The Origins of Emanuell Cambow

Tim Hashaw in his book “The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown” makes reference to the origins of Emanuell Cambow and his Cumbo descendants.

In the book he writes the following in reference to the origins of Emanuell Cambow and his Cumbo descendants in Colonial America:

The African Cumbo family first appeared in Jamestown documents in September 1644 and they, too, survived and traveled far from the colony over many generations.  That year, the Virginia House of Burgesses ruled Manuel Cambow was a Christian Servant and ordered that he was to serve as other Christians in indenture.  He was freed in September 1665 and, two years later, was granted fifty acres in James City County, near the free black Mihill Gowen, son of John Graweere and Margaret Cornish.  In the papers that recorded the land patent, Cambow was described as a Negro.  Several clues indicate that Manuel Cambow was a Bantu from Angola.  First, Cambo (possibly derived from Kambol, a royal name of Ndongo) was an African with a Christian Portuguese name who appeared in Jamestown between 1619 and 1650, when West India Company records show that virtually all of the three hundred or so Africans in Jamestown were being brought to the colony by Protestant  pirates raiding Portuguese and Spanish slave ships sailing from Luanda, Angola.  Second a few generations later, to escape laws restricting rights of black Americans, Manuel Cambow’s descendants were telling census takers that they were Portuguese.  Third his descendants merged quickly and easily into the Angolan malangu communities in Jamestown and married into the free families of Collinses, Driggers, Gowens, Hammonds, and Matthews.