Was the Mayflower a slave ship?

Answer 1

YES. Of the passengers on the Mayflower, 12 were white slaves. Between 1609 and the early 1800's, between one-half and two-thirds of all white colonists who came to the New World came as slaves. Do not confuse the white slaves with 'indentured servitude', these were (white) slaves*.

In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series; America and West Indies of 1701, we read of a protest over the "encouragement to the spiriting away of Englishmen without their consent and selling them for slaves, which hath been a practice very frequent and known by the name of kidnapping." In the British West Indies, plantation slavery was instituted as early as 1627. In Barbados by the 1640's there were an estimated 25,000 slaves, of whom 21,700 were White.

"In the Massachusetts Court of Assistants, whose records date to 1633, we find a 1638 description of a White man, one Gyles Player, as having been delivered up for a slave."

"George Downing wrote to John Winthrop, the colonial governor of Massachusetts in 1645, that planters who wanted to make a fortune in the British West Indies must procure White slave labor out of England if they wanted to succeed."

"The Englishman William Eddis, after observing White slaves in America wrote "Generally speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.""

"Governor Sharpe of Maryland colony compared the property interest of the planters in their White slaves, with the estate of an English farmer consisting of a 'Multitude of Cattle'."

* Not 'Indentured servants'; that term is a politically correct lie; White slaves - research it. The first black slaves were brought to America in 1619 - there were 19 of them. After that 19, brought on a Dutch vessel, the black slave trade to America essentially stopped for about a century. You see, when the Dutch ship carrying 19 blacks, (which is usually described as a 'ship load'), arrived in America, it arrived in the same year that hundreds of white slaves had (a true 'ship load'). And that ship load of white slaves, was not the first, nor the last. While the black slave trade to America was all but abandoned in 1619 for about one hundred years, the white slave trade thrived. This white slave trade was not just to America though; it was also to the West Indies. Actually, of the white slaves brought to the 'New World', about 80% of white slaves were brought to the West Indies, 20% to America. This does not take into account all of the white slaves brought to Africa and sold there to die in bondage also. All the while this white slave trade was taking place, the trans-Saharan slave trade was ongoing. Who was freed when Thomas Jefferson sent the united States Navy and united States Marines into Tripoli? "White slaves". So, this white slavery was still ongoing into the 1800's.

Answer 2

No. It was 102 people who sailed to settle in VA. Sixty of those were Pilgrims from the same village in England.

Answer 3

There were 20 indentured servants not slaves. They would be required to work for a set period of time and then could be free to pursue their own plans.