Historic Jamestowne Visitor Center
The Jamestown Middle Passage Committee in cooperation with the National Park Service and Preservation Virginia cordially invites you to attend a Remembrance Ceremony and Marker Installation on Friday August 23 at 6pm. Join us as we honor the 2,000,000 Africans who died in the Middle Passage and the 500,000 enslaved survivors and their descendants who helped build this nation.
Please RSVP to 757.725.1653 or memogroup@cox.net no later than August 16.
AFRICANS ARRIVE AT JAMESTOWN
John Rolfe, Virginia tobacco planter and Secretary of the Colony of Virginia, documented the August 1619 arrival of the first Africans to land in Virginia at nearby Old Point Comfort (present day Hampton.) In a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys, Treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, Rolfe wrote that a Dutch man-of-war (actually an English privateer, the White Lion) “brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes.” Governor George Yeardley and the colony’s cape merchant met the ship and gave its captain some victuals in exchange for the Africans. Three or four days later, another group of Africans arrived on the ship Treasurer. Afterward, some of these first Africans were brought up to Jamestown.