The system of binding servants for so many years tended to check the growth of slavery; but there is little doubt that during the first hundred years of American colonisation the influx of negro slaves reached alarming proportions. In 1620 a Dutch ship landed twenty negroes from the Guinea coast at the recently established Jamestown. From this small beginning the cursed traffic grew, and so rapidly that in 1637, and on many later occasions, enactments were passed to check all intercourse between whites and blacks. Within twenty years of the introduction of slavery there were in Virginia about three hundred blacks, while twelve years later the number had reached one thousand. It is not to be wondered at that the growth was so rapid, for the trade was a lucrative one,[228] and it was difficult to check when the first in the land participated in its spoils. Thus in 1662 the Royal African Company was founded with James, Duke of York, at its head, and with his brother Charles II. as a large shareholder. The negroes were in theory regarded as mere chattels, and to check risings such as those of 1678, 1712, and 1741, barbarous laws were passed against them. On the other hand, as individuals they were as a general rule comfortably clothed, fed, and housed; they had many amusements, and their work was not as arduous as has so often been described. At one time it was an understood thing in the colonies that the lord had the _jus vitae necisque_ over his slaves, but at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Crown made the murder of a negro a capital offence, a decision vigorously upheld by Governor Spotswood. The number of slaves on each plantation varied very much; the average may, perhaps, be placed at thirty. But the largest owner in Virginia possessed 900; while in Maryland this was easily beaten by an owner with 1300. In the eighteenth century the negroes far outnumbered the whites in South Carolina; but in New York they only formed about one-sixth the total population. In Maryland and Virginia they were as one to three, while in the middle colonies it is calculated that a ratio of one to seven would give a rough estimate of their numbers.