How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States How and why slavery, America’s original sin, came to these shores and took hold is a story of accident and coincidence. It didn’t have to happen the way it did.  Not if a 17th-century Portuguese king hadn’t dreamed of a trans-African empire; if an obscure African kingdom had been more stable; if two pirate ships looking for gold hadn’t, in the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico, stumbled instead on a slave ship; if the pirates hadn’t sold the enslaved to settlers in a colony desperately short of labor. How '20 and odd' enslaved Africans became millions Explore the graphic And the story of where the enslaved people came from is one that most Americans have never heard and that historians in recent decades have had to radically alter. Once, scholars believed the first blacks to arrive in the Jamestown settlement probably came from the West Indies. Where they had originally come from in Africa was anyone’s guess. But two decades ago, a researcher found a shipping document in the Spanish national archives that told of a raid by two pirate ships in July 1619 on a slave ship, the San Juan Bautista, en route to Mexico. The pirates absconded with about 60 enslaved Africans. The timing coincided with the arrival in Virginia a month later of two ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, carrying the enslaved whom the pirates sold to several leading settlers. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2019/08/21/american-slavery-began-1619-project-documents-brutal-journey/1968793001/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatodaycomnation-topstories