Below these classes were the indentured servants and negro slaves. The former were composed of paupers and criminals sent out from England, the earliest instance being in 1618, when Ambrose Smythe, a felon, was transported to America, as a servant bound for a limited period. The life in Virginia on the tobacco plantations must have been of the hardest, but it was evidently preferable to that in the West Indian islands, as Penruddock, the conspirator against Cromwell, petitioned in 1656 to be sent to Virginia rather than to the Barbadoes. The evil of the system of indentured servants lay for the most part in the ease with which _inconvenient_ people were got rid of, and in the kidnapping of harmless children. Fugitives from justice, guilty husbands or wives, the felon and the innocent were all to be found on those ships that sailed from Bristol. The scandal increased from year to year, so that in 1661 the new Colonial Board was obliged to make an effort to regulate indentured servants, while three years later a commission under the Duke of York was appointed to look into the whole matter. The outcome of this was a most salutary enactment by which kidnapping was made a capital offence. The inquisitorial system necessary for the proper enforcement of this Act soon came to be burdensome, as proved by a complaint of the merchants in 1682, concerning vexatious prosecutions; but that it was absolutely essential is shown by a fresh Order in Council, four years later, against kidnappers. The one great advantage possessed by the indentured servant over the negro slave was that no hereditary disqualification attached to the children of such servants, whereas in the case of the blacks the stigma of slavery passed from the parents to their offspring.