Through the stealing of children and youths to sell in the plantations, it can plainly be seen that many a wife of respectable birth was furnished to the colonists. This trade, by which, as Lionel Gatford wrote in 1657, young people were “cheatingly duckoyed by Poestigeous Plagiaries,” grew to a vast extent, and in it, emulating the noble ladies of the court, women of lower rank sought a degrading profit. In 1655, in Middlesex, England, one Christian Sacrett was called to answer the complaint of Dorothy Perkins:-- She accuseth her for a spirit, one that takes upp men women and children, and sells them a-shipp to be conveyed beyond the sea, having inticed and inveigled one Edward Furnifall and Anna his wife with her infant to the waterside, and putt them aboard the ship called the Planter to be conveied to Virginia. Sarah Sharp was also asserted to be a “common taker of children and setter to Betray young men and maydens to be conveyed to ships.” The life of that famous rogue, Bamfylde-Moore Carew, shows the method by which servants were sold in the plantations. The captain, with his cargo of trapanned Englishmen, among whom was Carew, cast anchor at Miles River in Talbot County, Maryland, ordered a gun to be fired, and a hogshead of rum sent on board. On the day of the sale the men prisoners were all shaved, the women dressed in their best garments, their neatest caps, and brought on deck. Each prisoner, when put up for sale, told his trade. Carew said he was a good rat-catcher, beggar, and dog-trader, “upon which the Captain hearing takes the planter aside, and tells him he did but jest, being a man of humour, and would make an excellent schoolmaster.” Carew escaped before being sold, was captured, whipped, and had a heavy iron collar, “called in Maryland a pot-hook,” riveted about his neck; but he again fled to the Indians, and returned to England. Kidnapped in Bristol a second time, he was nearly sold on Kent Island to Mr. Dulaney, but again escaped. He stole from a house “jolly cake, powell, a sort of Indian corn bread, and good omani, which is kidney beans ground with Indian corn, sifted, put into a pot to boil, and eaten with molasses.” Jolly cake was doubtless johnny cake; omani, hominy; but powell is a puzzle. He made his way by begging to Boston, and shipped to England, from whence he was again trapanned. In the _Sot-Weed Factor_ are found some very coarse but graphic pictures of the women emigrants of the day. When the factor asks the name of “one who passed for chambermaid” in one planter’s house in “Mary-Land,” she answered with an affected blush and simper:--