The treachery of the whites in refusing to give up the Indians at the expiration of the specified term of service, and the selling of them out of the country, caused considerable disturbance among the Indians in several colonies. In 1660, a company of English from Massachusetts settled on Old Town Creek at its junction with Cape Fear River in the present North Carolina. The settlement was short lived, lasting something less than three years. One reason why the settlers left was the hostile attitude of neighboring Indians who believed that the white men had shipped off as slaves some of the Indian children who had been entrusted to their care, under the pretext of sending them north to be educated.[679] Though the charge has never been substantiated, it seems probable that it was not without cause. The lax state of morals among the early settlers would permit the kidnapping of Indians to be practiced by this little settlement as well as elsewhere. But whether the settlers were guilty or not on this particular occasion, the incident throws a certain light on the custom of the times through the fear which the Indians showed of such treatment.[680] Evidently the practice continued in North Carolina, for one of the grievances of the Tuscarora Indians at the breaking out of the Tuscarora War was that their children who had been bound out for a limited time in English families, were, contrary to the spirit of the agreement, transported to other plantations and sold as slaves.[681] Virginia was always comparatively lenient in her treatment of the Indians. Accordingly, its early legislation dealt with the matter of unjustly forcing Indians into slavery. In 1655, provision was made that Indian children could become indentured servants only by consent of their parents and for specified terms agreed upon, and such children were to be educated in the Christian religion.[682] The following year, 1656, it was provided that Indian children brought into the colony as hostages should be assigned to masters by choice of their parents, but should not be made slaves.[683] Again, in 1658, it was decreed that any Indian children disposed of by their parents to a white man for “education and instruction in the Christian religion”, or for any other purpose, were not to be turned over to any other person upon any pretext whatever, and any such child was to be free at the age of twenty-five.[684] The fact that the legislation on the subject was repeated at such short intervals affords evidence of the continuance of the custom which it was intended to abolish. A letter of Governor Spotswood to Lord Dartmouth, March 11, 1711, regarding the Indian college, tells of his attempt to persuade Indians to allow their children to attend the college by remitting their annual tribute of skins, and declares that “they were a little shy of yielding to his proposal, and urged the breach of a former contract made long ago by