Contemporary colonial observers denounced indentured servants as near-worthless

Evidence

[M]odern writers have generally viewed them with generous tolerance, and magnified their virtues either out of patriotic pride or out of a wish to demonstrate how grievously worthy persons were exploited by economic overlords in the bad old days. But almost with one accord their own contemporaries, who knew them and saw them, denounced them as next to worthless. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 419