"Ship Passenger Lists: National and New England (1600-1825)," Edited and Indexed by Carl Boyer III, Published by the Compiler, Newhall, California, 1977, Pages 164-171. Let these pages serve as a rude awakening for those who believe that only persons of African ancestry were enslaved in America. These "passenger lists" were of Scottish prisoners captured by the forces of Oliver Cromwell at the Battles of Dunbar and Worcester during the English Civil War. They were shipped to the New World in chains and sold into slavery. These were not the "indentured servants" we were told about in school, who were laboring to pay back the cost of their passage to the land of liberty. Nor were these "apprentices" bound to a master to learn a valuable trade. The freighters of the ship "John and Sara," who signed their ship's manifest "your loving friends," described their human cargo as "servants to be disposed of." As the Reverend John Cotton wrote to Lord General Cromwell, "They have not been sold for slaves to perpetual servitude, but for 6 or 7 or 8 years." The going rate for a healthy Scottish slave was about £30. As the average cost of passage across the Atlantic Ocean was about £3, the freighters cleared a handsome profit. The names of David Hambleton, misspelled as "Hamilton," and Richard Jaxson, misspelled as "Jackson," appear on the passenger list for the "John and Sara," which sailed from Gravesend, near London, on 8 November 1651 (Page 155, Columns 2 and 3). The name of David "Hamilton" appears again among the list of seventeen Scottish prisoners sold into slavery at a sawmill at near Berwick, Maine. David Hambleton was my direct ancestor, ten generations before me. His wife, Annah Jaxson, was the daughter of Richard Jaxson.
On 28 September 1691, long after gaining his freedom from white slavery, David Hambleton was killed by Indians. His wife Annah Jaxson was likewise "destroyed by the enemy." Their house and land fell under the English law of primogeniture, passing into the hands of their eldest son, David Hambleton, Jr. He was claimed to be a "town charge," unable to support himself. The Board of Selectmen of the Town of Dover sold the entire estate in order to pay for his maintenance for two years, leaving eight sons not only orphaned but landless. The youngest son, James, still a minor, was shipped to the Northern Neck of Virginia in 1699 and "ordered to serve according to law," pursuant to a 1618 British law under which orphaned children could be kidnapped and forced into slavery on colonial plantations. James Hambleton was a "servant" for thirteen and a half years, twice the length of time we were told about in our history books. Under Virginia law, white slaves could be bound until the age of thirty-one. Accordingly, James Hambleton, born in 1682, was freed in 1713. James Hambleton was also my direct ancestor, nine generations before me. For lurid court records of his ordeal, look HERE