The extra time was said to compensate her master for time she spent being pregnant and during childbirth. Convicts were taken from prisons, placed on ships and sent to the Colonies. Debtors' prisons held both men and women. London prisons, like Bridewell Hospital and Newgate, transported women to Virginia and other British possessions. Bridewell Hospital, a habitually overcrowded prison, shows up in court records as a supply source of male and female servants.
Records show only a small percentage of prisoners actually being sentenced to transport.
Contracts including education during servitude, and at the end a suit of new clothes, an animal, and sometimes a promise of land helped persuade people to ignore the bad tales they sometimes heard about the fate of those going to the Colonies. For a poor person during all of the seventeenth century, indentured servitude was practically the only method available of getting to the Colonies. Among them were French, German and Swiss Protestants fleeing from religious persecution, Irish starving because of poor crops, and Scottish farmers driven out by high rents. Many people of all ages were enticed to relocate in to Colonies by advertising used by people hired to recruit workers by painting an overly optimistic portrait of what the Colonies could offer. Others went by force or coercion.