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 Massachusetts were enforced with special severity against the blacks is indicated by two cases before the central court in 1681, both of them prosecutions for arson.

Maria, a negress belonging to Joshua Lamb of Roxbury, having confessed the burning of two dwellings, was sentenced by the Governor "yt she should goe from the barr to the prison whence she came and thence to the place of execution and there be burnt .-- ye Lord be mercifull to thy soule, sd ye Govr." The other was Jack, a negro belonging to Samuel Wolcott of Weathersfield, who upon conviction of having set fire to a residence by waving a fire brand about in search of victuals, was condemned to be hanged until dead and then burned to ashes in the fire with the negress Maria.[17] [Footnote 17: _Records of the Court of Assistants, 1630-1692_ (Boston, 1901), p.