Labor for the ever-increasing fields was another problem confronting the planter. King James decided that the London Company should solve this by transporting to Virginia English convicts, who thus removed from old environments and temptations might form a valuable industrial asset. Only one shipload of a hundred was sent, for about the same time a Dutch man-of-war arrived at Jamestown (August, 1619) and twenty negro slaves were sold to the planters. Qualms about such a transaction could scarcely be expected, for through all historic times it was only as a slave that the negro had been associated with other races. In ancient times he had been subservient to the Egyptians, bought for the Carthaginian galleys; slave to Assyrian, Arabian, Indian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman; and in early Christian centuries sold by the Venetians to the Moors of Spain.[3] When the existence of new lands became known and labor was needed for their development, the negro’s native country became a hunting ground where he was not only stalked by the Dutch and Portuguese, but by the French and English who also had posts for that purpose in Africa. In fact the English, including therein the colonists of New England, became more extensively engaged in the traffic than all other slave-trading European nations combined. Compunctions about slavery as about many other things came only with the moral awakening of a later generation. “Scarcely any one seems to have regarded the trade as wrong. Theologians had so successfully labored to produce a sense of the amazing, I might almost say generical, difference between those who were Christians and those who were not, that to apply to the latter the principles that were applied to the former, would have been deemed a glaring paradox. If the condition of the negroes in this world was altered for the worse, it was felt that their prospects in the next were greatly improved. Besides, it was remembered that, shortly after the deluge Ham had behaved disrespectfully to his drunken father, and it was believed that the Almighty had, in consequence, ordained negro slavery.”[4] The utility of the negro being at once proven, African slavery had become something of an institution in Virginia, before the _Mayflower_ with its handful of men, women, and children landed on Plymouth Rock.