Richard Frethorne, who arrived in Virginia in 1622 at the age of twelve to work on a plantation and wrote home to his father and mother: ‘I have nothing to comfort me; nor is there nothing to be gotten here but sickness and death.’ He had been indentured under the 1601 Poor Law, which entitled the parish to collar children whose parents were receiving poor relief. Thousands of children were sent to the West Indies and the American colonies. Richard Frethorne died less than two years after
