wars, "whether it be in
lands, goods or persons," among the participating colonies.[11] But perhaps
the most striking action taken by the Confederation in these regards was
a resolution adopted by its commissioners in 1646, in time of peace
and professedly in the interests of peace, authorizing reprisals for
depredations. This provided that if any citizen's property suffered injury
at the hands of an Indian, the offender's village or any other which
had harbored him might be raided and any inhabitants thereof seized in
satisfaction "either to serve or to be shipped out and exchanged for
negroes as the cause will justly beare."[12] Many of these captives were in
fact exported as merchandise, whether as private property or on the public
account of the several colonies.[13] The value of Indians for export was
greater than for local employment by reason of their facility in escaping
to their tribal kinsmen. Toward the end of the seventeenth century,
however, there was some importation of "Spanish Indians" as slaves.[14]

[Footnote 11: _New Haven Colonial Records_, 1653-1665, pp. 562-566.]

[Footnote 12: _Plymouth Records_, IX, 71.]

[Footnote 13: G.H. Moore, _Notes on the History of Slavery in
Massachusetts_ (New York, 1866), pp. 30-48.]

[Footnote 14: Cotton Mather, "Diary," in Massachusetts Historical Society
_Collections_, LXVII, 22, 203.]

An early realization that the price of negroes also was greater than the
worth of their labor under ordinary circumstances in New England led the
Yankee participants in the African trade to market their slave cargoes in
the plantation colonies instead of bringing them home. Thus John Winthrop
entered in his journal in 1645: "One of our ships which went to the
Canaries with pipestaves in the beginning of November last returned now
and brought wine and sugar and salt, and some tobacco, which she had at
Barbadoes in exchange for Africoes which she carried from the Isle of
Maio."[15] In their domestic industry the Massachusetts people found
by experience that "many hands make light work, many hands make a full
fraught, but many mouths eat up all";[16] and they were shrewd enough to
apply the adage in keeping the scale of their industrial units within the
frugal requirements of their lives.

[Footnote 15: Winthrop, _Journal_, II, 227.]

[Footnote 16: John Josslyn, "Two Voyages to New England," in Massachusetts
Historical Society _Collections_, XXIII, 332.]

That the laws of Massach