38	WILLIAM  AND  MARY  QUARTERLY

presented themselves, whether surreptitious or open, whether sanctioned
by their masters or forbidden, to relieve the isolation and loneliness that
resulted from the demographic conditions of slavery on Maryland's
lower Western Shore.

A surplus of males among adults of working age was not the only
peculiarity of the slave population. Few children appear in the inventories:
appraisers listed less than one slave under age 16 for every two adults
between 16 and 50. In addition, the ratio of children to adults shows only
the slightest upward tendency through the period under study. The small
proportion of children reinforces the impression of a stunted family life
for most blacks in early colonial Maryland.

While the difficulty of assessing the impact of immigration on the
age structure makes certainty impossible, the small proportion of children
does suggest that the slave population did not increase by natural means.
Growth depended instead on immigration. Model life tables indicate that
in populations with adult life expectancies that approximate those found
among whites in Maryland of this period and that are growing by natural
means, the ratio of persons under 16 to persons 16 to 50 should approach
one.23 In the West Indies, where it has been established beyond doubt
that slaves suffered a net natural decline in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, the black population contained a slightly higher
proportion of children than in the four Maryland counties.24

The proportion of children in the inventories, furthermore, exag-
gerates the ability of the slave population to reproduce itself. Between
1658 and 1710 the sex ratio among slave children identifiable by sex was
1.405. Perhaps girls outnumbered boys among those who could not be so
identified, or perhaps among children female mortality was much higher
than male mortality. More likely, many of the children were not native

23 For life expectancies among whites see Lorena S. Walsh and Russell R.
Menard, "Death in the Chesapeake: Two Life Tables for Men in Early Colonial
Maryland," Md. Hist. Mag., LXIX (1974), 211-227. Model life tables are available
in Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable
Populations (Princeton, N. J., 1966), and United Nations, Dept. of Social Affairs,
Population Branch, Age and Sex Patterns of Mortality: Model Life-Tables for
Under-developed Countries (New York, 1955). See the comments on their use in
T. H. Hollingsworth, Historical Demography (Ithaca, N. Y., 1969), esp. 339-353.

2*Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 316. For a survey of census returns that helps place
the proportion of children in the Maryland slave population in context see Robert
V. Wells, "Household Size and Composition in the British Colonies in America,
1675-1775," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, IV (1973-1974), 543-570.