triangular trade, slavery, and indentured servants

Scholars when they talk about the slave trade into the Americas, particularly North America, often speak of the triangular trade. Most of the slaves who are carried on New England ships were actually not brought back to New England, but were instead carried to the sugar producing colonies of the Caribbean. And so what emerged in the 18th century was a triangular trade in which sugar and molasses produced by slaves in the Caribbean and Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and Haiti would find its way on New England ships back to places like Boston or Newport Rhode Island, where it would be distilled into rum. That rum then became a very important trade good on chips that would sail to Africa to acquire new cargoes of enslaved Africans. So that you ended up over the course of the 18th century getting this triangular traffic in which ships from New England laden with rum would acquire cargoes of African captives carry them to the Caribbean to produce more sugar and molasses to produce more Rome to produce more captives. In 1619, a year before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth rock, a mystery ship appeared out of a violent storm off the Virginia coast. No one recorded the ship's name. But somewhere on the high seas, she had robbed a Spanish vessel of a cargo of Africans. In search of supplies. She traded the Africans for food. They had been baptized and given Christian names. As Christians, they could not be enslaved for life under English law. Like most Europeans in the colony, they were purchased to work as servants for a limited number of years. The new arrival supplied much needed labor for the tobacco crop that was making men rich. Settlers were planting tobacco in the streets of Jamestown. Carving plantations out of the surrounding wilderness. And shipping some 60,000 pounds a year back to England. Once tobacco is established as a viable commodity, then the more land you control the bigger profits you can make and in order to make those profits you need more labor and you look for that labor wherever you can find it. Well, the colony builders initially intended to rely almost exclusively on white indentured servants as a labor force to cultivate the crops that were being grown in Virginia principally tobacco. And in order to create these raw materials of goods you often needed labor. Here's a hell to the company I want to remind the world the Africans entered was controlled by wealthy English men and populated by the English poor. Most under the age of 25. In return for passage to Virginia, they had traded four to 7 years of their labor. They were bound to a master by an indenture form. A contract that defined length of service and the conditions of servitude. Most were promised freedom dues after their service, a bushel of corn, a new suit of clothes, and 100 acres of land. Under Virginia's head rights system. A planter was entitled to 50 acres of land where each servant brought into the colony. The issue always was how long that indenture would be and under what conditions you would be forced to work at its best. It was a short friendly apprenticeship, you know, at its worst, it was a long and exploitative situation in which you might die before you ever obtained your freedom. By 1622, 3000 new settlers drawn by the opportunities of the tobacco boom, had arrived in Virginia. Two years later the first Negro child was born in the colony. He was named William Tucker after a Virginia planter.