White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (19 page)

For the Elizabethan blue bloods and youthful gentry with fire in their bellies, Ireland became a land of adventure. By the late 1500s, all kinds of Englishmen were crossing the narrow stretch of water in search of their fortunes. Some fared well and others less so but in almost all instances their prosperity was bought at a heavy cost to the locals. We do not need to give a complete account of what happened in Ireland – for that has been told so often and so clearly by historians over the years – but attempt an impression of the forces, psychological as well as social and political, that propelled Ireland into the front line of the transatlantic adventure.

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For any English ship putting out for the West Indies and America, Ireland was there to be sailed past or around. Ships stopped on the way for supplies and Ireland became an important point on the route to the west. It was natural that Irish men and women would get swept up in the great colonial adventure. Very early on, Irish servants were taken across the ocean under the indentured-servant scheme. No doubt many idle or curious people who ventured to the quaysides of ports such as Waterford in the south-east or Kinsale in the south-west were enticed aboard ships and became emigrants before they hardly knew it.

This adventure forged a firm link between England and Ireland, and then to the new colonies across the Atlantic. This triangular relationship grew throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and among the ties that held it were the chains of bondage.

The headright system that we have seen play such a key role in populating the American colonies was from early times used to promote emigration from Ireland. One seventeenth-century planter from Ireland managed to amass an estate of 32,000

acres in Maryland thanks to the numbers of servants he brought over. George Talbot from County Roscommon transported the astonishing number of 640 servants in the space of twelve years.

He seems to have been determined to create an entire colony by his sole endeavours.

The emigrants from Ireland included the ‘Scotch-Irish’, Scots who had settled in Ulster. Many were moved to go because their particular nonconformist religion was officially discouraged at home. They found support and a welcome in colonies such as Delaware and Pennsylvania. This was particularly the case after the Restoration of the English Crown in 1660, when the official view on dissenting religions hardened. This impelled Irish Quakers to settle in Pennsylvania, the first Quaker state, and New Jersey. In the eighteenth century, Presbyterian ministers in Ireland began to lead their congregations to America, especially to Carolina, seeing themselves as leaders of flocks of ‘lost’ people in search of the promised land. Their zeal was no doubt sharpened by the official financial inducements offered for ministers to emigrate. The Test 138

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Act of 1704 impelled more dissenters to make the journey from Ireland to America, for it not only barred them from high office but also ruled their marriages invalid.

The Irish Catholic experience was driven by a similar policy of exclusion. The Reformation under Henry VIII did not impinge all that much on Ireland but under Elizabeth I the desire to impose some uniformity of religion upon Ireland became much more strident. By the middle of the 1600s, Irish Catholics – the vast majority of the people – found themselves subject to an English scheme to eradicate them.

Of course, the English and the Normans had sparred with the Irish for centuries. The English thought of the Irish as uncivilised

– despite their uncanny ability to entice colonists into taking on their culture and way of life. Vikings, Normans, Welsh, Scots and English had gone to Ireland over the centuries and many had been swallowed up by it, like a lost goblet taken slowly down into the bog. The eminent social and economic historian Fernand Braudel has pointed out that the Irish were seen by the English as different in quality from the Scots or the Welsh:

The Irish were the enemy, savages simultaneously despised and feared. The consequences were mutual incomprehension, high-handedness by the invaders, and horrors whose sinister catalogue needs no elaboration: the story has been told with lucidity and honesty by English historians themselves.1

The English in America thought it reasonable to settle in a land already inhabited by others. They viewed the indigenous population as one to conquer, eradicate or enslave. This view of the world was undoubtedly learned, and it was probably learned in Ireland. By viewing the Irish as barbarians, the English could have no qualms about invading their land.

The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland prepared the mindset that was to propel the English farther west four centuries later.

Just as 1066 is a date to be remembered by every school child in England, 1166 should be remembered by every child in Ireland.

It was the date when the deposed King of Leinster, Diarmait Mac 139

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Murchada, invited Henry II of England into Ireland to help him regain his crown. Henry stayed and by 1171 had firmly established a bridgehead reaching from Dublin to Drogheda. It was to be called the Pale, after the Latin
palus
or stake. What happened to the Irish after that was to have interesting parallels with what happened in the American colonies.

A few years after Henry established his bridgehead, a Welsh cleric named Giraldus Cambrensis wrote a lasting work of collective character assassination.
The History and Topography of Ireland
listed all the Irish vices: blasphemy, laziness, treachery, incest and cannibalism among them. Cambrensis’s fiction provided the basis for English views of Ireland for several hundred years and rankled with the Irish for just as long. Such beliefs helped to justify the deeds of ruthless military leaders such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert, of whom we have already heard so much. His policy in Ireland was to slaughter even non-combatants on the grounds that terror among the population ‘made short wars’.

The Anglo-Norman expeditions into Ireland marked the start of a sorry and drawn-out history of enmity and struggle. The Irish would be cut off from their own laws and at the same time not allowed recourse to the laws of the colonisers. A group of Irish noblemen complained to the Pope that under the English laws no Englishman could be punished for killing an Irishman. The Irish were made into second-class citizens without the rights accorded to others. The ‘compelling parallels’ between this and in the way in which the slave-labour system in America accorded rights to some but not to others has been highlighted by Theodore Allen in
The
Invention of the White Race
.2

As Allen relates, under Anglo-American slavery, ‘the rape of a female slave was not a crime, but a mere trespass on the master’s property’. It is interesting to compare this with Ireland in 1278, when two Anglo-Normans were brought into court and charged with raping one Margaret O’Rorke. They were found not guilty because ‘the said Margaret is an Irishwoman’. We can see that from the twelfth until the sixteenth century, Ireland was a laboratory in which social ideas and legal conventions would be forged and which found their echo in the labour systems of the American colonies.

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A law enacted in Virginia in 1723 provided that ‘manslaughter of a [black] slave is not punishable’. Under Anglo-Norman law in Ireland, for someone standing accused of manslaughter to be acquitted he had only to show that the slain victim was Irish. Anglo-Norman priests granted absolution on the grounds that it was ‘no more sin to kill an Irishman than a dog or any other brute’.

The first serious rebellion in Ireland began in 1594 and became known as the Nine Years’ War. Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone (a title given to him by Henry VIII), was Ulster’s most powerful leader and he was alarmed at the increasing pace of plantation. After starting well, Tyrone threw in the towel in 1603 and submitted to James I, who had just succeeded Queen Elizabeth.

Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion sparked other uprisings around the country, especially in Munster, in the south-west. There were high-profile casualties, including Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. Raleigh bounced back from this reversal; for Spenser, it was the end of his fortunes. The creator of the pastoral ideals of
The Faerie Queene
was buried in Westminster Abbey at Chaucer’s feet at the age of forty-six but not before he had made a helpful suggestion of what to do with the Irish: they should be starved from the landscape. Spenser’s proposition would prove to be prophetic.

Four years after his rebellion ended, Hugh O’Neill, along with several other Irish nobles and their families, sailed out of Lough Swilly and into exile in Europe. The ‘flight of the earls’ was the signal the English had been waiting for. Ulster had long been a thorn in England’s side, with home-grown opposition providing a possible platform for Spanish designs. As O’Neill sailed over the horizon, all chance of organised resistance receded with him. Now the coast was clear for the plantation of Ulster. It was September 1607, just five months after the English settlers had founded Jamestown.

The colonisation of Ireland led to a large proportion of the indigenous population becoming rootless. The English colonists found they faced problems quite similar to those they had at home.

Wandering vagabonds and vagrant villains roamed the land, though more freely than in England, where the Poor Laws kept the homeless tied to their native parishes. Some saw transportation as the obvious 141

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answer to the problem of what to do with the native Irish in general.

There was even a proposal as early as 1607 to transport seven or eight thousand of the most obdurate rebels and vagrants. These imaginative schemes proved to be before their time. It was not until Cromwell came to Ireland with his more robust attitudes that they would be taken up, and then with some vigour.

In London, there were those who felt strongly that the plantation of Ireland was a better bet than the plantation of North America: for a start, it was much closer. The Solicitor General, Sir Francis Bacon, thought the Irish project scored strongly on religious, political and investment criteria. The financial arrangements for the two ventures were remarkably similar; in fact, the organisation of the Ulster venture followed the lines established for North America.

Just as the money for America was raised in the City of London through newly created joint stock companies such as the Virginia Company, the Ulster venture was also funded by City investment.

One important difference was that while the American companies were promoted by private enterprise, the Irish Society was forced on largely unwilling City merchants by the King.3

While struggling to make a go of planting Ireland, the English continued with their transatlantic endeavours. They would carry some Irish with them. The first English toehold in the West Indies was on St Christopher (now St Kitts), where some French had already settled. Captain Thomas Warner, a dogged Suffolk Puritan, together with his wife, son and a small number of men, claimed the island for James I. Warner had already travelled widely in the New World and had seen the Amazonian basin. Now he wanted a place that he could settle and make something of.

St Christopher already had its local inhabitants, the Kalinago people. They had arrived many years before, drawn by the island’s good soil and had displaced the previous inhabitants, the Arawak, by being better at warfare. They were not to be trifled with. After the Kalinago had come the Spanish, then a handful of French Jesuits, followed by the Spanish again, and then by the first Englishman, John Smith, passing through on his way to Virginia.

Thomas Warner came next. He developed a wary relationship with the Kalinago chief, Ouboutou Tegremante, and within two years 142

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had established his little colony sufficiently well, he felt, to sail to England for more colonists. While he was there, he picked up a warrant from Charles I giving him control over a sizeable part of the West Indies. The new colonists that returned with Warner in 1626

were mainly Irish indentured servants who slashed and burned the vegetation to make room for the arable crops they would live on and the crop they would sell, tobacco.

And so the Irish came in numbers to the Caribbean. In the 1640s, a fanciful report claimed some 20,000 Irish were living on St Christopher. Although this number seems improbable, we can take it that a good number of Irish did arrive on the island. In whatever manner they arrived, as voluntary indentured servants or as transportees, they became, in their multitudes, slaves in the plantations. St Christopher prospered through tobacco. Those Irish who survived their indenture could start up their own smallholdings on the island’s fertile land. But when the Virginian tobacco trade picked up, the smaller producers began to suffer.

Some Irish in the Caribbean went on to become major planters and slave owners themselves.

Into this stark new world sailed a trading ship called the
Abraham
in 1636. The reports of its dealings between Ireland and Barbados are contained in a unique series of letters preserved at the Admiralty in London and these give an excellent insight into the recruitment process for servants in the mid-1600s.4 The ship was owned by a merchant named Mathew Cradock, a Puritan and the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. His agent or supercargo, Thomas Anthony, had the job of drumming up a human cargo in Ireland before the ship arrived. The men and women Anthony persuaded to sign up would be indentured for four years and sold in the colonial labour markets.

Anthony was a punctilious employee and his letters provide a record of a man who wished his boss to know that his slow progress was not for want of trying. Though he laboured for months, Anthony had difficulty raising the necessary numbers to make up his cargo. Cradock had hoped for a hundred servants but Anthony faced competition from a local ship and from a Flemish ship out of Amsterdam.