“Mr. Pierce, in the Salem ship, the Desire, returned from the West Indies after seven months.  He had been at Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and negroes, &c., from thence, and salt from Tertugos....  Dry fish and strong liquors are the only commodities for those parts.  He met there two men-of-war, sent forth by the lords, &c., of Providence with letters of mart, who had taken divers prizes from the Spaniard and many negroes."[265]

“The Desire” was built at Marblehead in 1636;[266] was of one hundred and twenty tons, and perhaps one of the first built in the colony.  There is no positive proof that “The Mayflower,” after landing the holy Pilgrim Fathers, was fitted out for a slave-cruise!  But there is no evidence to destroy the belief that “The Desire” was built for the slave-trade.  Within a few years from the time of the building of “The Desire,” there were quite a number of Negro slaves in Massachusetts.  “John Josselyn, Gen’t” in his “Two Voyages to New England,” made in “1638, 1663,” and printed for the first time in 1674,[267] gives an account of an attempt to breed slaves in Massachusetts.

“The Second of October, (1639) about 9 of the clock in the morning, Mr. Maverick’s Negro woman came to my chamber window, and in her own Countrey language and tune sang very loud and shril, going out to her, she used a great deal of respect towards me, and willingly would have expressed her grief in English; but I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment, whereupon I repaired to my host, to learn of him the cause, and resolved to entreat him in her behalf, for that I understood before, that she had been a Queen in her own Countrey, and observed a very humble and dutiful garb used towards her by another Negro who was her maid.  Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a breed of Negroes, and therefore seeing she would not yield by persuasions to company with a Negro young man he had in his house; he commanded him will’d she nill’d she to go to bed to her, which was no sooner done but she kickt him out again, this she took in high disdain beyond her slavery, and this was the cause of her grief."[268]

It would appear, at first blush, that slavery was an individual speculation in the colony; but the voyage of the ship “Desire” was evidently made with a view of securing Negro slaves for sale.  Josselyn says, in 1627, that the English colony on the Island of Barbados had “in a short time increased to twenty thousand, besides Negroes."[269] And in 1637 he says that the New Englanders “sent the male children of Pequets to the Bermudus."[270] It is quite likely that many individuals of large means and estates had a few Negro slaves quite early,—­perhaps earlier than we have any record; but as a public enterprise in which the colony was interested, slavery began as early as 1638.  “It will be observed,” says Dr. Moore, “that this first entrance into