Melungeon-L Archives
Archiver > Melungeon > 2004-09 > 1096428217
From:
Subject: Origin of the Melungeons - 1619, Part 4
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 23:23:37 EDT
"Origin of the Melungeons - 1619, Part 4
by Tim Hashaw
all rights reserved.
The White Lion arrives first
So it was that John Rolfe, an eyewitness in Jamestown, Virginia wrote to
London Company president Edwin Sandys, "About the latter end of August, a Dutch
man of Warr of the burden of 160 tons arrived at Point Comfort…3 or 4 days
(ahead of the) the Treasurer." 15
The only thing "Dutch" about the White Lion when she arrived in the
Chesapeake in 1619 was the letter of Marque she carried from Prince Maurice of Nassau
giving her permission to attack Spanish and Portuguese ships. But John Rolfe
was an ally of Samuel Argall who was being prosecuted in London by Edwin
Sandys over the activities of the White Lion's consort, the ship Treasurer.
The Pilgrim founders were still living in Holland and England when the White
Lion anchored in Virginia with her Africans. The Puritans had not yet heard
of a vessel called the Mayflower. Massachusetts, Plymouth Rock, Cape Cod;
these names were not in the plans of the Leyden Pilgrims in August of 1619. But
the White Lion set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the
Pilgrims' anchorage in Cape Cod in December of 1620.
For nearly four hundred years those events were obscured by a conspiracy in
1619 to protect powerful men who had turned Jamestown into a haven for pirates.
The approach to Jamestown
In 1607 the English settlers who first landed in Virginia with Capt. John
Smith intentionally placed Jamestown about 40 miles upriver from Chesapeake Bay
as a defense from roving Spanish and French warships constantly patrolling for
signs of an English presence along the Atlantic coast of North America.
These first English colonists named this river and their town after James - the
king who chartered the Virginia Company to plant the colony.
To guard the earliest villages and plantations along the James and York
rivers, the settlers built a small wooden stockade on the coast of Chesapeake Bay
between the mouths of these rivers at present day Hampton, Virginia. The site
was called after the local Indian name Kecnoughtan and the stockade was named
Point Comfort. Old Point Comfort later became known as "the Gibraltar of the
Chesapeake" because of its strategic location as the international entrance
to Washington D.C.
In the early 17th century any strange ship that sailed up either the James or
the York rivers without first anchoring and obtaining permission from the
commander of Point Comfort was regarded as hostile. In 1619, the commander of
Point Comfort was Capt. William Tucker.
Capt. Tucker is one of the key players in the conspiracy to conceal the
details of the Africans' historic arrival. Though an active officer in the new
Yeardley-Sandys administration in the summer of 1619, William Tucker was
actually appointed to the command one year earlier by then governor Samuel Argall and
Tucker's loyalty remained with Argall and the earl of Warwick. Capt.
Tucker's brother-in-law Maurice Thomson was Lord Rich's business manager. In fact,
when Capt. Tucker was commissioned by the Virginia Company two years later to
explore rivers and contact local Indians for trade, Lord Rich gave him for that
expedition the very pinnace he had sent to Virginia in April 1619 to rescue
Argall; the vessel Eleanor. 16
Capt. Tucker's presence at Point Comfort proved fortunate for the crew of the
Treasurer straggling in the wake of the White Lion. In Jamestown, forty
miles up river from Point Comfort, newly appointed governor George Yeardley was
waiting with Sandys' warrant to seize the Treasurer.
But a small group of conspirators were already plotting to see that didn't
happen.
It is at Point Comfort that the supporters of the earl of Warwick schemed to
rescue the Treasurer from Gov. Yeardley and revise the true story of the
arrival of the first Africans. Here occurred the plot that obscured the identity
of the White Lion for four centuries as a "Dutch" man-o-war. And Point
Comfort is where the mystery can be re-constructed to reveal what actually happened
that week in the summer of 1619 when the White Lion and the Treasurer arrived
with sixty former subjects of Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, Angola, recently stolen
from the Portuguese who had raided Ndongo in 1618.
Two Virginians, both close allies of the earl of Warwick, left the only known
eyewitness reports of the events of that week. For nearly 400 years most of
what was known about the arrival of the first Africans in America came from
the letter John Rolfe wrote to Edwin Sandys, president of the Virginia Company
in January of 1620.
It is important to remember that Capt. Rolfe was appointed to be the colony's
Secretary and Recorder when the Argall administration came to power in 1617.
John Rolfe was in fact allied against Edwin Sandys - the man to whom his
letter describing the "Dutch" man o war was addressed.
The widower of Pocahontas informed Sandys that "About the latter end of
August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of 160 tons arrived at Point Comfort.
The Commander's name Capt. Jope, his Pilot for the West Indies, Mr. Marmaduke an
Englishman. They met with the "Treasurer" in the West Indies and determined
to hold consort ship hitherward, but in their passage lost one the other. He
(Jope) brought not any thing but 20 and odd Negroes, which the Governor
(George Yeardley) and Cape Merchant (Abraham Piersey) bought for victuals whereof he
was in great need as he pretended, at the best and easiest rate they could.
He had a large and ample commission from his Excellency (Prince Maurice of
Holland) to range and to take purchase in the West Indies."
Then, Rolfe informed Sandys, "Three or four days after (the Dutch ship) the
"Treasurer" arrived. At his arrival he (Elfrith) sent word present to the
Governor (Yeardley) to know his pleasure, who wrote to him, and did request myself
(John Rolfe), Leiftenate Peace (William Pierce) and Mr. EWENS (William Ewens)
to go down to him, to desire him to come up to James City. But before we got
down he had set sail and was gone out of the Bay. The occasion hereof
happened by the unfriendly dealing of the Inhabitants of Kecnoughtan, (Point
Comfort) for he was in great want of victual, wherewith they would not relieve him
nor his Company upon any terms." 17
Ewens is the man who will later set the African John Geaween from servitude.
John Geaween was the father of Mihill Gowen who is an ancestor of the
Melungeon Goins.
Upon his arrival behind the White Lion, Daniel Elfrith learned to his
surprise that his boss Gov. Argall had disappeared and a new governor ruled in
Jamestown. According to Rolfe's letter, the Treasurer then fled Jamestown and
records show it arrived weeks later in Bermuda with its share of the Portuguese
slaver's Angolans.
John Rolfe was the official Recorder of the Virginia colony. It was his
responsibility to record for the Company in London the name of every ship that
arrived and departed Virginia along with information about the ship's date of
arrival and departure, nationality, captain, cargo delivered, cargo picked up,
exact size and quantity of the cargo and the ship's outbound destination. Yet
in Rolfe's letter to Edwin Sandys, he manages to be either vague or misleading
in almost all of these details.
John Rolfe knew that Edwin Sandys was investigating Lord Rich and Samuel
Argall for piracy. Therefore he intentionally obscured many details of the
arrival of the White Lion and the Treasurer and their cargo of Africans with
Spanish-sounding name; Africans whose presence proved that the corsairs had raided a
Spanish ship in violation of King James' treaty with Spain.
According to the scenario presented by John Rolfe, the White Lion arrived at
Point Comfort in late August and was allowed by the new governor George
Yeardley to proceed up James River to Jamestown. At Jamestown, Capt. Jope traded
about two dozen Africans from the group that the White Lion had taken from the
Portuguese frigate, the Bautista, in the West Indies one month earlier. Jope,
according to Rolfe, traded his stolen Africans to only two men; the
wealthiest men in the colony; Gov. George Yeardley and Cape merchant Abraham Piersey;
both of whom were Edwin Sandys' agents.
Rolfe's letter pointedly informed Sandys that the Company president's own
people were engaged in trafficking with the pirates...even as Sandys was
prosecuting Argall for piracy. Whether Rolfe intentionally omitted names of other
planters (planters loyal to Lord Rich and Samuel Argall) who bought Africans from
the White Lion, is a possibility. Both Gov. Yeardley and Piersey, the
colony's chief business administrator, owned tobacco plantations in need of
laborers. They did not purchase these first Africans to sell to other settlers.
They purchased them to work on their own plantations.
Curiously, for someone waiting to seize an English crew on suspicion of
pirating a Spanish vessel, Gov. Yeardley seemed unconcerned about buying Africans
stolen from the English crew that had joined in plundering the same Spanish
ship. Jope's letter of Marque from Prince Maurice might afford Gov. Yeardley
with the veneer of legality, but everyone understood as Ambassador Sir Thomas Roe
had complained to the East India Company in 1617, that these foreign
certificates were "a common pretence of being Piratts."
A few days behind Capt. Jope and the White Lion, according to Rolfe, the
Treasurer arrived. However, he reports, the crew of the Treasurer unlike the
White Lion, received an "unfriendly" reception at Point Comfort and quickly sailed
away.
But had the widower of Pocahontas provided a true account of actual events?
A census of Virginia in 1624 revealed that the Rolfe family owned an African
woman named Angela who, according to the census, had been delivered to
Virginia onboard the ship the Treasurer. Either John Rolfe altered details in his
letter to Edwin Sandys, or the African woman named Angela came to Virginia on a
ghost ship, for not long after fleeing Virginia at the latter end of August
1619, the proud corsair Treasurer was a rusting wreck on a Bermuda beach!
...to be continued
Tim Hashaw
This thread: