White Cargo by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh

     For much of Britain's poor in the colonial era, getting passage to the American colonies often meant paying the cost of the voyage by selling themselves into bondage for a set amount of years.  This was the ideal situation.  According to the authors of White Cargo, the reality for indentured servitude was far worse.  The colonies became a dumping ground for England's unwanted.  Convicts from overcrowded jails, prisoners of war, prostitutes, and kidnapped children survived appalling conditions during the Atlantic crossing to essentially be sold and worked relentlessly, with any infraction an excuse to add extra time to their toil.  Life was truly "nasty, brutish, and short" for these people.

     I have only skimmed the surface of literature about indentured servitude in the colonial era and found much of the reading dry.  This book turned out to be a fairly decent page turner and was certainly an eye-opener about the horrors that happened during Great Britain's purging of their undesirables.  At first, I thought it was going to be a hackneyed revisionist tome, but apparently the authors did their homework, or at least had one heck of a good bibliography.  For colonial history buffs mainly - a grisly part of the past, engagingly told.

(William Hicks, Information Services)