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.