However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 African slaves ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portugese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.
After enslaved Native American laborers began to die due to exposure to disease, European powers began purchasing enslaved Africans, who became their primary labor source. Britain sent their first slave ships to the British West Indies to work on tobacco plantations and then later sugarcane plantations.
