Whatever may have been the number of enslaved Indian captives retained in Massachusetts, that number was sufficiently large to cause some uneasiness on the part of both authorities and people. On July 22, 1676, the general court of Plymouth confirmed an act of the council of war declaring that, because of the danger to the peace and safety of the colony incurred by having Indian captives residing there, no male captive above the age of fourteen years of age should reside in the colony; and that, if any such captive above that age was then resident in the colony, he was to be disposed of out of the colony before October 15, 1676, or be forfeited to the government.[529] It is not likely that the act was rigorously enforced during its brief existence. Exceptions to the law were doubtless made by the court from time to time.[530] Another act of similar tenor was passed March 29, 1677, when the Massachusetts council in an order, the preamble of which shows much alarm on the part of the people, decreed that no one within the colony should thereafter buy or keep, more than ten days after the publication of the council’s decree, any Indian men or women already bought, above the age of twelve years, without allowance from authority. A fine of £5, and the forfeit of the Indian or Indians concerned were fixed as a penalty for violation of the law.[531] Toward the end of the year Plymouth still further extended governmental supervision of captives by decreeing, March 5, 1678, that no one was to buy the children of the captive Indians taken during the late war, “without special leave, liking and approbation of the government of this jurisdiction”.[532] The seizure of Indians by authority of the colonial governments, and their subsequent sale, were not always above suspicion. At the time of the Narraganset troubles, in 1646, Plymouth gave legal sanction for the seizure of peaceable and unsuspecting Indians whose tribes were at peace with the English.[533] A second instance of the same character occurred during King Philip’s War shortly after the destruction of Dartmouth in 1675. The Dartmouth Indians had not been concerned in the burning of the town, so the whites entered into negotiations of peace and friendship with them, and the captains of the resident militia and the Plymouth forces sent thither promised them protection. But through other influences they were conducted to Plymouth, and, by order of the council, August 4, 1675, they were sold and “transported out of the Country, being about Eight-score Persons”.[534] On September 2, 1675, the council took similar action in the case of “a parcel of Indians lately come into Sandwich, in a submissive way to this colony. They were adjudged to be “in the same condition of rebellion”, and were condemned, fifty-seven in number, to perpetual servitude.[535]