Placed to their memory by several
American children.
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.