Pound Pup Legacy

The traffic in children being "spirited" to the Americas increased during the civil wars of the 1640s, and the Puritan-dominated parliament on 9 May 1645 passed a strongly-worded ordinance against the practice. Ships were to be searched by justices of the peace where there was reason to believe they held kidnapped children. However, there is evidence that this measure did little to inhibit the trade which ended only with the independence of the American colonies. The "Flying Post" allegations of 1698 and the kidnapping of 500 boys in and around Aberdeen in the 1740s provide evidence for this. By the following decade, Europe was plunged into a quarter century of warfare precipitated by the French revolution and the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Abandoned children became the flotsam and jetsam of the war, and many who came to the notice of the penal system were transported to the Australian colonies, where about a quarter of the convicts were under eighteen years of age.