Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/642

 cook-shops in the neighborhood of the wharves in the principal seaports, and here they were kept in close confinement until sold to merchants or masters of ships which were about to set sail for Virginia. Their incarceration very often lasted for several months. So notorious were the houses in which these imprisonments took place, that warrants were frequently sued out authorizing employers to search them for the recovery of apprentices who had disappeared under the influence of the inducements held out by the spirits to fly to the Colonies. The frauds and robberies resulting from the custom of spiriting away became so common that in 1664, when the evil had reached its most alarming proportions, the Committee for Foreign Plantations decided to interpose. A few years before an application had been made by John Clark and Henry Harding for letters patent, under which they were to be granted the authority to establish an office in London to which all the servants and children to be sent to Virginia and Barbadoes from that port should be required to be brought in order that they might declare their willingness to go, or for the purpose of showing that their parents had consented to their departure. This application does not seem to have been successful, although the greatness of the evil sought to be remedied was fully admitted. A few years later, the matter was taken up by a very influential body of men who had reason to consider their own private interests seriously impaired by the work of the spirits. In 1664, the English merchants presented a petition condemning the action of these persons, not on the ground that it resulted in so much injustice and inhumanity, but because it offered to so many