A great deal has been written about the life, struggles, and accomplishments of pioneer men and women who crossed the ocean to build a new world in the wilderness; but infant and child life during early colonial days is largely hidden in obscurity. Little has been recorded.1
It is known that few children under the age of 7 survived in the crowded immigrant ships: falling into the sea, accidents, hunger, thirst, and sickness took its sad toll. Nevertheless, there were many young2-5: a third of the founders of Plymouth were children; Puritan youth were evident in the great migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony; several cargoes of poor children and orphans from Dutch almshouses were "bound out" to the burghers of New Netherlands; children were frequently dispatched from England as indentured servants and apprentices; the London Company sent 100 children to Virginia in 1619, and 1,500, kidnapped from Ireland and England, in 1627; African slave children were shipped to the colonies after 1620; and the colonial mother6 bore many children, buried many, and often followed them to the grave at an early age. Fecundity,5 characteristic of early colonists, served to people a continent (the population was 2.5 million in 1776), and provided needed child labor. Over 50% of Plymouth colony consisted of children.7
Colonial children were viewed as miniature adults; and boys and girls were dressed alike until the age of 7.1,7,8 The infant1,7 wore a long linen smock; was covered with a woolen blanket; and a wooden or wicker cradle, hooded to protect from cold draughts, much like those in which Indian babies slept, was its bed.
Piety, beeswax and the Portuguese African slave trade to Lima, Peru, in the early colonial period
