ervants for
the colony as the wages demanded were intolerable. A day's work brought,
in addition to food, a pound of tobacco valued at one shilling, while in
England the unskilled worker considered himself fortunate if he could
earn so much in a week.[2-16]

In his efforts to solve this acute problem the planter found little hope
in the aborigines. The Spaniards, it is true, had made use of the
Indians to till their fields or work in the gold and silver mines, but
the Pamunkey and the Powhatan were cast in a different mold from the
Aztec and the Peruvian. To hunt them out of their native lairs and bind
them to arduous and ignominious servitude was hardly to be thought of.
Their spirit was too proud to be thus broken, the safe refuge of the
woods too near at hand. One might as well have attempted to hitch lions
and tigers to the plough shaft, as to place these wild children of the
forest at the handles. At times it proved practicable to make use of
Indian children for servants, and there are numerous instances on record
in which they are found in the homes of the planters.[2-17] But this, of
course, could be of little service in solving the pressing labor
problem, in clearing new ground or tilling the idle fields. The Virginia
landowner was forced to turn elsewhere for his helpers.

In 1619 a Dutch privateer put into the James river and disembarked
twenty Africans who were sold to the settlers as slaves. This event, so
full of evil portent for the future of Virginia, might well have
afforded a natural and satisfactory solution of the labor problem.
Slaves had long been used in the Spanish colonies, proving quite
competent to do the work of tending the tobacco plants, and bringing
handsome returns to their masters. But it was impossible at this time
for England to supply her plantations with this type of labor. The
slave trade was in the hands of the Dutch, who had fortified themselves
on the African coast and jealously excluded other nations. Thus while
the demand for negro slaves remained active in the colony, they
increased in numbers very slowly. The muster of 1624-25 shows only
22.[2-18] During the following half century there was a small influx of
negroes, but their numbers were still too small to affect seriously the
economic life of the colony.[2-19]

The settlers were thus forced to look to England itself to supply them
with hands for their tobacco fields. They knew that in the mother
country were many thousan