White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (16 page)

compassionate ‘that rather than one should starve . . . they would starve all’. There were no hungry beggars and no gallows ‘furnished with poor wretches’. He concluded: ‘Plato’s commonwealth is much practised by these people.’ Thomas Morton wanted to stay.

Two years after Morton’s party landed, their principal, Captain Wollaston, decided that there might be much greener pastures down south in Virginia. The mother colony was booming, sucking in labour more eagerly than ever, so Wollaston took some of the indentured servants with him on a long and speculative trip to Jamestown. There he sold the servants, no doubt with little difficulty. It was so profitable a transaction that he sent back to Massachusetts for the remaining servants. Thomas Morton, who was set on making the plantation work, baulked at the instruction and mounted what was effectively a coup. He had Wollaston’s lieutenant ejected from the plantation and gathered the remaining free-willers around him to offer alternatives. They could either go to Virginia to be sold into slavery or be his partners: ‘We will converse, plant, trade and live together as equals and support and protect one another,’ Morton promised.4

What followed outraged the Pilgrim Fathers. A free commonwealth was proclaimed on the plantation and it was re-named Ma-Re-Mount, the phonetic spelling of the original Algonquin name.

It would be known – justifiably – as Merrymount during its short existence.

Morton was an Anglican and bon viveur. In that first burst of freedom for the servants, he or they organised the kind of celebrations for the next festival that had the Puritans muttering

‘Satan’. The festival was May Day. Morton and his newly freed servants celebrated it on their plantation with a traditional ‘old English festival’. The centrepiece was an eighty-foot maypole with a stag’s antlers on its top. Morton composed an allegorical poem to the Greek goddess of spring, Maja, and he laid on ‘a barrel of excellent beer’ plus many bottles of alcohol. There was ‘good cheer for all comers’, especially Algonquin friends, who joined in as everyone held hands and danced in ‘innocent mirth’ around the maypole. It sounds to have been a loud affair of dancing, drinking 115

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and singing, a joyous V-sign to the grimly pious Pilgrims in the nearby Plymouth colony.

Among the Puritan settlers there was predictable outrage at this

‘school of atheism’. They called the maypole an idol, the calf of Horeb. The Governor of the Plymouth colony, William Bradford, denounced it:

They . . . set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman Goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.5

Morton was also said to be selling guns to his Algonquin friends, which understandably frightened settlers and added to their outrage. But there were other emotions, too. One was a fear among surrounding proprietors at the impact on their servants of Morton’s free commonwealth. Numbers of servants were evidently fleeing their masters and finding refuge at Merrymount.

We don’t know how many but Governor Bradford accused Morton of entertaining ‘discontents’ and ‘all the scum of the country’. Merrymount was a threat to every master. Morton was also probably doing too well commercially for their liking. His friendship with the Algonquin helped him to secure much of the fur trade and in its short existence it is estimated that Merrymount was six times more profitable than other plantations.

Puritan troopers stormed into Merrymount, seized Morton after a chase and hauled him in chains before Governor Bradford.

Morton was too well connected to execute and so he was shipped back to England. The maypole was cut down and the houses were destroyed. There is no record of what happened to the servants. We assume they were thrust back into bondage, perhaps sent to Virginia and sold, as their original master first intended.

The second episode occurred within a year or so. A large group of indentured servants from East Anglia were among 180 souls 116

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sent by Puritan leaders into New England in 1628. The servants were landed at Salem and directed to settle a tract of land on the Merrimack River. They expected to be resupplied with food two years later when the famous Winthrop fleet arrived. However, when the fleet unloaded, the supplies earmarked for the Merrimack servants had vanished. The free-willers, who had been decimated by disease and had run out of provisions, appealed to the Puritan leadership in Salem for ‘victuals to sustain’ them but were turned down. A letter from the Puritan leader Thomas Dudley to the Countess of Lincoln written in 1631 explained why: We found ourselves wholly unable to feed them by reason that the provisions shipped for them were taken out of the ship they were put in, and they who were trusted to ship them in another, failed us, and left them behind; whereupon necessity enforced us to our extreme loss to give them all liberty.6

In other words, the free-willers were dumped, left to fend for themselves or to rely on the charity of the local Native Americans.

Judging from Dudley’s letter, that wasn’t the worst of it. What upset these Puritans was the financial loss they had suffered in bringing all these souls over. Dudley lamented that the servants

‘cost us about £16 or £20 a person furnishing and sending here’.7

Leaving servants to fend for themselves once they were of no more use would be one of the hard features of indentured servitude.

Worn-out or dying servants would literally be dumped by their masters. It happened on a wide-enough scale for some colonies to legislate on the matter. Rhode Island, founded in 1636, would be the first to bring in an act to stop masters kicking out the sick and the lame under the pretence of freeing them. Virginia would follow, though not until more than a century later.

The Puritans in later years veered between treating indentured servants as children and treating them as potential delinquents.

They imposed restrictions on all kinds of basic freedoms, legislated harsh punishments for runaways and approved the buying and selling of people. But more attention was given to the rights of 117

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servants and there was no stream of allegations about brutality and ill treatment. A crucial factor here was size. In New England, small farms predominated with only one or two servants apiece.

The situation in the Chesapeake, where a people business was in operation, was very different. The trade had developed to provide labour for the tobacco fields and would expand as colonialisation expanded. It featured most of the accoutrements of any trade –

investors, agents, carriers, marketeers.

The investors were people of all kinds who spotted the chance of easy money through sending servants to the colonies and claiming the headright. In Virginia, as we have seen, they were entitled to fifty acres but the first investors in Maryland qualified for 2,000

acres for every five settlers they imported or 100 acres per person for fewer than five. The offer was later reduced but was so generous that Maryland would eventually have to drop headrights altogether for fear of running out of land.

Those keen to cash in on such a profitable opportunity ranged from the innkeeper with a relative or friend in the colony and a few pounds sterling to invest, to the great London and Bristol goldsmiths, cloth merchants and grocers with numerous contacts and large sums at their disposal. The Virginia historian Timothy Paul Grady investigated who was signing on servants for America from various parts of England and found nearly 3,000 different people in Bristol alone from 1654 to 1686.8 Some signed up a party of servants and personally accompanied them to the New World, where they claimed headrights on themselves and on the servants. They then either sold the land and the servants, or had a go at tobacco planting on the land they had acquired with the manpower that had allowed them to acquire it.

Others used the network of agents and merchants who specialised in the trade to find and transport servants for them. One aristocratic investor was told that forty would-be servants could be delivered to her at a day’s notice. These people brokers had printed indenture forms with blank spaces where the name of the servant and any extra obligations could be filled in. They had secure quayside buildings where servants were kept fed and happy till the ship was ready. And they no doubt regularly greased the palms of officials to 118

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turn a blind eye if servants changed their minds at the last minute and had to be stopped from slipping away.

Those already established in America indulged in a little servant trading on return trips to England. In
A Good Master Well Served
, Lawrence Towner quotes an entry made in the diary of Boston’s mint master and leading goldsmith James Hull during the 1660s:

‘Several children,’ he wrote, ‘I have brought over and all in good health and so disposed of them and providentially missed the having of one Sam Gaylor, who was after placed with Master Clark, and fell overboard and was lost on the way.’9

In America, ships from English ports carrying servants plied the Chesapeake’s major rivers, stopping off to sell their cargoes wherever there was a demand. Their coming was advertised in advance. Posters and, later in the Chesapeake’s history, newspapers announced the arrival of the latest cargo of servants. Potential buyers could read of the ages, gender and skills of those arriving and of when to clamber on board to inspect the human goods for themselves.

There were even sale-or-return clauses, conditions of barter requiring servants to be ‘in perfect health’ or ‘able’. Those who weren’t could be returned as ‘refuse’. Some buyers became so indignant at discovering disease or infirmity that they went to court to get their money back. One forced a merchant who had sold him a young woman who turned out to have ‘the pox’ to pay for a cure and make a partial refund.

Like many high-paying ventures, the trade was risky. Ships and servants with them disappeared without trace. The year 1637 saw allegations by merchants that servants were being stolen en route to America. One merchant, Joseph Sanders, alleged that eighty-three of his servants were stolen by the captain of the ship transporting them after the man appointed as Sanders’s factor died. Sanders petitioned the Privy Council to order their return. The very next month, another petitioner levelled the accusation against three ships’ captains that they had ‘embezzled . . . divers servants’.10

The journey from England continued to be unspeakably grim.

In 1634, death rates on board and among those just landed were so high that John West, then acting Governor of Virginia, complained 119

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to the Commission for Plantations. He blamed the great numbers regularly squashed into most vessels. Merchants ‘so pester their ships with passengers’ that infection spread ‘through throng and noiseomness,’ he asserted.11 Ill-conditioned, thin-blooded, town-bred servants were the most vulnerable. Eight of the servants on the
Mayflower
died within four months.

To the shipper, far and away the most profitable servants were those who postponed indenturing till they landed in America.

The arrangement was for the captain to indenture and sell them on the basis of the cost of the fare. According to the Victorian historian Philip Bruce, shipowners took massive advantage of hapless migrants by hiking the ‘fare money’ enormously. There was ‘an inclination on the part of [ship] owners to raise the rate extremely high in order to lengthen the terms of service and thus increase the profit of the voyage . . . not infrequently to four or five times the ordinary fee of the passage’.12 The danger of putting oneself in the hands of a ship’s master became notorious but it kept happening.

The main buyers of men and women were, of course, the big planters whose holdings automatically increased with every new servant they brought in. Men like William Tucker, who led the planters’ reprisal attacks on the Powhatans after the 1622 massacre.

In his will, drawn up two decades later, Tucker revealed that he had purchased at least 180 servants:

I have transported divers servants thither which for every servant I am to have fifty acres of land, for my first dividend, which will amount unto 3000 acres for the first dividend, 3000 for the second dividend and 3000 acres for the third.

Tucker had a taste for understatement. His will ended: ‘Such land may prove beneficial in time to my heir.’13

‘Of hundreds of people who arrive in the colony yearly scarce any but are brought in as merchandise for sale,’ the colony’s secretary Richard Kemp reported to London in 1637.

All this was done in an atmosphere of fraud and rip-off. The Chesapeake in the 1630s was swimming with sharks feeding off 120

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the headright system. It was easy. Even the dead could qualify for a headright so long as they were on their way to the colony when they died or had once visited. This invited deception and corruption, and after Virginia became a Crown colony in 1624

the invitation continued to be proffered. One man who crossed the Atlantic eight times was allowed to claim on himself for each trip. Ships’ captains allegedly registered entire crews as settlers and claimed headrights on all of them, then sold the headrights, sailed away and when the ship returned to the Chesapeake did it all again, choosing a different settlement at which to land this time. In one case, a servant was claimed on successively by the ship’s master who brought him, the merchant he was sold to and by the planter to whom the merchant sold him.

Philip Bruce, who appears to have dug through every headright ever claimed in Virginia, was outraged by the corruption and made that clear in his
Economic History of Virginia
: The perversion was pushed so far that head rights were granted on the presentation of lists of names copied from old books of record, and it ended in the office of the secretary of the colony falling into the grossly illegal habit of selling these rights to all who would pay for one to five shillings for each right, without any pretension being made that the buyer had complied with the law.