N almost 400-year-old historical mystery surrounding the origins of some of the first African slaves to arrive in Bermuda has been solved, The has reported.

Historians in Jamestown have finally traced the lineage of the Africans who arrived in Bermuda and Virginia in 1619 to Angola.

The slaves were the first Africans to set foot in North America at the Jamestown colony established in 1607 ? and the second group to arrive in Bermuda, which saw the first slave arrive from the West Indies in 1616 four years after the island was permanently settled by the English.

For nearly 400 years, historians believed the Africans who arrived in Bermuda and Virginia in 1619 came from the West Indies aboard a Dutch warship.

Little else was known about them. But new scholarship and transatlantic detective work undertaken by Virginia's Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation has solved the puzzle of who the Africans were ? and where their enforced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began.

The slaves were herded onto a Portuguese slave ship in a region that is now part of the southwest African country of Angola. The ship was seized by the English on the high seas ?- not brought to Virginia after a period of time in the Caribbean.

They represented one ethnic group, not many, as historians had long believed. According to the , the discovery has resulted in new exhibits celebrating the slaves' identity and culture being included in Jamestown museum displays commemorating the 400th anniversary of the settlement's founding.

Although historians have thoroughly documented the direct slave trade from Africa starting in the 1700s, little was known of the first blacks who arrived in Virginia, Bermuda and other English colonies a century earlier.

"We went entirely back to the drawing board," said Tom Davidson, senior curator of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.

"The problem has always been that all of the things that make for a human story of the Africans were missing. . . . Now we can talk about the Africans with the same richness we talk about the English and the Powhatans."

How the story of the charter generation of Africans in Virginia and Bermuda has come to life is a tale of two scholars who helped connect two coasts of the Atlantic Ocean.

The early 1600s were a time of war and empire-building in southwest Africa; Portuguese traders under the rule of the king of Spain had established the colony of Angola.

The exporting of slaves to the Spanish New World was a profitable enterprise. The Portuguese waged war against the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo to the north, capturing and deporting thousands of men and women.

They passed through a slave fortress at the port city of Luanda, still Angola's capital. At Jamestown, tobacco was on the verge of a boom after the English settlers had failed at several industries. Indentured servants from England were common in the settlement, now close to 1,000 people strong.

John Rolfe, a survivor of the wreck in Bermuda in 1609 who a year later sailed to Jamestown aboard the locally-built , went on to become Virginia's first tobacco planter. He also married the fabled Indian princess Pocahontas and wrote the earliest known account of the 1619 African landing in a letter to the Virginia Company of London.

The captain of a Dutch warship that arrived in Jamestown in August 1619 "brought not any thing but 20 and odd Negroes". Rolfe explained that the ship and another called the had embarked from the West Indies.

A retired University of California at Berkeley historian, Engel Sluiter, made a startling discovery in the Spanish national archives in the late 1990s as he did research for a book on Spanish America.

A colonial shipping document he uncovered in an account book identified a Portuguese slave ship called the . About 350 slaves were bound for Veracruz, on the east coast of modern-day Mexico, when the ship was robbed of its human cargo off the coast of Mexico in 1619 by two unidentified pirate ships, the record said.

Mr. Sluiter, who died in 2001, published his discovery in an academic journal. It caught the eye of historian John Thornton, an expert on the Portuguese colonies in Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries. The outlines of the other half of the story took shape.

"I said, 'I can figure out how these people were enslaved'," said Mr. Thornton, a Boston University professor who, with his wife, historian Linda Heywood, is publishing a book on the slave trade between Angola and the North American colonies.

Previous scholarship has documented the slave trade from Ghana, Senegal and other parts of West Africa.

"We know Angola was a big exporter of slaves to Brazil and the Spanish colonies, but now we know that they showed up here," Mr. Thornton said.

Through records of a legal dispute between the pirate ships, Mr. Thornton identified the vessels as the British-owned and the

Each took 20 to 30 slaves before the continued to Veracruz. They landed at Jamestown within four days of each other and traded the Africans for provisions. The then sailed to Bermuda, dropping off more slaves, and returned to Virginia a few months later, trading the final nine or ten more.

The research draws a portrait of some of the first Africans in Bermuda as urban people connected by common languages, who had had contact with Europeans for many years.

They spoke Bantu languages called Kimbundu and Kikongo. Their homelands were the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, regions of modern-day Angola and coastal regions of Congo.

Both were conquered by the Portuguese in the 1500s. And they most likely had been baptised as Christians, because the Kingdom of Ngondo converted to Christianity in 1490. Many were literate.