Part 47 (1/2)

A contract was signed on September 14, 1653, by the Com missioners of Ireland and Messrs. Sellick and Leader, ”to supply them (the merchants) with two hundred and fifty women of the Irish nation, above twelve years and under the age, of forty- five.”

The fate reserved for the human cattle, as they must have been looked upon by the G.o.dly gentlemen who bartered over them, may be well imagined. It is calculated that, in four years, those English firms of slave-dealers had s.h.i.+pped six thousand and four hundred Irish men and women, boys and maidens, to the British colonies of North America.

The age requisite for the females who were thus s.h.i.+pped off may be noted; the boys and men were not to be under twelve or over fifty. These latter were condemned to the task of tilling the soil in a climate where the negro only can work and live. As all the cost to their masters was summed up in the expense of transportation, they were not induced to spare them, even by the consideration of the high price which, it is said, caused the modern slave-owners of America to treat their slaves with what might be called a commercial humanity. It is easy to imagine, then, the life led by so many young men forced to work in the open fields, under a tropical sun. How long that life lasted, we do not know; as their masters, on whom they entirely depended, were interested in keeping the knowledge of their fate a secret.

It is well understood that, when the unfortunate victims, had once left the Irish harbor from which they set sail, no one ever heard of them again; and, if the parents still lived in the old country, they were left to their conjectures as to the probable situation of their children in the new.

Sir William Petty says that ”of boys and girls alone ”-exclusive, consequently, of men and women-” six thousand were thus transplanted; but the total number of Irish sent to perish in the tobacco-islands, as they were called, was estimated in some Irish accounts at one hundred thousand.”

The ”Irish accounts” may have been exaggerated, but the English atoned for this by certainly falling below the mark, as is clear from the fact that, according to them, the Commissioners of Ireland required the ”supply” for New England alone to come from ”the country within twenty miles of Cork, Youghall, Kinsale, Waterford, and Wexford;” that ”the hunt lasted four years,” and was carried on with such ardor by the agents of many English firms that those men-catchers employed persons ”to delude poor people by false pretenses into by-places, and thence they forced them on board their s.h.i.+ps; that for money sake they were found to have enticed and forced women from their husbands, and children from their parents, who maintained them at school; and they had not only dealt so with the Irish, but also with the English.” For this reason, the order was revoked, and the ”hunt”

forbidden.

When agents were reduced to such straits after the government had used force, as Henry Cromwell acknowledged, the large extent of country mentioned above must have been well scoured and depopulated; and certainly a far greater number of victims must have been secured by all those means combined than is given in the English accounts. We believe the Irish.

One other source of supply deserves mention. Not only women and children, but priests also, were hunted down and s.h.i.+pped off to the same American plantations; so that persons of every cla.s.s which is held sacred in the eyes of G.o.d and man for its character and helplessness, were compelled to emigrate, or rather to undergo the worst possible fate that the imagination of man can conceive.

In 1656 a general battue for priests took place all over Ireland.

The prisons seem to have been filled to overflowing. ”On the 3d of May, the governors of the respective precincts were ordered to send them with sufficient guards, from garrison to garrison, to Carrickfergus, to be there put on board of such s.h.i.+ps as should sail with the first opportunity to the Barbadoes. One may imagine the sufferings of this toilsome journey by the pet.i.tion of one of them. Paul Cas.h.i.+n, an aged priest, apprehended at Maryborough, and sent to Philipstown, on the way to Carrickfergus, there fell desperately sick; and, being also extremely aged, was in danger of peris.h.i.+ng in restraint from want of friends and means of relief. On the 27th of August, the commissioners having ascertained the truth of his pet.i.tion, they ordered him sixpence a day during his sickness, and (in answer, probably, to this poor prisoner's prayer to be saved from transplantation) their order directed that the sixpence should be continued to him in his travel thence (after his recovery) to Carrickfergus, in order to his transplantation to the Barbadoes.

”-- (Cromwellian Settlement.)

In that burning island of the West Indies, deprived of all means, not only of exercising their ministry among others, but even of practising their religion themselves, of fulfilling their holy obligation of prayer and sacrifice, these victims of such an atrocious persecution were employed as laborers in the fields: their transplantation had cost money, and the money had to be repaid a hundred-fold by the sweat of their brow.

s.h.i.+p-loads of them had been discharged on the inhospitable sh.o.r.e of that island; each with a high calling which he could no longer carry out; each, therefore, tortured in his soul, with all the sweet or bitter memories of his past life crowding on his mind, and the dreary prospect spreading before him, to the end of his life, of no change from his rude and slavish occupation under the burning sun, hearing no voice but that of the harsh taskmaster; his eyes saddened and his heart sickened by the open and daily spectacle of immorality and woe, with no ending but the grave.

It seems, however, that these holy men found some means of fulfilling their sacred duty as G.o.d's ministers, for the inhuman traffic in such slaves as these to the Barbadoes lasted but one year. In 1657 it was decreed that this island should no longer be their place of transportation, but, instead, the desolate isles of Arran, opposite the entrance to the bay of Galway, and the isle of Innisboffin, off the coast of Connemara. Mr.

Prendergast thinks that this change of policy in their regard may have been caused by the price of their transportation, which probably mounted to a high aggregate sum. But he must be mistaken. They certainly cost no more than women and children, and their labor in the West Indies surely covered this expense.

The reason for the change is more plainly visible in the nature of the site subst.i.tuted for the Barbadoes as their place of exile. The ”holy isles” of Arran and the isle of Innisboffin were then, as now, bare of every thing--almost of inhabitants.

The priests could be there kept as in a prison, and, though they might be of no profit to their masters, they could not hear a voice or see a face other than those of their fellow-captives.

In the West India islands there existed an already thick population, and the very women and children who had been transported thither before them would be consoled by their ministry, though practised by stealth, and strengthened in their faith, which might thus have not only been kept alive among them, but spread over the whole country.

Who can say if the faith, preserved among the many Irish living in the island until quite recently, was not owing to their exhortations?

”The first Irish people who found permanent homes in America,”

says Thomas D'Arcy McGee, ”were certain Catholic patriots banished by Oliver Cromwell to Barbadoes. . . . In this island, as in the neighboring Montserrat, the Celtic language was certainly spoken in the last century,1 (1 The Celtic language-- that sure sign of Catholicity--was not only spoken there last century, but is still to-day. The writer himself heard last year (1871), from two young American seamen, who had just returned from a voyage to this island, that the negro porters and white longsh.o.r.emen who load and unload the s.h.i.+ps in the harbor, know scarcely any other language than the Irish, so that often the crews of English vessels can only communicate with them by signs.) and perhaps it is partly attributable to this early Irish colonization, that Barbadoes became 'one of the most populous islands in the world.' At the end of the seventeenth century, it was reported to contain twenty thousand inhabitants.”

Although Barbadoes is the chief island concerned in the present considerations, nevertheless nearly all the British colonies then existing in America, received their share of this emigration. Several s.h.i.+p-loads of the exiles were certainly sent to New England, at the very time that New-Englanders were earnestly invited by the British Government to ”come and plant Ireland;” Virginia, too, paid probably with tobacco for the young men and maidens sent there as slaves. The ”Thurloe State Papers” disclose the fact that one thousand boys and one thousand girls, taken in Ireland by force, were dispatched to Jamaica, lately added to the empire of England by Admiral Penn, father of the celebrated Quaker founder of Pennsylvania.

Thus, then, began the first extensive emigration of the Irish to various parts of British America--a movement quite compulsory, which in our days has become voluntary, and is productive of the wonders soon to claim our attention.

The involuntary emigration of soldiers and clergymen to the Continent of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was, as has been seen, the cause of great advantages to Ireland, and became, in the designs of a merciful Providence, a powerful means of drawing good from evil. At first sight, it seems impossible to discover a similar advantage in this other most involuntary emigration to the plantations of America.

A pagan has declared that ”there is no spectacle more grateful to the eyes of G.o.d than a just man struggling with adversity;”

and where, except in the first ages of Christianity, could more innocent victims, and a more cruel persecution, be witnessed?

After the horrors of a civil war, horrors unparalleled perhaps in the annals of modern nations, the children and young people of both s.e.xes are hunted down over an area of several Irish counties, dragged in crowds to the seaports, and there jammed in the holds of small, uncomfortable, slow-going vessels. What those children must have been may be easily imagined from the specimens of the race before us to-day. We do not speak of their beauty and comeliness of form, on which a Greek writer of the age of Pericles might have dilated, and found a subject worthy of his pen; we speak of their moral beauty, their simplicity, purity, love of home, attachment to their family, and G.o.d, even in their tenderest age. We meet them scattered over the broad surface of this country--boys and girls of the same race, coming from the same counties, chiefly from sweet Wexford, the beautiful, calm, pious south of Ireland. Who but a monster could think of harming those pure and affectionate creatures, so modest, simple, and ready to trust and confide in every one they meet? And what could be said of those maidens, now so well known in this New World, of whom to speak is to praise, whom to see is to admire? Such were the victims selected by the Bristol firms, by ”Lord” Henry Cromwell, Governor-General of Ireland, or by Lord Thurloe, secretary and mouth-piece of the ”Protector.” They were to be violently torn from their parents and friends, from every one they knew and loved, to be condemned, after surviving the horrible ocean-pa.s.sage of those days, the boys to work on sugar and tobacco plantations, the girls to lead a life of shame in the harems of Jamaica planters!

Such of them as were sent North, were to be distributed among the ”saints” of New England, to be esteemed by the said ”saints”

as ”idolaters,” ”vipers,” ”young reprobates,” just objects of ”the wrath of G.o.d;” or, if appearing to fall in with their new and hard task-masters, to be greeted with words of dubious praise as ”brands s.n.a.t.c.hed from the burning,” ”vessels of reprobation,” destined, perhaps, by a due imitation of the ”saints,” to become some day ”vessels of election,” in the mean time to be unmercifully scourged by both master and mistress with the ”besom of righteousness” probably, at the slightest fault or mistake.