Hence no small part of the convicts were unfortunates, rather than criminals, to our modern way of thought. But there remained a large and unpalatable number who had been convicted of crimes of all degrees and in their ranks were found a motley crew ranging from the lowest type of profligate, whose escape from the noose had been a public misfortune, to the minor offenders punished for a first violation of law. However even this evil residue was fated to leave but a minor contamination of the Colony's bloodstream. A great death-toll was taken by sickness on the transporting ships, particularly by the dreaded "goal distemper" as it was called. Those who survived the voyage naturally received far less consideration from their purchasers than was accorded the indentured servant; the unaccustomed climate took its quota and all in all the mortality was very great. Of those who outlived their period of servitude, some rose to positions of trust; many of the incorrigibles soon made the Colony too hostile for their comfort and took themselves off either voluntarily or as fugitives--sometimes to the more remote and unseated parts of Piedmont or, more generally, to the North Carolina backwoods, a favorite refuge for the dregs of Virginia's Colonial population. And at length, in 1740, came an opportunity for a great and general house-cleaning. In raising the Virginia levies for the ill-fated expedition against Carthagena, many a convict was pressed into service and, in the disasters attending that adventure, ended his turbulent career. But unfortunately the polluted stream continued to pour in on Virginia's shores until after the Revolution. An unduly large proportion of these undesirables appears to have found its way into the backwoods of the Northern Neck which, in 1730, Governor Gooch described as "a part of the Country remote from the Seat of Government where the common people are generally of a more turbulent and unruly disposition than anywhere else, and are not like to become better by being the Place of all this Dominion where most of transported Convicts are sold and settled."[34] One may, without an undue straining of the imagination, discover the descendants of some of these people in modern Loudoun's small lawless element. [34] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, I., 162. The negro slaves were practically confined to the eastern and southern parts of Loudoun. They were all but unknown in the German Settlement and the Quakers as a sect were so opposed to the very institution of slavery that, as early as the eighteenth century, the Society in America reached the decision to disown any member thereof who held slaves.