A GLANCE AT SOME PIONEER IRISH IN THE SOUTH.

BY MICHAEL J. O’BRIEN, NEW YORK CITY.

No section of the Union presents a wider or more diversified field for historical inquiry than the Carolinas and Virginia.

All the territory from the Delaware River south to Cape Fear was named “Virginia” by the English, and it is generally supposed that it was in the present state of Virginia the earliest colonists landed. It was, however, the Indians of North Carolina who were the first to set eyes on the white men who came to America with the famous navigator, Sir Walter Raleigh, in the year 1584.

Among these first-comers to the Carolinas Irishmen are found, and in the resistance to the authority and encroachments of the British organized in that section many years later, the sons of Erin and their descendants are recorded as having played an honorable and prominent part.

In Hakluyt’s Voyages, Navigations, Traffiques and Discouveries of the English Nation are found some interesting facts relating to the first voyages of the English, under Raleigh and his lieutenants, to the western world. Richard Hakluyt was one of those who accompanied Raleigh on his first voyage of discovery in 1584. His Voyages and Discouveries, now a work of extreme rarity (it was published in London over 300 years ago), is by all odds the most celebrated book ever written on the subject, and forms the basis of all true history of the colonization of the Carolinas and Virginia. It is printed in the old English text of the sixteenth century, which renders its examination a task as laborious as it is interesting. The writer has examined the copy of this famous work in the Astor Library, and we are sure our readers will be interested in learning something of its contents at this stage.

The second voyage was undertaken by Sir Richard Greenville in the year 1585. The company comprised 107 persons. Hakluyt’s great work (page 254, volume 3) contains “an account of the particulars of the employments of the Englishmen left in Virginia by Sir Richard Greenville under the charge of Master Ralph Lane, general of the same, from August 17, 1585, to June 18, 1586.”

It will be observed that Greenville refers to “the Englishmen left in Virginia.” This would lead the ordinary reader to the conclusion that the expedition was comprised of Englishmen only, but such an assumption would be erroneous. In those days Ireland had a merchant marine of her own, and the ships which sailed from Irish ports, and indeed not a few of those whose home ports were in England, were manned by Irish seamen. (See Marmion’s Maritime Ports of Ireland.) What more natural, therefore, than to expect that Irish names should be found among the lists of these “Englishmen?” All of the early histories of the southern colonies refer to the first settlers as English. No suggestion is ever made, as far as the writer can find, that these first-comers may not all have been English, or that any Irish people were amongst them. Yet it is a fact that Irishmen came too in search of adventure, and no better testimony in support of that assertion can be adduced than the lists of the names of the persons who came on these colonizing expeditions.

Here are some of the names from Greenvilles’ list, as they were written down at the time: Edward Kelley, R. Courtney, Hugh Rogers, Thomas Fox, Darby “Glande,” Edward Nugent, John “Costigo” (Costigan), James Lafie, Francis Norris, Richard Moore, Richard Ireland, Matthew Lyne, Dennis Barnes, “Denice” Carroll, Robert Young, Thomas Hesket, Richard Humphrey and R. Griffin. Many of these, undoubtedly, were natives of Ireland. This is said to have been the first English colony that settled in America, the previous expedition having returned with its entire company.

They entered Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic by what is now known as New Inlet, and then landed at Roanoke Island, thence crossed over to the mainland to the eastern portion of North Carolina, just south of Norfolk, Va. They followed the course of the Chowan River for a short distance, and soon came in contact with the Indians. Hakluyt’s work contains an interesting narrative of the voyage and of the explorations of the party in Virginia, written by Ralph Lane, in which long accounts are given of their encounters with the savage Indians. In his account of one fight, on the first of June, 1586, he refers to the bravery of “one of my Irish boys,” who shot Pemisapan, the king of the Indians, “athwart the buttocks with my petronell.” The Irish boy’s shot did not, however, bring down the Indian king, and the wily redskin, with a number of his warriors, managed to escape into the dense forest.

But then, another Irishman, who was not afraid to face the Indian band singlehanded, was there to finish the work of the youthful adventurer from Erin, “for,” writes Lane, “in the end an Irishman serving me, one Nugent, and the deputy provost undertook him”—that is to say, volunteered to capture or kill the Indian king—“and I, in some doubt lest we had lost both the king and my man, by our own negligence to have been intercepted by the savages, we met him returning out of the woods with Pemisapan’s head in his hands.”

The place where the bold Irishman, Edward Nugent, and the nameless youth thus earned such prominent mention in early American history has been located as in Chowan County, near the present town of Edenton, N. C.

It seems that in all of the early voyages of the English to the American continent the adventurous Irishman was present. On Raleigh’s first voyage the largest ship was commanded by a Captain Butler, and Captain Edward Hayes commanded a vessel in the expedition of Sir H. Gilbert to Newfoundland in 1583. Sixteen years earlier, 1567, Robert Barrett and John Garrett commanded ships in the expedition to Mexico under Sir John Hawkins. There is nothing to show that these captains were of the Irish nation, but their names have been for centuries so common in Ireland that we venture to include them in this category.

In 1568, when Hawkins arrived in the Gulf of Mexico, he put ashore a company comprising 68 men under Miles Philips, a little north of Panuco. From the curiously-worded narrative of Miles Philips, entitled “The voyages from Panuco, thence to Mexico, and afterwards to sundry other places, having remained in the counterey 15 or 16 yeeres together, and noted many things most worthy of observation,” which is contained in Hakluyt’s third volume, we glean some interesting information.

The whole company was captured by a band of Indians and Spaniards, and immediately haled before the governor, who “visited them with the terrors of the Inquisition.” John Gray, John and Thomas Browne, John Mooney, James Collier and John Rider were sentenced to receive 200 lashes on horseback and to serve eight years in the galleys; others of the company received various terms of servitude, while others were condemned to serve as servants or slaves in the monasteries. Three were condemned to be burned to ashes, and the inhuman sentence was carried out in the market place of the City of Mexico on the day preceding Good Friday in the year 1575.

The three unfortunates were George Riuely (Reilly), Peter Momfrie and “Cornelius.” Philips was unacquainted with the full name of the latter, but in order to distinguish him from another of the party who bore the same Christian name, he refers to him as “Cornelius the Irishman.” In relating the circumstances of his subsequent escape, Philips stated that several of the adventurers, after the expiration of their terms of servitude, remained in Mexico, married native women, and some prospered in the new country.

The same volume of Hakluyt (page 286) contains the story of “The Fourth Voyage, made to Virginia in 1587, wherein was transported the Second Colony,” written by the commander, Captain John White. The narrative runs in part:

“On the first day of July (1587) we weighed anchor at Musketo’s Bay, upon the fourth side of St. John’s Island, where were left behind two Irishmen of our company, Darbie Glaven and Dennis Carrell, thence bearing along the coast of St. John’s till evening.” The vessels anchored in the bay for the purpose of securing a supply of salt, which Simon Fernando, who was with Raleigh on the first expedition, had informed White could be procured on the island. The two hardy Irishmen, Glaven and Carrell, were selected to go ashore and procure the necessary supply. They proceeded inland, but, during their absence, Fernando, for some reason that does not appear, persuaded the commander to weigh anchor, and before the two unfortunates had returned to the shore, the vessels were far on their way. It would be interesting if we could follow the fortunes of the two Irish castaways among the Indians of the Danish West Indies, but history contains no further account of them.

In the following September, when one of the vessels of the expedition was on its return to England, she encountered a great storm. The crew and passengers were in sore straits on account of the lack of food and water, expecting to perish by famine at sea. On October 16, however, when they had almost given up in despair, they sighted land, which proved to be the coast of Kerry. By the aid of “a hulke of Dublin” they entered Smerwick Bay, where the inhabitants at once succored them. White relates that the whole company was brought ashore at “Dingen a Cos,” where the sick sailors and passengers were taken care of by the local doctor.

HON. JOHN S. WHALEN.
New York Secretary of State.
A MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY.

The writer of the narrative pays a well-merited tribute to the inhabitants of Smerwick and Dingle for their timely and spontaneous aid. They stayed at Smerwick for over two weeks; there White distributed some potato plants among the people, “the first ever seen in Europe.” It is generally supposed that it was Raleigh who first brought the potato plant to Europe, but according to White’s account, it was he who introduced it, and that it was the inhabitants of the County of Kerry who were the first Europeans to taste the esculent tuber.

Could John White, who wrote the official account of, and commanded this expedition, have been an Irishman? His story of the fifth voyage is dated “from my house at Newtown, in Kilmore, the fourth of February, 1593.” There is no such place as Kilmore in England, but there are several such places in Ireland, and the name is distinctively Irish. The town of Dingle, County Kerry, has always been and even is still known to the inhabitants as “Dingen a Cos.” It will be observed that White referred to the town by its Irish, not by its Anglicized appellation, which, to some, may be suggestive that a knowledge of the Gaelic language, which, happily, most Irishmen spoke in those days, was one of the accomplishments of the historian mariner.

And is it not highly probable that White and his officers, who came to form such friendly intercourse with the fisher-folk of the Kerry coast, may have informed them of “the great land beyond the sea,” with the result that, on his subsequent voyages to Virginia, he was accompanied by not a few of the hardy natives of the Kingdom of Kerry?

After the forfeiture of the immense estates of the Desmonds in Munster in 1584, Raleigh came into possession of 12,000 acres in Cork, Waterford and Tipperary. He built and made his home in the castle of Lismore, and soon after established at the neighboring ports of Waterford and Youghal a large trade in lumber and barrel staves with France and Spain. His ships were largely manned by Irish sailors, and it is entirely within the bounds of probability that Raleigh impressed into his transatlantic crews some of the sailors and fishermen of the Munster coast.

In the charter which Raleigh received from the English crown on March 27, 1585, empowering him to hold the lands which he had colonized in America and apportion them among the colonists, reference is made to “persons from England and Ireland,” thus showing that Irishmen were among the first white settlers of the western world.

Among those who landed in North Carolina from White’s fourth expedition, and “remayned to inhabite there,” were Thomas Coleman, Edward and Winifred Powell, James Hyndes, William and Henry Browne, Thomas Ellis, Michael Millet, James Lafie, Maurice Allen, Richard Berry, Dennis and Margery Harvie, William Waters, Martin Sutton, Hugh Patterson, Thomas Humphrey and John and Brian “Wyles.” Most of these names are common to Britain as well as to Ireland, but, without doubt, some of them were natives of Ireland.

These colonists all either perished from famine or were slain by the savage enemy. Some are supposed to have sought asylum among the Hatteras Indians at Croatoan, who were friendly to the whites. Lawson, one of the historians of North Carolina, writing in 1714 of the natives of Croatoan, relates how the Indians told him that some of their ancestors were white people and “could talk in a book as we do,” and that many of the Hatteras Indians had gray eyes, which are known only among whites.

In his account of the fifth voyage, White tells of their arrival at the mouth of the Roanoke on August 17, 1590. A great storm raged; the ship’s boats were tossed about at the mercy of the waves, and eleven of the company drowned, among them Edward Kelly, Edward Kilborne and Robert Coleman. These three are mentioned as “among 7 of the chiefest men of the expedition.”

Hawk, one of the historians of North Carolina, says that “in 1666 the Lords Proprietors had agents employed in seeking emigrants on the continent of Europe, and in Ireland, Scotland and the West Indies,” and the same author in referring to the divers religious beliefs professed by the people of North Carolina (about 1700), refers to “the Irish Romanists.” It is to be regretted that we have no means of tracing the names or careers of any of those “Irish Romanists.”

Hewatt’s Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia (published at London in the year 1776), is referred to by historians as an authoritative work. In this book many references are made to the early Irish settlers of the Carolinas. The author describes the dreadful extremities to which the poor settlers in the vicinity of Charlestown (now Charleston), S. C., were reduced in the year 1667.

During the government of Sir John Yeamans a civil disturbance broke out among the colonists, which threatened the ruin of the settlement. “The Proprietors,” says Hewatt, “were unable to furnish the colony with regular supplies, and the spots of sandy and barren land poorly rewarded their toil. Many of them were unskilled, and the European grain which they were accustomed to sow soon proved suitable to neither soil nor climate. The settlers began to murmur against the Proprietors and to curse the day they left their native land to starve in a wilderness. While they gathered oysters for subsistence with one hand, they were obliged to carry the musket in the other for defence against the Indians.”

In this emergency, a true son of Ireland is seen to have been in the forefront of the battles waged by the afflicted colonists. Florence O’Sullivan was one of the leading men among the settlers of Charlestown, some of whom were his countrymen, and to whom they looked for guidance and counsel. O’Sullivan is said to have come to South Carolina with Governor Sayle. He was surveyor-general of the province until he was succeeded by John Culpeper in 1671. He is thought to have been of the famous family of that name whose paternal home was on the borders of Cork and Kerry, and which gave to America schoolmasters, governors, a celebrated general of the Revolutionary army, and in later days men who distinguished themselves in every sphere of activity in the new country.

To add to the troubles between the colonists and the Indians, it is related that about this time there was great fear among the Carolinians of an invasion by the Spaniards from the South. Militia companies were formed in and around Charlestown to resist invasion, and O’Sullivan had been placed in command of a body of men on an island in the harbor—now known as Sullivan’s Island. Their situation was one of great danger and they were instructed to warn the inhabitants on the first approach of the enemy, and then return to shore. “The great gun”—evidently the only one available—was in the immediate charge of O’Sullivan.

The Spaniards did not put in an appearance; the scanty supplies of the party soon gave out, but they stuck to their post until starvation stared them in the face. They remained until all hope had fled that their supplies would be replenished, and when they were not forthcoming, O’Sullivan and his men, deciding that to perish from hunger would be an inglorious end, deserted the island without consulting the governor and joined the discontented party in the town.

Thereupon, we are told, the people became ungovernable and threatened to compel the authorities to relinquish the settlement. O’Sullivan was arrested by the town marshal and “compelled to find security for his good behavior.” Vessels were despatched to Virginia and to Barbadoes for provisions, but, before they returned, a ship arrived from Europe with supplies and a number of new settlers. “The newcomers revived the drooping spirits of the people and encouraged them to engage in more vigorous efforts. The governor, sensible of the hardships the people had suffered, readily forgave them,” and O’Sullivan and his friends were released from further restraint.

The Spanish authorities at St. Augustine, “on learning the belated news of the discontented and miserable condition of the Carolina colonists,” advanced with an armed party as far as St. Helena Island, about 50 miles south of Charlestown, to dislodge or destroy the settlers. Brian Fitzpatrick, a well-known “character” of the settlement, is said to have deserted his friends at this juncture and to have gone over to the Spaniards. What his purpose was in doing so does not appear. However, reinforcements arrived to aid the Carolinians, upon which the Spaniards evacuated St. Helena and retreated to Augustine.

After the death of Governor Yeamans in 1674, the inhabitants called a meeting at Charlestown, when they elected representatives for the purpose of making laws for the government of the colony. Thomas Gray, Henry Hughes, Maurice Mathews and Christopher Portman were the four deputies chosen by the people.

In 1680 Richard Kirle, who is described as “an Irish gentleman,” succeeded to the governorship, but he died six months after taking the reins of office.

Elsewhere we have referred to the wholesale exportation of the Irish by Cromwell, mainly to the Island of Barbadoes, during the first half of the seventeenth century. In time, those who survived the tropical climate became freemen, and eventually even some became landowners, planters and the business men of the island. Numbers of them, on gaining their freedom, sailed for the American coast with their families. They had been apprised of the opportunities open for them in the South, as the planters of Virginia and the Carolinas had their agents in the West Indies inducing them to settle on the mainland. In John Camden Hotten’s famous work, there is a list of those who departed from Barbadoes in the year 1678, which is described in this quaint language:

“List of what Ticqtts. have been granted out of the Secretary’s office of the Island of Barbadoes for departure off this island of the several psones hereafter menconed, beginning in January, 1678, and ending in December following.”

These are seen to have sailed for Virginia and the Carolinas and other American colonies:

On one ship, the True Friendship, commanded by Capt. Charles Kallahan, these sailed from Barbadoes:

Those who left Barbadoes for America in the year 1678 are the only ones recorded by Hotten, but for many years there was a constant stream of wanderers leaving the West Indies for the American coast. We are as yet unable to procure any records but those of the year 1678.

Thus we see what a great infusion of Irish blood Virginia and the Carolinas received in the year 1678 alone. Some of these were servants, but among them also were men of family, who either settled down on the plantations or received grants of uncultivated lands themselves, which, in course of time, they converted into fruitful estates. It has been well said that “the fighting races don’t die out,” and surely the blood of these early Gaels must have been a potent factor in moulding the Americans of later generations in the South.

Irish families are invariably large, and as the same homely virtue is usually practised by their descendants, it will not be deemed an exaggeration when we say that thousands of the present natives of the South are descended directly or indirectly from the Irish colonizers from Barbadoes of the last half of the seventeenth century. There is no system of calculation by which we could arrive at any adequate idea of the probable number of American descendants of those early settlers, but, if we adopt the simple method of taking the number of generations that have elapsed since their coming, and then apportion, say an average of five persons to each family for each succeeding generation, we can safely conclude that when American historians refer to the pioneers of the South as wholly “of Anglo-Saxon origin,” they are playing fast and loose with their imaginations.

The provincial authorities were anxious to attract immigrants to open up the virgin forest and extend the bounds of their domain, so we find them in communication with the government agents in England and Ireland, offering the most flattering inducements to all who desired to settle in the new country.

Farmers, artisans and agricultural laborers were particularly needed, while they objected to the importation of convicts and other undesirable persons. Irish political refugees were sometimes classed as “convicts,” and while the provincial history, supported by other testimony of an indubitable character, indicates that great numbers of Irish “convicts” settled in Virginia, it is seen that once they had landed on the soil, they were, in a manner, “tolerated” and permitted to stay, and accordingly were parcelled out among the planters and others who needed the services of able-bodied men.

The privations suffered by those imported Irish “convicts” under the vassalage of their colonial masters are, in some cases, beyond description, and would shake the credulity of the most sympathetic. Many of them occupied even lower positions than the Southern slaves of a later day. Not only were they the tillers of the soil, the woodsmen of the forest, and the builders of the highways, but they occupied “the firing line” in the resistance of the planters to the attacks of the savage redskins. Here where the ravages of the Indians were so terrible, these Irishmen and boys, so rudely torn from their own country, inflicted on savagery many a mortal blow and opened the way for the civilization whose fruits we now enjoy.

The continued cry for settlers attracted the avarice of many of the Cromwellian adventurers in Ireland, who thus became most efficient aids in carrying on the barbarous work of the English commissioners, who were appointed by government to exterminate the Irish.

As Prendergast relates in his Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, they had agents actively engaged throughout Ireland, “who were authorized by Parliament to seize women, orphans and the destitute to be transported to Barbadoes and the plantations of Virginia.” Among the destitute were those whose ancient properties had been confiscated by the crown and many of whom had become wanderers over the stricken island, or had become inmates of the workhouses. “The commissioners for Ireland,” says Prendergast, “issued orders to the governors of garrisons to deliver all prisoners of war; to the jail-keepers for all offenders in their custody; to the masters of workhouses for the destitute in their care, and gave directions to all in authority to seize those who had no visible means of livelihood and deliver them to the British agents.” All unfortunates who were thus caught were quickly conducted to the waterside and there herded like so many cattle until such time as a sufficient number had been gathered in to embark them on board some ship bound for the West Indies or the coast of Virginia.

Some of the English adventurers in Ireland also engaged in the business of man-hunting on their own account, and we find from the records of Virginia that on April 12, 1621, Sir William Newce, an English officer who resided in the County of Cork, wrote to the governor “offering to transport two thousand persons to Virginia.” The same records indicate that Daniel Gookin, an Irish Quaker merchant of Cork City, was in the business of transporting cattle from Ireland to Virginia. On one occasion, he came in person to the colony, and, seeing the probable advantages of a permanent settlement in the country, he sailed from Cork in the Flying Harte with a large number of his countrymen, who, we are told, “were exceedingly well furnished with all sorts of provisions and cattle,” and landed at Newport News in November, 1621.

Notwithstanding that the records of Virginia say that this large colony came from Ireland, they are referred to by historians, who at all make reference to them, as “English.” The fact that they were so “well furnished” would also indicate that Ireland sent forth other colonizers to America in those early days besides the “convicts” and the “destitute.”

In the “Records of the London Company” (the Proprietors of Virginia), Daniel Gookin is mentioned as having undertaken “to transport great multitudes of people and cattle to Virginia,” and as having “received patents for 300 people.” The records do not state from where this large colony came, but, from the fact that their leader had formerly been a merchant in the city of Cork, from where his first contingent sailed, it is entirely within the bounds of probability that the second colony was largely, if not entirely, composed of Munstermen.

In 1622 many of the colonists were massacred by Indians, after which the remainder were ordered to abandon the outlying plantations and to concentrate their forces about the stronger ones. Gookin’s Irish settlement, which had been located near the mouth of the James River, back of Newport News, was one of those ordered to be abandoned, but he refused to obey the order, and, “gathering together his dependants, who by that time numbered only 35, he remained at his post, to his great credit and the content of his adventurers.” (Stith’s History of Virginia.)

In 1637 Gookin received a grant of 2,500 acres of land in Upper Norfolk, now Nansemond County, and in 1642 he was appointed commander of the county. The court records show, under date of May 24, 1642, that “Daniel Gookin, late of Ireland,” was still a resident of Upper Norfolk County. His son, Daniel, left Virginia for Massachusetts, where he became superintendent of Indian Affairs, with the title of major-general. He was also the author of a history of the Indians. It is said that his descendants are now very numerous in the United States.

Neill, in his History of the English Colonization of America, a most authoritative work, gives in full a sermon preached at Bowe Street Church in London in 1622, by a famous clergyman named Rev. Patrick Copland, who had been employed by the East India Company in Barbadoes. In this sermon he referred to “a fleete of nine sayle of ships that not one person out of 800 who had been transported out of England and Ireland for the plantations of Virginia, had met with any mishap by the way.”

In a footnote to the remarks of the preacher, the historian in referring to the great exodus from Ireland to the American colonies, remarks that “Ireland has always been a hive from which America has derived sturdy hewers of wood to subdue the forests.” In 1622, Rev. Patrick Copland was appointed first president of the College of Virginia and general manager of all its properties. The college was founded by King James in 1622 and was established at Henrico City, fifteen miles below Richmond. (See Old Churches and Families of Virginia, by Bishop William Meade.)

At this period there must have been a goodly number of Irish in Virginia, if we are to judge from the contents of a little book, “suitable for a projected school in Virginia,” prepared in 1621 by an English Puritan minister named John Brinsley. The book was intended as “a plea for learning and the school master.” The author stated that “the incivility among manie of the Irish, the Virginians, and all other barbarous nations” grew “from their exceeding ignorance of our Holy God and of all true and good learning.” On another page the author said it was his unfeigned desire to adapt the book “for all functions and places, and more particularly to every ruder place, and more especially to that poor Irish nation with our loving countrymen in Virginia.”

How very solicitous he was for the “uncivil” Irish! To him, of course, they appeared rude and uncivil because they did not in those days speak in the English tongue, but in their own undefiled and mellifluous Gaelic. The book was presented by Brinsley “at a court held for Virginia on December 19, 1621,” on which occasion a committee was appointed to determine whether the book was suitable for distribution among the school children. This circumstance is related by the historian Neill.

FRANCIS J. QUINLAN, M. D., LL. D.
New York City.