pages 4 from the book "THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE" by Nell Irvin Painter
... "In 1618 the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay five pounds per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hense the children's sobriquet "Duty Boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children - a quarter of them girls - were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.
A first shipment of 100 homeless children landed in Virginia around Easter in 1619, some four months before the arrival of "20 and odd Negros." ...
The Virginia Company, ever entrepreneurial, also transported poor women on "bridal boasts," selling them in Virginia and Maryland for 120 pounds of tobacco. At this point in the seventeenth century, Britons, male and female, outnumbered Africans in American tobacco fields; even by the middle of the century, when Virginians population of settlers numbered about 11,000 only 300 were African.
Any of them - African, British, Scottish, or Irish - were lucky to outlive their terms of service." ...
