often young people who intended to become permanent residents. In some cases, convicted criminals were transported to the colonies as indentured laborers, rather than being imprisoned. The indentured laborers were not slaves, but were required to work for 4-7 years in states such as Virginia and Maryland in exchange for the cost of their passage and maintenance. The first Africans to reach the colonies that England was struggling to establish were a group of some 20 enslaved people who arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, near Jamestown, in August 1619, brought by British privateers who had seized them from a captured Portuguese slave ship. Colonists do not appear to have made indenture contracts for most Africans. Although it is possible that some of them were freed after a certain period, most of them remained enslaved for life. The historian Ira Berlin noted that what he called the "charter generation" in the colonies was sometimes made up of mixed-race men (Atlantic Creoles) who were indentured servants and whose ancestry was African and Iberian. They were descendants of African women and Portuguese or Spanish men who worked in African ports as traders or facilitators in the trade of enslaved people. The transformation of the status of Africans, from indentured servitude to slaves in a racial caste that they could not leave or escape, happened over the next generation. First slave laws There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history, but, in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch, an African, to life in servitude after he attempted to flee his service. The two whites with whom he fled were sentenced only to an additional year of their indenture, and three years' service to the colony. This marked the first de facto legal sanctioning of slavery in the English colonies and was one of the first legal distinctions made between Europeans and Africans. In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first colony to authorize slavery through enacted law. Massachusetts passed the Body of Liberties, which prohibited slavery in many instances but allowed people to be enslaved if they were captives of war, if they sold themselves into slavery or were purchased elsewhere, or if they were sentenced to slavery as punishment by the governing authority. The Body of Liberties used the word "strangers" to refer to people bought and sold as slaves; they were generally not English subjects. Colonists came to