ABSTRACT
The first Dutch slave ship, Jesus, reached Jamestown in 1619. During the middle passage - the term used for the voyage of the slave ship - many members of its African cargo jumped overboard and died in a vain attempt to swim back home. Those Africans who arrived in the New World brought with them their culture. Vesey was bom into a Pan-African environment. He was a slave when Pan-African consciousness was bom, and a young adult when hundreds of thousands of Africans were imported into the West Indies and North America. Nearly 40 000 slaves were brought into South Carolina alone between 1800 and 1807. In 1920 the father of modem African-American history, Dr Carter G. Woodson, wrote: ‘one of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United States is that treating the relations of Negroes and Indians.’ He believed that slaves ‘found among the Indians one of their means of escape’.
