Before Laurens had acquired the English language, when on his way to school, he was kidnapped and sent to America, most likely Virginia, and remained there for many years.

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It was that Isaac and Laurens used to go daily to a school in London to learn English.   One day, as they were walking along together, they noticed a crowd and, stopping to see what the matter was and saw a pretty little girl standing on a doorstep and weeping sadly because her pet bird (a parrot) had escaped and would not return to its cage, but sat preening itself well out of her reach.   The polite, French Isaac (1668-), catching sight of the bird, and his quick French wit connecting it with the little girl’s woe, succeeded in catching it and returning it to its owner.   When he went back to join his brother Laurens, he had gone and was nowhere to be found and for years nothing was heard of him.

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His family had quite given him up for lost, when one day he turned up again.   He had been shipped to America and forced to work on a sugar plantation and to endure great hardships, apart from the misery of separation from his family.  

 

After years of despair had passed, a French gentleman and lady visited the plantation, and somehow he managed to have a speech with them and tell them his sad tale.  With their aid, he got back to London but found it difficult to trace his relations.   At last, to the joy of all, he did.  

 

And now comes a bit of romance which may not be true, and that is that he met and married the girl who had lost the parrot and who had thus, indirectly, been the cause of all his troubles.   At any rate, he did marry a Miss Bridget Crawford, who was the sister-in-law of Alderman Grugnon, a goldsmith and watchmaker, to whom his elder brother, Isaac, had been apprenticed.

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Laurens had one child, Bridget, named after her mother, and she married Isaac, the son of Francis Roussel, her first cousin.

 

Notes

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​Byles, Emma Mary, "Family Notes", 1926 unpublished.

The above account is credible but unable to be verified: In the 1700s, urchins were kidnapped from London’s streets to labour in tobacco fields in America. Hundreds of thousands of white children and adults were kidnapped, chained, whipped, shipped as galley slaves and worked to death in the American colonies.

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See: Hoffman, Michael A., "They Were White, and they were Slaves." 1992. Independent Research Company, Idaho.
Jordan, D. and Walsh, M. "White Cargo: The forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America." (2008) New York University Press, New York.