This affair created, as was said, a good deal of talk at the time.
In the year 1719, beginning in February and ending in November, Hezekiah Tipton sent away to the American colonies or plantations in all over five score servants.
One day early in March, a company of nineteen men who had volunteered to emigrate to the Virginias was brought up from London to meet the brig _Arundel_ at Southampton. They were quartered at the Golden Fish Inn, and during the morning the old America merchant went to look them over. The men were ranged in a row along by the wall of the inn yard, and the old man walked up and down in front of the line, peering at each man with half-shut eyes and wrinkled face, while a few people from the inn stood looking on with a sort of inert interest. He did not seem very well pleased with the appearance of the servants. There were only nineteen, and there should have been one and twenty. The agent explained that there had been twenty-one of them when he wrote from London, but that one of them had run away during the night, and that another would not sign the papers. “‘Twas,” said he, “as fine, good a young lad of sixteen or eighteen as ever you see. But his mother, methinks it was, comes in crying at the last minute and takes him away from under our werry noses, so to speak.” Hezekiah grunted a reply as he walked up and down along the row of grinning, shuffling men, looking them over. The big knotted joints of the old man’s fingers gripped the cracked and yellow ivory head of his walking-stick, which he every now and then tapped, tapped on the stones of the court-yard. “That man,” said he, in his cracked, querulous voice, poking his walking-stick as he spoke at a lean little man standing in the line—“that man—why did ye bring him? How much d’ye think he’ll fetch in the Virginias? I’s warrant me not fifteen guineas.”
“Why, Master Tipton,” said the agent, referring to a slip of paper which he held in his hand, “there you are mightily mistook. Maybe, like enough, that man is worth more than any of ‘em. He’s a skilled barber and leecher, and a good man he is, and knows his trade, to be sure, and that werry well. Just you think, Master Tipton, how much he might be worth as a vally or body-servant to one of them there Virginia planters.”