White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (20 page)

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When he arrived in Kinsale on 28 April, four months before the
Abraham
, Anthony vigorously put the word out for people wishing to start a new life, writing on 13 September (the spelling and grammar are so idiosyncratic that we have changed quotations into modern usage for the sake of comprehensibility): ‘And now it may please you to be informed that upon the first days of market after the ship’s arrival, both here at Bandon, Cork, and at Youghal, we caused the drum to be beaten . . .’

After many recruiting trips around the country, Anthony still had not got his complement of 100 servants:

And hither unto we have entertained and forthcoming the number of 61 persons, whereof there is 41 men servants, the rest women kind, from 17 to 35 years and very lusty and strong bodied which will I hope be means to set them off to the best advantage . . .

To obtain his complement of sixty-one, Anthony seems to have had to resort to some knavery, probably involving kidnapping, as the mayor of Kinsale put him in the town gaol until he had released two of the servants recruited locally. Anthony spent only a few days in prison, indicating either a quick bribe or the release of those he had not recruited legally. Finally, in November, the
Abraham
set sail for Barbados.

We know the level of profits that Anthony made for his boss, for he wrote to him on 13 February 1637, nearly a year after he had arrived in Cork. By then his cargo had diminished to fifty-six, three having probably died on the journey (a very low rate of mortality as rates of death on board ship could sometimes reach twenty or even thirty per cent) and two having absconded in Cowes on the Isle of Wight. ‘From Cowes we brought 56 servants for your accounts which were disposed of to sale; ten of them to the governor of this place in 450 weight (pounds of tobacco) apiece and all the rest in 500 . . .’ In total, Anthony’s cargo made a profit of 27,500 pounds of tobacco – a nice sum, even without the thwarted bonus of the kidnapped inhabitants of Kinsale.

Back in Ireland, fifty years after Spenser’s death, his radical 144

FOREIGNERS IN THEIR OWN LAND

proposals were about to be put into play. A new and more strident plantation policy paved the way for the large-scale movement of the Irish across the Atlantic. The political events that led up to this mass migration of people began in England but quickly spread to Ireland. As relations between Charles I and Parliament worsened in the 1640s, the Irish Catholics saw a chance of making capital.

The centre of the rebellion was in Ulster, where the plantation of large numbers of Protestants had made the situation very volatile.

The rebels killed some 4,000 Protestant settlers and up to another 8,000 are thought to have perished through starvation and want.

Exaggerated reports circulated in London that up to 100,000

Protestants had been killed. The Irish uprising spread throughout the country. A confederacy was formed to fight the English, with even the Old English reluctantly joining in, but it was riven with disagreements and militarily flawed.

The English Parliamentarians decided to take firm action. An act was passed in 1642 to raise the finance for an army to crush the Irish.

The act offered 2,500,000 acres of confiscated Irish land at knock-down prices to merchant adventurers – those who would invest in the army that was to be raised to suppress the insurrection. The Irish, their religion and their propensity for siding with England’s enemies would be crushed once and for all, and the adventurers would be rewarded with the land confiscated to enable Protestants to resettle the island. The Irish would become outlaws in their own land and their former property would be sold off at below-market prices to pay for the military operation that would have taken it from them. It was as brilliant as it was brutal – one of those elegant pieces of synergism that must make the difficult task of ruling occasionally satisfying.

A contemporary though not impartial observer, the Papal Nuncio, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, said that the Irish transported to the Indies were ‘held like slaves under a cruel lash’.5

Among many sad stories, Rinuccini reported the case of the wife of a Catholic man being deported because of his faith pleading to be allowed to accompany her husband into exile. The woman was refused on the grounds that she was not strong enough to work in the Indian Islands (the West Indies). She was thrown into prison, while her husband was sent to his fate.

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Sir Phelim O’Neill, one of the key leaders of the rebellion, carefully made clear that the argument was not with the King but with Parliament. To begin with, this was a good move but it ceased to be so when Charles I was beheaded in 1649. On 20

June that year, Oliver Cromwell was appointed Lord-Lieutenant and commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland. Macaulay, in his
History of England
, describes vividly what Cromwell achieved: Everything yielded to the vigour and ability of Cromwell.

In a few months he subjugated Ireland, as Ireland had never been subjugated during the five centuries of slaughter which had elapsed since the landing of the first Norman settlers. He resolved to put an end to that conflict of races and religions which had so long distracted the island, by making the English and Protestant population decidedly predominant.

For this end he gave the rein to the fierce enthusiasm of his followers, waged war resembling that which Israel waged on the Canaanites, smote the idolaters with the edge of the sword, so that great cities were left without inhabitants, drove many thousands to the Continent, shipped off many thousands to the West Indies, and supplied the void thus made by pouring in numerous colonists, of Saxon blood, and of Calvinistic faith.6

Cromwell began his war in Ireland in August 1649 by marching against Drogheda, a prosperous town thirty miles north of Dublin and a key strategic position from which to advance into Ulster. On the evening of 11 September, the Parliamentarians overwhelmed the town, slaughtering officers and soldiers. Catholic priests and friars were treated as combatants and killed on sight. A moment of gruesome farce came when the commander of the defending forces, Sir Arthur Aston, was bludgeoned to death with his wooden leg, in which Parliamentarian soldiers believed he had hidden gold coins. Some 3,500 people died in the storming of Drogheda.

Parliamentarian losses were around 150. Many of the surviving defenders were transported to Barbados.

An interesting two-way trade in people was developing in which 146

FOREIGNERS IN THEIR OWN LAND

something beneficial emerged for both those wanting to colonise Ireland and those backing America: native Irish could be deported to feed the voracious labour market in America while making room in Ireland for planters from England. This does not seem to have been an orchestrated movement but it was a nice piece of serendipity for nascent imperial capitalism.

In the ensuing turmoil, famine followed war on a terrible scale.

Proposals for deportation came quickly to the fore. It is difficult to know how many people were banished during this period, for no records exist. However, there are clues to what was going on.

The Puritans who now ruled Ireland had only one goal: the total subjugation of Ireland by the method of destroying its people and planting in their stead Protestant stock from England and Scotland.

The destruction of the Irish was to be carried out by three methods: by starvation, by banishment to the West or to Continental Europe and by transportation across the Atlantic. Priests, defeated soldiers, men, women and children were all shipped off at various times from various locations. The transportation of the Irish began in the late 1640s and certainly reached a high level in 1652–3, the years that mark the partial obliteration of the Catholic people of Ireland.

On 1 April 1653, Cromwell’s Council of State issued a licence to one Sir John Clotworthy to transport to America 500 Irishmen.

The licence was careful to point out that these unfortunates should be ‘natural Irishmen’ in case the assiduous Sir John made the mistake of sending off some descendants of the ‘Old English’ or Anglo-Norman settlers. Such a mistake was made when young women descended from the early Anglo-Norman settlers were abducted and sold by traders to the sugar plantations in the West Indies.7 Licences were granted to English merchants throughout the year. In June, the Council of State in England ordered that ‘the governors of the precincts be authorised to transport 8,000 Irish’.

Later that year, the Council of State granted a licence for 400

Irish children to be taken to New England and Virginia. Around the same time, a contract was signed with Boston merchants to carry off 250 women and 300 men from ports along Ireland’s southern and south-eastern coast. The contracted merchants, Leader and 147

WHITE CARGO

Selleck (the latter a merchant who was particularly prominent among those importing Irish labour), were to be allowed to search for their slaves within twenty miles of Wexford, Waterford, Kinsale, Youghal and Cork. The onerous task of having to search along such a long stretch of coastline was mercifully mitigated when the English grandee with control over Cork, Lord Broghill, said he would allow the merchants to pick their slaves from among the people of Cork alone.

In the 1650s, Ireland was a desolate place. The land became dreadfully depopulated due to war, famine and disease. Hundreds of thousands of Irish people vanished over a mere decade or so.

Charles Walpole described the situation:

The English government had a grim excuse for re-peopling Ireland. The desolation of the island was complete: one third of the people had perished or been driven into exile; famine and plague had finished the work of the sword; the fields lay uncultivated; and the miserable remnants of the flying population were driven to live on carrion and human corpses. The wolves so increased in numbers, even round the city of Dublin itself, that the counties were taxed for their extermination, and rewards of £5 were paid for the head of a full grown wolf and £2 for that of a cub.8

Wolves were not the only troublesome creatures with a price on their heads – there were also the priests and the tories. Tories were guerrilla fighters, who lived in the forests, mountains and bogs and operated mainly at night, launching raiding parties against those who had usurped their lands.9 Some degenerated into banditry. Freedom fighters or rogues, they all had a price. One way of dealing with them was to hold four people hostage against the capture of any tory committing a crime. If within twenty-eight days the crime went unsolved and the tory had not given himself up, the four would be shipped off to the colonies. As for the priestly classes, the ordinary holy man’s head was priced the same as that of a wolf but a bishop’s head would fetch twice that, namely £10. Keeping or hiding a priest would merit banishment 148

FOREIGNERS IN THEIR OWN LAND

and the confiscation of all property. A Franciscan who had to flee Ireland told of one such case:

Anno 1657, I myself saw this iniquitous law carried out into iniquitous execution in the City of Limerick, in Ireland by Henry Ingoldsby, Governor of the same City. A certain noble gentleman of Thomond, named Daniel Connery, was accused of harbouring a priest in his house, and convicted on his own confession (although the priest had safe-conduct from the Governor himself), and declared guilty of death.

And then, as he said, out of mercy, the sentence was changed, commuted, and he was despoiled of all his goods, and bound in prison, and finally condemned to perpetual exile. This gentleman had a wife and twelve children. His wife was of a very noble family of Thomond, and she fell sick and died in extreme want of necessities. Three of the children, very beautiful and virtuous virgins, were sent off to the East [
sic
]

Indies, to an island they call Barbados, where, if they are still alive, they spend their days in miserable slavery.10

Catholics who refused to attend a Protestant church could be fined.

If they could not raise the money to pay – as was no doubt the case for the majority – they would be transported to Barbados and

‘sold as a slave’. In Galway, merchants procured numbers of the population for sale to the slave markets of the Indies. Invasion and occupation turned people against one another. Corrupt officials engaged in the trade.

During this time, those Irish who had been banished or transported were dismayed to discover that the suppression of their language and religion was replicated in the transatlantic colonies.

The Puritans were determined people but so were the Irish Catholics. Priests disguised themselves and went secretly about their work in both Ireland and the West Indies to keep their religion alive. Even on islands that had already had French or Spanish (and therefore Catholic) settlements, Irish Catholics were forbidden to attend religious services, except in Protestant churches, as was the case at home.

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With the end of the Confederate War in 1653, transportation continued. The war had created large numbers of widows and orphans, and many of these were shipped to the West Indies.

According to Walpole, women and orphans were rounded up from workhouses and prisons. They were, he said, ‘boys who were of an age to labour and women who were marriageable, or not past breeding’.11 The children were put to work in the fields, while the women were married off to planters.

The creation of a colonial Ireland cost the native Irish dearly

– they lost not only their lands but what remained of their reputation. The Irish character, already blackened by Cambrensis and by a tendency to stage occasional uprisings, was reputed to be so bad that when American colonies got to hear of it they began to fear even the impoverished and emaciated souls who migrated to their shores. As a result, acts were passed prohibiting the landing of Irish in Massachusetts. One such act, in 1654, was formulated by a committee appointed by the General Court of Massachusetts to consider proposals for the public benefit: