The first Negro captives were brought into the port of Jamestown in the year 1619. They were brought by a foreign ship then described as a "Dutch" ship, but presumably a Portuguese slaver seeking the enlargement of his market. The Portuguese had developed a market for Negro slaves in the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean where the enslaved Indians proved unable to perform the hard work demanded of them. Unhappily the slavers succeeded in widening their market to include Virginia and the other English colonies of the American continent and in the West Indies. The first Negroes were brought to Jamestown in 1619 and sold to English masters as indentured servants. As such they were required to serve for a definite number of years and after that they would become freemen entitled to all the benefit of Virginia law. The goal set before them, as before immigrants from France and the Netherlands, was eventual freedom and naturalization as full citizens. The tragedy of the Negro was that he had been procured by the Portuguese as a captive taken in war between the native Negro tribes, and he came into the life of Virginia utterly ignorant of every British ideal of human freedom and government under constitutional law. He knew nothing of the English language. The indentured Englishman or Scotsman who was sold into service came with inherited knowledge of Anglo-Saxon ideals of civil government and Christian faith; and the one great goal set before him was that he could become a legal citizen of Virginia after he completed his years of servitude. The Negro knew nothing of all this. There would have been little difficulty if the few Negroes in the first ship had been all who came. The government could have provided for their care and for their instruction in English ideals and the Christian faith. But they were not all who came. The first indentured Negroes proved useful as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and they were capable of far more work in the fields than many of the Englishmen: and so the agrarian needs of the community where all men were farmers made the governmental authorities willing to admit more Negroes. The authorities must have realized at once that if Negroes were brought into the colony in great number they could not be permitted to become freemen after any period of indenture. That would have brought into the life of Virginia a steadily growing population of men and women who knew nothing of English institutions, or of the English language, or of the Christian religion. The welfare of the colony required that if they were to be admitted at all, they could be admitted only as servants under a permanent status of servitude. So slavery was introduced into the British empire; and in America the enslavement of the Negro was permitted in New England as well as in Virginia, the Carolinas and in Georgia.