There was certainly some very creative and fraudulent promotion going on, leading to families emigrating for the fabulous opportunity and finding themselves in

There was certainly some very creative and fraudulent promotion going on, leading to families emigrating for the fabulous opportunity and finding themselves in indentured servitude or on some marginal land even worse than at home. Or, like early many colonists rapidly succumbing to new and interesting fatal diseases. Course having got there they were mostly stuck without coin for passage home. I too suspect the push to space might go similarly.