Englishmen had already explored the Chesapeake. Indeed, the Secretary of the Virginia
Colony, William Claiborne started a small trading post in the province on Kent Island in 1631, but
Claibome did not have a royal grant.5

A.        Indentured Servant to Free Man in the Province's First Years

Mathias DeSousa came with his fellow colonists on the Ark and the Dove. Nine surviving
documents mention a person with that name or a variant thereof. In a colony of Englishmen, the
name was unique. The references are spare - a tantalizing glimpse of facts relating to an individual
which leave most of his life to the imagination. The documents are silent on when or where
DeSousa was born or died, nor do they state why he came to Maryland, what he thought of the land,
what religious ideas he held, who his friends were, or how other colonists treated him. These
documents and the other records of the period provide a reasonable basis for a few conclusions.
Such conclusions are not infallible, but they are important nonetheless in establishing a baseline for
understanding the relationship between race and law in Maryland.

One of the first records of DeSousa1 s presence in Maryland is a claim filed by Ferdinando
Pulton, also known as Father John Brock, who came in 1638 to act as the father superior of the
Maryland Jesuits. A headlight dated October 9, 1639 states the demand of Ferdinando Pulton for
land "as an assignee of Mr. Andrew White brought into the province Anno 1633 ... Mathias Sousa,
a Molato."6 The designation of Sousa as a mullato demonstrates that his ethnic origin was
considered significant. The word comes from the Spanish and Portugese "mulato" meaning mule,
hence a half-breed. It has been traced in English use to the sixteenth century where it was apparently
a reference to the immediate offspring of a negro and a white person.7 Thus, DeSousa, one of the
original colonists of Maryland, was a man of African descent.

The colonists landed in an area occupied by the Yaocomico indians. Bothered by raids from
the Susquehanna, the Yaocomico indians were already planning to move. In exchange for axes,
hatchets, rakes and cloth, the Yaocomico sold the colonists thirty miles of land, including their huts
and fields.8 The colonists named the central area of their new colony St. Mary's. Before leaving, the
indians showed DeSousa and the other settlers how to clear land for planting by girdling trees to kill
them. The dead leafless trees permitted enough sunlight to reach the crops so that it was not
necessary to fell them. The settlers at first planted only com and other food crops for subsistence,
but attempts to create a trade in furs for export to England were disappointing and by 1635 they
began to cultivate tobacco as the basic good for export.9 Thus, DeSousa and his fellow colonists
spent much of their time preparing seed beds for the tobacco crop, weeding the beds and picking off
the worms, transplanting the plants, topping the plant to prevent flowering, removing leaves and
suckers which grew between the leaves, picking the leaves, hanging them to cure and packing them.10
Cultivation of tobacco was enormously time consuming compared to the food crops which the
settlers grew for subsistence, but it became so critical to the colony that it was adopted as the
medium of exchange. It also swiftly exhausted the soil, forcing the colonists to be constantly
concerned with clearing new land for the crop.