When an apprentice had served three years, his master was expected to give him as a reward a musket, a pound of powder, six pounds of lead, two shirts, two pairs of drawers, and a cap. The _valets_, as the French called them, then became comerades, and ceased to be mere _engagés_. They took their own _matelots_, and became, in their turn, Buccaneers. When they had obtained a sufficient quantity of hides, they either sent or took them to Tortuga, and brought from thence a young apprentice to treat him as they themselves had been treated. The planters' _engagés_ led a life more dreadful than that of their wilder brethren. They were decoyed from France under the same pretences that once filled our streets with the peasants' sons of Savoy, and the peasants' daughters from Frankfort, or that now lure children from the pleasant borders of Como, to pine away in a London den. The want of sufficient negroes led men to resort to all artifices to obtain assistance in cultivating the sugar-cane and the tobacco plant. In the French Antilles they were sold for three years, but often resold in the interim. Amongst the English they were bound for seven years, and being occasionally sold again at their own request, before the expiration of this term, they sometimes served fifteen or twenty years before they could obtain their freedom. At Jamaica, if a man could not pay even a small debt at a tavern, he was sold for six or eight months. The planters had agents in France, England, and other countries, who sent out these apprentices. They were worked much harder than the slaves, because their lives, after the expiration of the three years, were of no consequence to the masters. They were often the victims of a disease called "coma," the effect of hard usage and climate, and which ended in idiotcy. Père Labat remarks the quantity of idiots in the West Indies, many of whom were dangerous, although allowed to go at liberty. Many of these worse than slaves were of good birth, tender education, and weak constitutions, unable to endure even the debilitating climate, and much less hard labour. Esquemeling, himself originally an _engagé_, gives a most piteous description of their sufferings. Insufficient food and rest, he says, were the smallest of their sufferings. They were frequently beaten, and often fell dead at their masters' feet. The men thus treated died fast: some became dropsical, and others scorbutic. A man named Bettesea, a merchant of St. Christopher's, was said to have killed more than a hundred apprentices with blows and stripes. "This inhumanity," says Esquemeling, "I have _often seen_ with great grief." The following anecdote of human suffering equals the cruelty of the Virginian slave owner who threw one slave into the vat of boiling molasses, and baked another in an oven:--