16 TRANSPORTATION TO AMERICA- Teansportation to the American plantations ia said to have become a common sentence in the English Criminal CromweiL Courts about the time of the Restoration — 1660.* Crom- well sent large numbers of his royalist prisoners to the West Indies ;t but although many convicts of all classes were afterwards sent there, they were few in comparison with the numbers sent to America. The extent to which transportation to that country was carried may be gathered from many casual references in the pages of contemporary Bftoon. writers. When, for instance. Bacon wrote in his Essays that it is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people and wicked condemned men to be the people with whom you plant, he was evidently pointing to Virginia. He was a shareholder in the trading Com- pany formed by London merchants and others for the pur- pose of colonising that country, and which, in 1608 — the Early socoud edition of the Essays was published in 1612 — sent out an expedition of nine ships with five hundred settlers on board. These men were for the most part the very- scum of the earth — ^men sent out to the New World because they were unfit to live in the Old, "J Speaking*
- Kelyn^e's Reports, p. 45 : — *' It having been lately used that for
felonies within clerey, if the prisoner desire it, not to give book, but procure a conditionaipardon from the King, and send him beyond sea to serve five years in some of the King's plantations, and then to have land there assigned to him, according to the use in those plantations for servanta after their time expired ; with a condition in the ^rdon, to be void if they do not go, or if they return into England dunns seven years or after without the King^s license." Kelvnge was appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1665. + Post, p. 455. X Doyle, History of America, pp. 45-6. Digitized by Google
