- EARLY VIRGINIAN PLANTERS. 469
own use ; and as the merchants will trust them with tools and 1721 necessaries upon the credit of their crop before it is grown, so they again plant every year a little more than the year before, and so buy whatever they want with the crop that is before them. Hence, child, says she, many a Newgate bird becomes a great man, and we have several Justices of the Peace, officers of the trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have been burnt in Bamt in the the hand You need not think such a thing strange, daughter, for some of the best men in the country are burnt in the band, and they are not ashamed to own it. There's Major ; he was an eminent pickpocket ; there's Justice , was a shop- lifter, and both of them were burnt in the hand, and I could name you several, such as they are." In another passage the author describes the practice of buying and selling the convicts. The heroine of his story, having been petition for convicted of stealing in a dwelling, was sentenced to death, but Jj^JJ^*"**" transported on '^an humble petition for transportation." Her hus- band was a highwayman captured on suspicion, but not tried, and allowed to transport himself : —
- When we drew near to the shore [of Virginia], the captain called
me to him and told me that he found by my discourse I had some relations in the place, and that I had been there before, and so he supposed I understood the custom in their disposing the convict prisoners when they arrived. I told him I did not. . • • He told me I must get somebody in the place to come and buy me as a servant, and who must answer for me to the Governor of the country if he demanded me. I told him we should do as he should Bargain and direct ; so he brought a planter to treat with him, as it were, for TOmictB. the purchase of me for a servant (my husband not being ordered to be sold), and there I was formally sold to him, and went ashore with him. The captain went with us. . . . After some time the planter gave us a certificate of discharge and an acknowledg- ment of having served him faithfully, and I was free from him the next morning to go whither I would. For this piece of service the captain demanded of me six thousand-weight of tobacco, which he said he was accountable for to his freighter, and which we immediately bought for him, and • made him a present of twenty guineas besides, with which he was abundantly satisfied." The practice of kidnapping people in the streets, and shipping them out to Virginia to be sold as indented servants, forms the Return to subject of several incidents in another of De Foe's novels — Colonel "* Jack. And a paper On the Return to England of Transported Felons, published by him in Applebeo's Journal, Januaiy 26, 1723, contains some interesting matter on that subject. Digitized by Google
