I would only add, That this Exporting of Felons to the Colonies, may be consider’d as a Trade, as well as in the Light of a Favour. Now all Commerce implies Returns: Justice requires them: There can be no Trade without them. And Rattle-Snakes seem the most suitable Returns for the Human Serpents sent us by our Mother Country. [More]
I’d rather have the snakes.
[Via Steve T]
According to genealogy research done by my mother and aunt, my family’s name was brought to Georgia Colony by one of those “Human Serpents.” His “crime,” that resulted in his exportation as an indentured servant by one James Oglethorpe, was in being on the “wrong” side of the years long wars between England and Scotland.
In those days, the English jails held quite a few people who would today be treated as POWs, but the English saw them as a cash crop and their “contracts” were sold in wholesale bunches for export to Georgia, where at the time importation of slaves of African origin was forbidden due to proximity and threat from Spanish Florida.
The difference between slaves and indentured servants was that over time an indentured servant could pay off their “contract” and strike out on his/her own. Many of them, fed up with both the royal and colonial governments, headed north and west, becoming part of the “overmountain men” that eventually fought loyalist troops under British Major Patrick Ferguson at Kings Mountain. I would like to think that at least some of the ferocity shown to Ferguson and his men was payback for the way England had treated people like my ancestor.
As the old saying goes: “Payback is a bitch, and her stripper name is Karma.”
Unlike criminals, rattlesnakes have value. We sell the ones we catch (one or two dozen each year) to crafters.