sold as indentured servants. Indentured servants agreed, or in many cases were forced, to work with no pay for a set amount of time, often to pay off a debt and could legally expect to become free at the end of the contract. Many Europeans who arrived in the Americas came as indentured servants. Despite this classification—and records which indicate that some of them did eventually obtain their freedom—it is clear that the Africans arriving at Point Comfort in 1619 were forced into servitude and that they fit the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ definition of enslaved peoples. The arrival at Point Comfort marked a new chapter in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began in the early 1500s and continued into the mid-1800s. The trade uprooted roughly 12 million Africans, depositing roughly 5 million in Brazil and over 3 million in the Caribbean. Though the number of Africans brought to mainland North America was relatively small—roughly 400,000—their labor and that of their descendants was crucial to the economies of the British colonies and, later, the United States. READ MORE: How Slavery Became the Economic Engine of the South Two of the Africans who arrived aboard the White Lion, Antonio and Isabella, became “servants” of Captain William Tucker, commander of Point Comfort. Their son William is the first known African child to have been born in America, and under the law of the time he was born a freeman. In the coming decades, however, slavery became codified. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-african-slave-ship-arrives-jamestown-colony?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2022-0820-08202022&om_rid=4db4988918fc0ba1f9725b0b7feaed59af7c45e96fdc463730ef7a247b2920c5&~campaign=hist-tdih-2022-0820Servants of African origin were oftentimes forced to