The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

The "Irish accounts" may have been exaggerated, but the English atoned for this by certainly falling below the mark, as is clear from the fact that, according to them, the Commissioners of Ireland required the "supply" for New England alone to come from "the country within twenty miles of Cork, Youghall, Kinsale, Waterford, and Wexford;" that "the hunt lasted four years," and was carried on with such ardor by the agents of many English firms that those men-catchers employed persons "to delude poor people by false pretenses into by-places, and thence they forced them on board their ships; that for money sake they were found to have enticed and forced women from their husbands, and children from their parents, who maintained them at school; and they had not only dealt so with the Irish, but also with the English." For this reason, the order was revoked, and the "hunt" forbidden.

When agents were reduced to such straits after the government had used force, as Henry Cromwell acknowledged, the large extent of country mentioned above must have been well scoured and depopulated; and certainly a far greater number of victims must have been secured by all those means combined than is given in the English accounts. We believe the Irish.

One other source of supply deserves mention. Not only women and children, but priests also, were hunted down and shipped off to the same American plantations; so that persons of every class which is held sacred in the eyes of God and man for its character and helplessness, were compelled to emigrate, or rather to undergo the worst possible fate that the imagination of man can conceive.

In 1656 a general battue for priests took place all over Ireland. The prisons seem to have been filled to overflowing. "On the 3d of May, the governors of the respective precincts were ordered to send them with sufficient guards, from garrison to garrison, to Carrickfergus, to be there put on board of such ships as should sail with the first opportunity to the Barbadoes. One may imagine the sufferings of this toilsome journey by the petition of one of them. Paul Cashin, an aged priest, apprehended at Maryborough, and sent to Philipstown, on the way to Carrickfergus, there fell desperately sick; and, being also extremely aged, was in danger of perishing in restraint from want of friends and means of relief. On the 27th of August, the commissioners having ascertained the truth of his petition, they ordered him sixpence a day during his sickness, and (in answer, probably, to this poor prisoner's prayer to be saved from transplantation) their order directed that the sixpence should be continued to him in his travel thence (after his recovery) to Carrickfergus, in order to his transplantation to the Barbadoes. "— (Cromwellian Settlement.)

In that burning island of the West Indies, deprived of all means, not only of exercising their ministry among others, but even of practising their religion themselves, of fulfilling their holy obligation of prayer and sacrifice, these victims of such an atrocious persecution were employed as laborers in the fields: their transplantation had cost money, and the money had to be repaid a hundred-fold by the sweat of their brow.

Ship-loads of them had been discharged on the inhospitable shore of that island; each with a high calling which he could no longer carry out; each, therefore, tortured in his soul, with all the sweet or bitter memories of his past life crowding on his mind, and the dreary prospect spreading before him, to the end of his life, of no change from his rude and slavish occupation under the burning sun, hearing no voice but that of the harsh taskmaster; his eyes saddened and his heart sickened by the open and daily spectacle of immorality and woe, with no ending but the grave.

It seems, however, that these holy men found some means of fulfilling their sacred duty as God's ministers, for the inhuman traffic in such slaves as these to the Barbadoes lasted but one year. In 1657 it was decreed that this island should no longer be their place of transportation, but, instead, the desolate isles of Arran, opposite the entrance to the bay of Galway, and the isle of Innisboffin, off the coast of Connemara. Mr. Prendergast thinks that this change of policy in their regard may have been caused by the price of their transportation, which probably mounted to a high aggregate sum. But he must be mistaken. They certainly cost no more than women and children, and their labor in the West Indies surely covered this expense. The reason for the change is more plainly visible in the nature of the site substituted for the Barbadoes as their place of exile. The "holy isles" of Arran and the isle of Innisboffin were then, as now, bare of every thing—almost of inhabitants. The priests could be there kept as in a prison, and, though they might be of no profit to their masters, they could not hear a voice or see a face other than those of their fellow-captives. In the West India islands there existed an already thick population, and the very women and children who had been transported thither before them would be consoled by their ministry, though practised by stealth, and strengthened in their faith, which might thus have not only been kept alive among them, but spread over the whole country.

Who can say if the faith, preserved among the many Irish living in the island until quite recently, was not owing to their exhortations?

"The first Irish people who found permanent homes in America," says Thomas D'Arcy McGee, "were certain Catholic patriots banished by Oliver Cromwell to Barbadoes. . . . In this island, as in the neighboring Montserrat, the Celtic language was certainly spoken in the last century,1 (1 The Celtic language— that sure sign of Catholicity—was not only spoken there last century, but is still to-day. The writer himself heard last year (1871), from two young American seamen, who had just returned from a voyage to this island, that the negro porters and white longshoremen who load and unload the ships in the harbor, know scarcely any other language than the Irish, so that often the crews of English vessels can only communicate with them by signs.) and perhaps it is partly attributable to this early Irish colonization, that Barbadoes became 'one of the most populous islands in the world.' At the end of the seventeenth century, it was reported to contain twenty thousand inhabitants."

Although Barbadoes is the chief island concerned in the present considerations, nevertheless nearly all the British colonies then existing in America, received their share of this emigration. Several ship-loads of the exiles were certainly sent to New England, at the very time that New-Englanders were earnestly invited by the British Government to "come and plant Ireland;" Virginia, too, paid probably with tobacco for the young men and maidens sent there as slaves. The "Thurloe State Papers" disclose the fact that one thousand boys and one thousand girls, taken in Ireland by force, were dispatched to Jamaica, lately added to the empire of England by Admiral Penn, father of the celebrated Quaker founder of Pennsylvania.