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.