White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (21 page)

This Court, considering the cruel and malignant spirit that has from time to time been manifest in the Irish nation against the English nation, do hereby declare their prohibition of bringing any Irish, men, women, or children, into this jurisdiction, on the penalty of £50 sterling to each inhabitant who shall buy of any merchant, shipmaster, or other agent any such person or persons so transported by them; which fine shall be by the country’s marshal levied on conviction of some magistrate or court, one third to be to the use of the informer, and two-thirds to the country.

This act to be in force six months after the publication of this order.

For those Irish already in the colonies, they continued to be singled out for particularly harsh treatment. In 1658, the authorities decided that English bonded servants in the American colonies should have their minimum bond period extended from four to five years. It was already five years for Irish servants, and so to keep the differential 150

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intact, the length of servitude for Irish servants was increased from five to six years. Following the Restoration of the monarchy two years later, this extra year of servitude was withdrawn for servants from both England and Ireland ‘in the interest of peopling the country’. The extra year had proved to be a disincentive to those who wished to relocate to the New World voluntarily.

In 1688 in Massachusetts, a remarkable event occurred that opened a strange window into the world endured by enslaved Irish men and women – and provided more than a little insight into the minds of their masters. It involved allegations of demonic possession involving an old washerwoman and a family of Puritans.

The case was a precursor to the witchcraft trials in Salem in 1692.

The old Irish servant at the core of our tale is thought to have arrived in Massachusetts in the 1650s, when, despite the official ban on emigrants from Ireland, many Irish continued to be sent.

An account of the case was written by Cotton Mather, the famous minister of the North Church in Boston. It begins as follows: Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. A Faithful Account of many Wonderful and Surprising Things, that have befallen several Bewitched and Possessed Persons in New-England. Particularly, A Narrative of the marvellous Trouble and Releef Experienced by a pious Family in Boston, very lately and sadly molested with Evil Spirits.12

Mather had a questing mind and a vivid imagination, and he was quick to spot the Devil’s work among his flock. The Devil could be discovered anywhere, even in the inexplicable illnesses of a Boston stonemason’s children:

There dwells at this time, in the south part of Boston, a sober and pious man, whose Name is John Goodwin, whose Trade is that of a Mason, and whose Wife (to which a Good Report gives a share with him in all the Characters of Virtue) has made him the Father of six (now living) Children. Of 151

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these Children, all but the Eldest, who works with his Father at his Calling, and the Youngest, who lives yet upon the Breast of its mother, have laboured under the direful effects of a (no less palpable than) stupendous Witchcraft.

Indeed that exempted Son had also, as was thought, some lighter touches of it, in unaccountable stabs and pains now and then upon him; as indeed every person in the Family at some time or other had, except the godly Father, and the suckling Infant, who never felt any impressions of it.

Mather’s tale is one of demonic attacks upon the children in which they suffered assaults by unseen hands. When one Goodwin child suffered pains in the neck, another did and so on. Physicians of great repute were called but could only agree that it must be witchcraft.

As luck would have it, a likely suspect was close to hand – a non-believer in the earthy form of an old Irish woman called Anne Glover, known as ‘Goody’, whose daughter was the Goodwins’

washerwoman. Anne had victim written all over her: she was beached in a foreign land run by English Puritans, whose idea of a good time was to hunt out demons and Catholics. Massachusetts must have been a dull place in the late seventeenth century but Goody was soon to liven things up. Among her powers, she could make children fly and ride on invisible horses.

About Midsummer, in the year 1688, the Eldest of these Children, who is a Daughter, saw cause to examine their Washerwoman, upon their missing of some Linen which t’was feared she had stolen from them; and of what use this linen might be to serve the Witchcraft intended, the Thief’s Tempter knows! This Laundress was the Daughter of an ignorant and a scandalous old Woman in the Neighbourhood; whose miserable Husband before he died, had sometimes complained of her, that she was undoubtedly a Witch, and that whenever his Head was laid, she would quickly arrive unto the punishments due to such an one. This Woman in her daughters Defence bestow’d very bad Language upon the Girl that put her to the Question; immediately upon 152

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which, the poor child became variously indisposed in her health, and visited with strange Fits, beyond those that attend an Epilepsy or a Catalepsy, or those that they call The Diseases of Astonishment.

At her trial, Anne Glover failed an elementary test for possession

– she could not recite the Lord’s Prayer in English. This was hardly surprising, for she spoke not a word of the language. It has been said she could recite the prayer in Irish and in Latin but that this cut no ice with the court. The knitted dolls found in her house proved she was obviously up to no good. Foreigner, Roman Catholic and devil worshipper, Anne scored a hat-trick. She was hanged. As Mather himself said at the end of his account: ‘This is the Story of

[the] Goodwins Children, a Story all made up of Wonders!’ Never a truer word has been written.

The days were numbered for Irish servants like Goody Glover and her daughter in Massachusetts, though other American colonies remained open to the importation of Irish labour. The same was true for island colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados. To this day in Jamaica, Irish surnames abound. The first Irish imported to the island arrived shortly after the British captured it from the Spanish. When the Cromwellian generals William Penn (the father of the founder of Pennsylvania) and Robert Venables failed to take Hispaniola from the Spanish in 1655, they took Jamaica, not wishing to return home and face Oliver Cromwell empty-handed.

The island’s economy required extra labour and so they turned to islands already stocked with strong young Irishmen: Barbados, St Lucia, St Christopher and Montserrat. Barbados in particular seems to have had plenty of labourers to choose from. In 1660, half of the white people in Barbados were said to be Irish. They were rarely the planters but unquestionably the servants.

After the wars and social upheavals of the middle of the century, one might have expected that transportation of Irish to serve as slaves in the English colonies might have died out. It did not, but it did tail off. In the hills and bogs, bandits and rebels continued to be rounded up occasionally and shipped off to cool their heels in the colonies. And even in the farthest outposts of the colonies, 153

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Irish continued to be indentured. In Newfoundland in the 1680s, fishermen, many of them Irish or Scottish, accumulated debts they could not pay off. They were then forced to give themselves up as indentured servants.

But the flow of Irish labourers to the colonies was not yet staunched, nor would it be for some time yet. In the following century, Ireland and its people became subject to new laws that made transportation a key part of its penal system. Meanwhile, dissent was brewing in another part of the nation.

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CHAPTER TEN

DISSENT IN THE NORTH

On a bleak headland in the Orkney Isles off the north of Scotland stands a roughly made stone pillar, forty feet tall. It is a thin, tapering four-sided pillar in the form of an obelisk but, instead of the usual pyramidal top, it is finished with a rounded cap, giving it the look of a giant chess piece. This is the monument to a tragedy that occurred on 10 December 1679, a few days before the winter solstice.

Orkney lies at fifty-nine degrees north, almost the latitude of Greenland, and in mid-December the sun barely edges into the sky. Reaching its zenith at ten degrees above the horizon, the sun hangs in the sky for barely six hours a day, providing a glimmering light from about nine-thirty in the morning until just three-thirty in the afternoon. Into this eerie world sailed the
Crown of London
, commanded by Captain Thomas Teddico and carrying a cargo of 257 prisoners locked below deck. The prisoners were the remains of a defeated army of religious dissenters, Covenanters, who denied the right of either king or bishops to rule over their church.

For their dissenting views, they had been prepared to fight and, if necessary, to die. Now, at sea off the largest Orkney island of Mainland, fate was ready to deal them a further blow.

The ship was supposed to be on its way to the West Indies, though Teddico’s true intentions have been questioned. By sailing into such northerly latitudes in the dead of winter he was risking 155

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his ship, the crew and the prisoners locked below. The
Crown
had begun its journey at the port of Leith, outside Edinburgh, in November. A better route would have been to strike a southerly course down the east coast of Scotland and around the south coast of England. To have headed north to the Orkneys might seem to imply that the captain had some dark mission to accomplish.

A gale blew up and Captain Teddico decided to see the storm out at anchor off the headland of Scarvataing at the entrance to Deerness Bay. At ten o’clock in the evening, the ship dragged its anchor and was driven onto the rocks. According to one account, the crew made it to safety by cutting a mast and using it as a bridge to dry land. One of the crew is said to have taken an axe to the deck to cut an exit for the prisoners. Some forty to fifty made it to land.

The rest perished with the ship.

The shipwreck of the
Crown
could well have been the catalyst for Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous scene in
Kidnapped
in which the brig carrying the abducted hero to the colonies founders in heavy seas. David Balfour clings to a yardarm and makes it ashore to freedom.

In the case of the Orkney wreck, many of those who survived were subsequently rounded up and transported to become slaves in the plantations. In the troubled history of Scotland during the seventeenth century, these rebellious men were only a small sample of those who found themselves suffering a drastic penalty for their religious beliefs. As one twentieth-century historian has remarked,

‘The troubles of these times cast many an unfortunate Scot ashore in the New World in a condition differing little, if at all, from that of the negro slaves who toiled in the tobacco and sugar plantations.’1

It was the era when the concept of the colonial penal colony was being turned into fact and the policy of political banishment, long used in Ireland, was introduced to Scotland.

The circumstances leading up to the deaths off Scarvataing had their origins many years before, at the beginning of one of the most important and turbulent periods in British history. For many centuries, Scotland and England had had a border dispute. The disputed areas were known as the ‘debatable lands’. Traditionally, these areas were lawless havens for robbers, army deserters and 156

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villains. In 1617, the English court of law, the Star Chamber, sent a copy of a new code for establishing peace in the border area to Scotland’s ruling body, the Privy Council, for its consideration.

Of course, the King expected the Scots would bow to his will but they did nothing of the sort. The sticking point for the Scots was Section Thirteen. This provided for a survey of all villains and layabouts in the territory so they could be rounded up and shipped off to Virginia, which would become in effect a gulag for the troublesome and the unwanted.

The Privy Council would have been as concerned about law and order as the Star Chamber, so this provision appeared at first sight to be one to which no exception could be taken. However, the Scottish lawmakers declined to accept the wisdom of Section Thirteen. They had spotted a snag: Virginia and all other colonies were controlled by England and so any deported Scots would come under the control of English masters. Those worthy of transportation might be scum – but they were Scottish scum and as such deserved better. The traditional Scottish sentence of banishment allowed the banished one to decide upon the country of his or her exile. Transportation in this case meant serving under English rule. Unfortunately for the delicate sensibilities of the Scots, London insisted. The Privy Council gave way, while continuing to express its reservations.

The following year, 1618, yet greater Scottish reservations were expressed regarding interference from London. In his attempt to bring the Presbyterian, democratically minded elders of the Church of Scotland to heel, James I had new rules drawn up, imposing rites and ceremonies that were thought to have more than a whiff of Catholicism about them. The Five Articles of Perth included kneeling to take communion and confirmation of church membership conducted by bishops. To encourage recalcitrant Church of Scotland ministers, it was suggested that those who did not wish to conduct their church services by the articles might find themselves deported. During the half-century or so of struggle between state and Covenanters that was to follow, this threat became real.

In 1625, James I died. His son Charles inherited the crown 157

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and with it all the unresolved political and religious tensions that had bedevilled the state during his father’s reign. Mutual distrust continued between Scotland and England. A key part of this was the continuing animosity between the reformist, Calvinist, Presbyterian strain of Christianity and the more traditional, ceremonial strain preferred both by James and Charles. Both father and son failed to address these factors, just as they had done little to ease the tensions between the Crown and various political factions; when combined, these elements provided the impulse that led to Scotland and England being convulsed by war.