at the time, and a part of the account of the affair has been preserved. In his diary we read that " a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars touched at Jamestown this year." Little more is known about it, and it is not even ascertained from what part of Africa these negroes came, or how they were captured.
The history of the American slave-trade, however, dates from this historical event. The Dutchman came there because on the high seas when he had his slaves on board he met with a Virginia ship, the Treasurer, and those aboard of the latter told him that they wanted slaves in Jamestown. Afterwards the Treasurer brought negro slaves to Virginia, and indeed she was the first ship fitted out for the slave-trade in this country. She had quite a history afterwards, and it has been very well told in the Magazine of American History (November 1891) by a writer of authority. In the year 1636 we see in the ship Desire the first craft built in the United States for the very purpose of plying in this nefarious traffic. Still other vessels landed them along the coast at various points, yet in 1649 not over fifty negro slaves had been imported into Virginia. Booker T. Washington the negro president of the colored institute at Tuskegee, Alabama, in his book entitled The Future of the American Negro, utterly ignores the introduction of the thousands, yes, tens of thousands, of slaves that were landed in this country during the entire slave-trade period, and makes the foolish attempt to hoodwink his readers by having them believe that all the negroes in the United States at the present time are descended from those constituting the first cargo brought to Virginia. He makes the statement thus: "The first slaves were brought into
