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the
Sea-Flower
’s captain had died, followed by the first mate; the mast snapped off, and the supplies of food and water ran out. Commander loaded provisions onto the ship and put one of his midshipmen on board to navigate the
Sea-Flower
into port. About a week later the survivors spotted the flickering candles of Boston’s lighthouse. By the time the
Sea
-
Flower
arrived in Boston Harboron October 31, 1741, it had been at sea for sixteen weeks, and 46 of the original 106 passengers had died. The survivors were taken to a hospital to recover, but no one seems to have seriously considered releasing the half-starved servants from their indentures. A month later, on December 1, an advertisement appeared in the
Boston Gazette
: “Just arrived in the Sloop Sea Flower, from the North of Ireland, several likely Men Servants, both Tradesmen and Farmers, their Time to be disposed of, for four years, by Capt. John Steel, at the North End of Boston.”
    While an extreme case, the
Sea
-
Flower
was fairly typical of transatlantic journeys for indentured servants at the time. Sullivan probably boarded a boat at the Waterford pier in 1742, a year after the
Sea
-
Flower
disembarked from Belfast, and often went hungry during his nine-week passage. He cut a deal with the captain to fill his empty stomach: in exchange for adding three more years to his indenture (for a total of seven years), he would be allowed to eat as many biscuits—bread designed to survive long sea voyages—as he could in the span of ninety minutes, as timed by the ship’s hourglass. The skipper burst into laughter when he heard Sullivan’s offer. He agreed to it on one condition: the Irishman couldn’t have any water for the hour and a half he was eating. The captain upended the hourglass and Sullivan stuffed the biscuits into his mouth, the parched bread ground down to a semi-edible paste of flour and saliva by his teeth before being forced down his throat. A few dozen biscuits were worth this little piece of sadistic entertainment, the captain figured, even if he lost some servants to starvation as a result.
    The reason for the nightmarish conditions aboard these ships was simple economics. People like Sullivan who were too poor to afford the trip to America sold contracts of their future labor for a certain period of time, usually between three to five years, to the ship’s owner, who recouped his expenses by retailing the contracts to customers in the colonies. Merchants tried to maximize profits by cramming as many servants as they could into their ships and keeping costs low by feeding them as little as possible.Even if a quarter of their cargo died, the traders reasoned, enough would survive to turn a profit. Provisions consisted of heavily salted bread, meat, and cheese calculated to last for twelve weeks, although a ship making several stops along the British Isles and the Continent before departing for America could be at sea for much longer. Even if there had been enough food, it would have been nearly impossible to stay healthy under such circumstances. One observer who inspected the servants’ quarters on a ship in the middle of the eighteenth century described foul odors, vomiting, seasickness, fever, dysentery, constipation, boils, scurvy, and mouth rot.
    If Sullivan came to America hoping to find the good life, he would soon be disappointed. When the ship arrived in Boston, the captain sold Sullivan’s seven-year indenture to a man named Captain Gillmore, who put the Irishman to work clearing wooded land on his estate near the St. George River in Maine. Maine in the 1740s was still mostly wilderness, beset by severe winters that kept its settlements rugged and small. It was also a major battleground, perhaps the bloodiest in North America, aggressively contested by the English, the French, and local Indian tribes for more than a hundred years. The fighting had been ruthless, with atrocities committed on all sides—villages burned to the ground,