My thanks to my friend Sue who posted the article from Canada; the article was taken from the website peoples trust toronto
IRISH: THE FORGOTTEN WHITE SLAVES
IRISH: THE FORGOTTEN WHITE SLAVES
Source: http://goo.gl/LQ9JTW
They came as slaves: human cargo transported on British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.
Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. Some were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.
We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.
But are we talking about African slavery? King James VI and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbour.
The Irish slave trade began when James VI sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.
By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade.
Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia.
Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.
As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.
African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (£50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than £5 Sterling). If a planter whipped, branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.
The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce.
Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish mothers, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their children and would remain in servitude.
In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls (many as young as 12) with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.
This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
There is little question the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more, in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is also little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.
In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end its participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded this chapter of Irish misery.
But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.
But, why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims not merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be the one that their English masters intended: To completely disappear as if it never happened.
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.
Feeback on this article...
---I had a friend Brian McGinn -a free lance writer for Life Magazine years ago who did a lot of research on this. I remember talking to him on and off about it in the 90's. I knew him from Time &Life-Brian ended up in Vietnam where he was an intelligence officer. Sadly he died some years ago from a incurable brain cancer--Pat.
....
1)
Click in this You Tube video about the black Irish in Monserrat. At
about 1.20 seconds in you will hear a black man from Monserrat talking.
Close your eyes and you will think you are in Cork!
2) FYI Bob Marley´s first wife Rita from Jamaca was known to have what we would consider a very decent Cork accent too.
3) The Red Legs, the Irish in
Barbados. They are the from the same liniage as those that went to
Jamaica, Monserrat, et al. While
all the Irish people who went to the other places as slaves, mixed and
married with slaves from Africa, or escaped and moved on. Of the 60,000 or s that were sent to Barbados, there are about 400 decendents left. These group never mixed, married or moved on. No one knows why. They are the only seperate white group from Cromwell´s time that anyone knows of.
4) These communities are not all of Irish/Africian descent;
Cromwell and kings (and Queens) in England were just as horrible to the
English and Scots who got in their way/disagreed with them too.
5)
Re. The picture attached to article above. No details that I can see. But I hazard a guess it is
depicting slaves from north europe being sold in Rome or North Africa.
LOADS, ( I mean millions over at least 15 centuries) of north Europeans
sold as slaves in Africia.
- There was Jewish and Turkish slaves being sold on the Island of Malta
until Napoleon arrived and banned it in 1798. (He did something right!)
So how´s that for interesting with your next cup of tea!
......Thanks so much for sending Sue's email on. I do remember your telling me that fascinating story about the Red Legs.
This is an interesting topic to me, because I too keep running across references to European and Middle
Eastern slaves from antiquity up to modern times. I just finished
reading a historical novel set in Spain, and in the book the author
mentioned that there was a large, thriving slave market in Sicily during
the Middle Ages, long before the African slave trade began. I had
never heard about this before.
