Slaves of many nations.
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 neighbor.
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.
Add to Onlywire