When the child doth cry, I must sing, By-a-by, In the land of Virginny, O; No rest that I can have Whilst I am here a slave, When that I was weary, O. A thousand Woes beside, That I do here abide, In the land of Virginny, O; In misery I spend My time that hath no end, When that I was weary, O. Then let Maids beware, All by my ill-fare, In the land of Virginny, O: Be sure thou stay at home, For if you do here come, You will all be weary, O. But if it be my chance, Homeward to advance, From the land of Virginny, O: If that I once more Land on English shore, I’ll no more be weary, O. Some of these complaints would seem to us to be rather of the ‘crumpled rose-leaf’ order, but probably there was enough humanity left in their owners to treat their female ‘servants’ more tenderly than the male, whose sorrows were genuine enough. Ned Ward, in his ‘London Spy,’ 1703, gives a most graphic account of the sort of men who enticed these human chattels to the plantations. He was pursuing his perambulations about the City, exercising those sharp eyes of his, which saw everything, and was in the neighbourhood of the Custom-house, when he turned down a place called Pig Hill (so called, he says, from its resembling the steep descent down which the Devil drove his Hogs to a Bad Market). ‘As we walked up the Hill, as Lazily as an Artillery Captain before his Company upon a Lord Mayor’s Day, or a Paul’s Labourer up a Ladder, with a Hod of Mortar, we peeped in at a Gateway, where we saw two or three Blades, well drest, but with Hawkes’ Countenances, attended with half-a-dozen Ragamuffingly Fellows, showing Poverty in their Rags and Despair in their Faces, mixt with a parcel of young, wild striplings, like runaway ‘Prentices. I could not forbear enquiring of my Friend about the ill-favoured multitude, patched up of such awkward Figures, that it would have puzzled a Moor-Fields Artist,[28] well-read in physiognomy, to have discovered their Dispositions by their Looks.