Equipped as it was with all the apparatus of a "New
England Canaan," the founders anticipated a far greater career than seemed
likely of achievement in Massachusetts. Prosperity came at once in the form
of good crops and rich prizes taken at sea. Some of the latter contained
cargoes of negro slaves, as was of course expected, who were distributed
among the settlers to aid in raising tobacco; and when a certain Samuel
Rishworth undertook to spread ideas of liberty among them he was officially
admonished that religion had no concern with negro slavery and that
his indiscretions must stop. Slaves were imported so rapidly that the
outnumbered whites became apprehensive of rebellion. In the hope of
promoting the importation of white labor, so greatly preferable from the
public point of view, heavy impositions were laid upon the employment
of negroes, but with no avail. The apprehension of evils was promptly
justified. A number of the blacks escaped to the mountains where they dwelt
as maroons; and in 1638 a concerted uprising proved so formidable that the
suppression of it strained every resource of the government and the white
inhabitants. Three years afterward the weakened settlement was captured
by a Spanish fleet; and this was the end of the one Puritan colony in the
tropics.
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