The literary fame of historic Clonfert is known only to the students of history. Most of the precious manuscripts of that great institution of learning were destroyed by the Danes and Anglo-Normans centuries ago, and its walls have long since crumbled into ruins.
“Clonfert,” says the scholarly Butterfield, “should be dear to all Americans, because our first discoverer was Clonfert’s Bishop. The Sea of Clonfert will doubtless remain during future ages as a shrine of pilgrimage to numberless tourists, for it holds in its midst an honored grave, where rests the dust of the patriarchal navigator who first designated this hemisphere as a paradise of loveliness, to give happy homes and altars free to the myriad outcasts of the human family.”
During the past two centuries, countless thousands of Erin’s sons and daughters have found happy homes and civil and religious liberty in “Brendan’s Land,” now and forevermore the land of Washington, which has been for more than a century and a quarter an asylum for the poor and oppressed of every race and every clime.
Owing to the ruthless destruction of vast numbers of ancient Irish archives by the Danes and English, our knowledge of the first discovery of America is not as exact as could be desired, yet there is enough known to justify Americans, regardless of race or creed, in claiming the honor of that discovery for St. Brendan and his sailor monks, almost a thousand years before Columbus landed on the soil of San Salvador.
HON. JAMES F. BRENNAN.
Of Peterborough, N. H.
Historiographer of the Society.
THE IRISH SETTLERS OF SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE.
BY HON. JAMES F. BRENNAN, HISTORIOGRAPHER AND MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF THE AMERICAN IRISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY, A MEMBER OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE HISTORICAL SOCIETY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHER OF THE PETERBOROUGH HISTORICAL SOCIETY, PETERBOROUGH, N. H.
The men who endured the hardships of this rough climate and encountered the dangers incident to the opening up of this wild country, had to be a class of men with strong hearts and resolute purposes. It was no place for the weak; each had to be a soldier in the battle for existence; each had to do his share in conquering the hardy soil and defending himself and his family against the ever present dangers of Indians and the wild beasts which then infested the territory.
The Plymouth Colony, composed largely of Englishmen, had for over a century established itself in Eastern Massachusetts, provided itself with comfortable settlements and enacted laws as intolerant as this country has ever known, but had not penetrated into New Hampshire. These Puritans, who, it is said, “first fell on their knees and then on the aborigines,” had roasted witches, driven Quakers, Baptists and all others, who were outside the pale of the Church of England, with buck shot into the tender mercies of the savage interior; fleeing from the intolerance of their own church in their quest of religious liberty, they inaugurated a system of unparalleled religious slavery here.[[14]]