[tzs]

The issue of crew as consumable resource is interesting.

It's particularly interesting I think because now that you've brought it up, it seems to me there is a similar issue with much Earthly colonization or frontier expansion, and I've never seen it mentioned.

For example, anyone who left England to start or join a New World colony early on, when settlements were far apart and it was a struggle for each to survive, was entering an environment where their children would have a much harder, much more constrained life than they could have had back in England.

Were there debates back then about the morality of moving somewhere where you descendants, possibly for generations, would have harder lives than if you stayed where you are?

[natechols]

17th century American settlers were fleeing an environment where the child mortality rate was at least 1/3rd even for the upper classes, nearly all land and wealth was controlled by inbred gangsters, and the penalties for petty theft or incorrect religious worship included public hanging. From that perspective, the risks associated with colonization may have seemed much more attractive than the best-case scenario of spending several more decades of poverty in the same village. At least once you were in America, voting with your feet and moving west was always an option, something that was already recognized by 19th-century European socialists as a unique factor in the development of the US economy.

Of course I'm also assuming that the majority of the colonists were not only dirt poor, but also ignorant and uneducated and shamelessly lied to by the promoters of colonization.

[duncan_bayne]

And the early colonies had their problems too. IIRC at least one colony enacted capital punishment for anyone caught abandoning the colony to join the native American tribes.

[natechols]

I hadn't heard that one, but the freedom-loving Pilgrims executed Quakers for proselytizing in Massachusetts. Not really an environment founded on respect for individual autonomy or other ethical considerations.