As already observed, the check on the traders by the creation of the board of commissioners was so slight that they continued as before to traffic in Indians with impunity. Unprincipled traders were licensed and obtained Indians wherever and however they could. Some traders went so far as to keep a body of slaves with them in the Indian nation where they traded, whom they sent out to attack other tribes for the purpose of obtaining captives.[639] Attempts, of course, were made by the board to check the traffic. At its meetings Indian agents were tried for illegally reducing Indians to slavery,[640] and on one occasion it was ordered that a woman and child should be brought back from New York where they had been sold as slaves.[641] In 1711, an attempt was made to check the practice of the traders employing Indian slaves in the manner above mentioned, by issuing the following order to all traders: “You shall permit none of your slaves to go to war on any account whatsoever.”[642] This order had as little effect as those which preceded it. The influence of the traders, indeed, among the friendly tribes could accomplish the same result by stirring them up against other tribes.[643] These and other efforts at regulation of the Indian slave trade were alike fruitless. The general weakness of the province made it impossible to control the action of the traders on the frontier and outside the boundary of the province. Reports to the English Board of Trade made frequent mention of the state of affairs but conditions were not remedied.[644] On October 27, 1720, several merchants suggested to the Board of Trade, as a means of improving conditions in South Carolina, “to prohibit by still greater penalties the selling as a slave of any person of the nations in amity with us throughout the continent and to prevent abuse therein”, and declaring that “none but deputies from the public should have power to buy Indian slaves from those Indians in alliance with us as taken in war, which deputies on public account should be obliged to transfer them to the Islands there to be sold on condition not to be sent to the province again”.[645] But the provincial authorities could not enforce these decrees, so the action of the traders continued unmolested until checked by other causes. Government officials continued to league with the traders. As late as 1754, a Catawba trader wrote to the board of commissioners as follows: “The Catawbas held a council yesterday in the king’s house, and have resolved to go with the English against the French. They want me and my people to go with them, and we are willing to do so, even without pay, on one condition: that we be allowed to keep as our own property whatever plunder in the way of Indian slaves we may be able to capture.” There are frequent intimations in the records that Indian slaves were still being held in South Carolina at this time, though their wholesale delivery and sale in Charleston had ceased.[646]