his indiscretions must stop. Slaves were imported so rapidly that the
outnumbered whites became apprehensive of rebellion. In the hope of
promoting the importation of white labor, so greatly preferable from the
public point of view, heavy impositions were laid upon the employment
of negroes, but with no avail. The apprehension of evils was promptly
justified. A number of the blacks escaped to the mountains where they dwelt
as maroons; and in 1638 a concerted uprising proved so formidable that the
suppression of it strained every resource of the government and the white
inhabitants. Three years afterward the weakened settlement was captured
by a Spanish fleet; and this was the end of the one Puritan colony in the
tropics.[1]

[Footnote 1: A.P. Newton, _The Colonizing Activities of the English
Puritans_ (New Haven, 1914).]

Massachusetts was likewise inaugurated by a corporation of Puritans, which
at the outset endorsed the institution of unfree labor, in a sense, by
sending over from England 180 indentured servants to labor on the company's
account. A food shortage soon made it clear that in the company's service
they could not earn their keep; and in 1630 the survivors of them were set
free.[2] Whether freedom brought them bread or whether they died of famine,
the records fail to tell. At any rate the loss of the investment in their
transportation, and the chagrin of the officials, materially hastened the
conversion of the colony from a company enterprise into an industrial
democracy. The use of unfree labor nevertheless continued on a private
basis and on a relatively small scale. Until 1642 the tide of Puritan
immigration continued, some of the newcomers of good estate bringing
servants in their train. The authorities not only countenanced this but
forbade the freeing of servants before the ends of their terms, and in at
least one instance the court fined a citizen for such a manumission.[3]