Among the settlers of this period there was one peculiar class which requires special mention. They were, for the most part, colonists rather than immigrants, though some of them came from foreign countries. These were the indented (or indentured) servants, or redemptioners.[43] There were two main classes of them—those who were brought under compulsion, and those who came voluntarily. Of the first class, many were convicted criminals, who were sent over in great numbers from the mother country, and on arrival were indented as servants for a term of years. Under the barbarous legal system of the day many persons were sentenced to death for insignificant crimes, such as stealing a joint of meat worth over a shilling, or counterfeiting a lottery ticket. Many humane judges welcomed exile as an alternative to the death penalty. It is estimated that possibly as many as fifty thousand criminals were sent to America from the British Isles, from the year 1717 until the practice was ended by the War of Independence. Besides the criminals, in this class of indented servants were many who were kidnaped and sent over to America. Press gangs were busy in London, Bristol, and other English seaports, seizing boys and girls, usually, but not always, from the lowest classes of society, and sending them over to labor as indented servants in the colonies. Those who came voluntarily were respectable but destitute persons who, despairing of success or progress in the old country, sold themselves into temporary slavery to pay their passage over. Many of these came from very good classes of society. The southern colonies received a much larger number of indented servants of all classes than the northern colonies, as the semiplantation character of the former made a much larger demand for servile labor than in the farm colonies of the north.[44] Shipmasters made an enormous profit from this traffic, adding as much as 100 per cent of the actual cost of transportation to cover risks. Adults were bound out for a term of three to six years, children from ten to fifteen years, and smaller children were, without charge, surrendered to masters who had to rear and board them.[45] As a rule the indented servants, on the arrival of a ship at an American port, were auctioned off to the highest bidder at a public auction very like a slave market. The last sales of this kind reported took place in Philadelphia in 1818 and 1819. These were mostly Germans. Many of the indented servants became eminent and respected citizens of the colonies, while others degenerated and became the progenitors of the “poor white trash” of the south.