[Harmless Teddy Bear]

The numbers are not surprising because most people indentured or free died inside of five years. The work was hard, food was scarce, medical care minimal to non-existent and you were living in a war zone. The indentured were often in a weakened state when they arrive so they were more vulnerable but it was only a matter of degree.

The ones that survived, thrived.

[Pelham]

You likely know of Bernard Bailyn's book The Barbarous Years

"Now comes “The Barbarous Years,” the next installment. It circles back to a period that most Americans don’t hear much about in school: the chaotic decades from the establishment of Jamestown (England’s first permanent colony in the Americas) in 1607 up to King Philip’s War (the vicious conflict that effectively expelled Indians from New England) in 1675-76. Bailyn’s goal is to show how a jumble of migrants, “low and high born,” sought “to recreate, if not to improve, in this remote and, to them, barbarous environment, the life they had known before.” As the title indicates, the story is as grim as it is fascinating: a group portrait in tones of greed, desperation and brutality."