[Reader-list] Irish Slave Trade

[A. Mani]

1. Book Review:
http://www.historyjournal.ie/book-reviews/59-irish-slavery-reviews/117-white-cargo.html
http://floridairishheritagecenter.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/slavery-and-the-irish/
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2.  http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/1638

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3.  http://www.rhettaakamatsu.com/irishslaves.htm

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4. http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/white_slavery.htm

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5.

Out of Africa, out of Ireland
For centuries, England dominated both the African slave trade and
Ireland. The parallels are too numerous and haunting to ignore.
by James Mullin

W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP and preeminent historian on
slavery in the Americans, wrote: "Any attempt to consider the attitude
of the English colonies toward the African slave trade must be
prefaced by a word as to the attitude of England herself and the
development of the trade in her hands." Amen.

Du Bois gives America's "Dialogue on Race" a logical starting place.
Racism is the legacy of slavery, and slavery in the Americas began
with the "Mother Country's" dominant role in the Atlantic slave trade.
Before all white Europeans are lumped together with the British as
colonists and slave keepers, let us consider Britain's tyranny in
Ireland and the many parallels of subjugation and enslavement to be
drawn.

Britain first entered the slave trade with the capture of 300 Negroes
in 1562, and pursued it with religious zeal for three centuries. She
introduced the first African slaves to Virginia on board a Dutch ship
in 1619. In 1651, she fought two wars to wrest the slave trade from
the Dutch. In her book, Black Chronology from 4,000 B.C. to Abolition
of the Slave Trade, Ellen Irene Diggs wrote: "The final terms of peace
surrendered New Netherlands to England and opened the way for England
to become the world's greatest slave trader."

In 1662 the Company of Royal Adventurers was chartered by Charles II.
The Royal Family, including Queen Dowager and the Duke of York,
contracted to supply the West Indies with 3,000 slaves annually. This
company was later sold for 34,000 pounds and replaced by the Royal
African Company, also chartered by King Charles II.

Diggs says that in 1655, "Oliver Cromwell, in his zeal for God and the
slave trade," sent an expedition to seize Jamaica from Spain. It soon
became Britain's West Indian base for the slave trade.

In 1649 Oliver Cromwell and his 20,000-man army invaded Ireland. They
killed the entire garrison of Drogheda and slaughtered all the
townspeople. Afterwards, Cromwell said, "I do not think 30 of their
whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe
custody in the Barbados."

Under Cromwell's policy, known as "To Hell or Connaught," Irish
landowners were driven off millions of acres of fertile land. Those
found east of the river Shannon after May 1, 1654, faced the death
penalty or slavery in the West Indies. Cromwell rewarded his soldiers
and loyal Scottish Presbyterians by "planting" them on large estates.
The British set up similar "plantations" in Barbados, St. Kitts and
Trinidad.

The demand for labor on these distant plantations prompted mass
kidnappings in Ireland. A pamphlet published in 1660 accused the
British of sending soldiers to grab any Irish people they could in
order to sell them to Barbados for profit: "It was the usual practice
with Colonel Strubber, Governor of Galway, and other commanders in the
said country, to take people out of their beds at night and sell them
for slaves to the Indies, and by computations sold out of the said
country about a thousand souls."

In Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois concurs: "Even young Irish
peasants were hunted down as men hunt down game, and were forcibly put
aboard ship, and sold to plantations in Barbados."

According to Peter Berresford Ellis in To Hell or Connaught, soldiers
commanded by Henry Cromwell, Oliver's son, seized a thousand "Irish
wenches" to sell to Barbados. Henry justified the action by saying,
"Although we must use force in taking them up , it is so much for
their own good and likely to be of so great an advantage to the
public." He also suggested that 2,000 Irish boys of 12 to 14 years of
age could be seized for the same purpose: "Who knows but it might be a
means to make them Englishmen."

In 1667 Parliament passed the Act to Regulate Negroes on British
Plantations. Punishments included a severe whipping for striking a
Christian. For the second offense: branding on the face with a hot
iron. There was no punishment for "inadvertently" whipping a slave to
death.

Between 1680 and 1688, the English African Company sent 249 ships to
Africa and shipped approximately 60,000 black slaves. They "lost"
14,000 during the middle passage, and only delivered 46,000 to the New
World.

As Diggs points out, "Planters sometimes married white women servants
to Blacks in order to transform these servants and their children into
slaves." This was the case with "Irish Nell," a servant woman brought
to Maryland and sold to a planter when her former owner returned to
England. Whether her children by a black slave husband were to be
slave or free occupied the courts of Maryland for a number of years.
Petition was finally granted, and the children freed.

The "custom" of marrying white servants to black slaves in order to
produce slave offspring was legislated against in 1681. How many
half-Irish children became slaves through this custom? How many black
Americans have Irish ancestors because of it? If a servant is forced
to mate with a slave in order to produce slave children for her slave
master, is she not a slave?

In 1698 Parliament acted under pressure and allowed private English
merchants to participate in the slave trade. The statute declared the
slave trade "highly Beneficial and Advantageous to this Kingdom, and
to the Plantations and Colonies thereunto belonging," according to Du
Bois.

English merchants immediately sought to exclude all other nations by
securing a monopoly on the lucrative Spanish colonial slave trade.
This was accomplished by the Assiento treaty of 1713. Spain granted
England a monopoly on the Spanish slave trade for 30 years. England
engaged to supply the colonies with "at least 144,000 slaves at the
rate of 4,800 a year," and they greatly exceeded their quota,
according to Du Bois. The kings of Spain and England were to receive
one-fourth of the profits, and the Royal African Company was
authorized to import as many slaves as they wished.

In Slavery: A World History, Milton Meltzer says, "Slave trading was
no vulgar or wicked occupation that shut a man out from office or
honors. Engaged in the British slave trade were dukes, earls, lords,
countesses, knights -- and kings. The slaves of the Royal African
Company were branded with initials D.Y. for the Duke of York."

In the late 18th century historian Arthur Young traveled widely in
Ireland. He wrote, "A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order
which a laborer, servant, or cottier dares to refuse. He may punish
with his cane or horsewhip with most perfect security. A poor man
would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own
defense."

When the Irish rebelled in 1798, Britain shipped thousands of chained
"traitors" to her penal colonies in Australia. Many Irish prisoners
were convinced that the masters of these convict ships were under
orders to starve and murder them by neglect on the outward voyage. In
The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes writes, "They had reason to think so,"
and points to the 1802 arrival of the Hercules, with a 37-percent
death rate among the political exiles. That same year, the Atlas II
sailed from Cork, with 65 out of 181 "convicts" found dead on arrival.
Irish sailors who mutinied to help their countrymen were flogged
unmercifully, and "ironed" together with handcuffs, thumbscrews and
slave leg bolts.

In Slavery and the Slave Trade, James Walvin writes: "In 1781 the
British slave ship Zong, unexpectedly delayed at sea and in danger of
running short of supplies, simply dumped 132 slaves overboard in order
to save the healthier slaves and on the understanding that such an
action would be covered by the ship's insurance (not the case had the
wretched slaves merely died)."

The Church of England supported the slave trade as a means of
converting "heathens," and the Bishop of Exeter held 655 slaves until
he was compensated for them in 1833. Trader John Newton had prayers
said twice a day on board his slave ship, saying he never knew
"sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion." Francis Drake's
slave ship was called Grace of God.

In The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson says, "The value of British
income derived from the [slave] trade with the West Indies was said to
be four times greater than the value of British incomes derived from
trade with the rest of the world." Diggs says that the greater profits
from the trade "helped make possible the British Industrial
Revolution." The tables from the Royal African Company indicate that
between 1690 and 1807, they took 2,579,400 slaves out of Africa.
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6. The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves
The Slaves That Time Forgot

by John Martin

	
Global Research, May 28, 2012


They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall 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. They 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 II and Charles I
also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed
Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next
door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II 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 or 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 moms, even with this new found emancipation,
would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in
many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The
settlers began to breed Irish women and girls 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 that the Irish experienced the horrors of
slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did.
There is, also, very 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 it’s 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 nightmarish 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, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the
history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?

Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more
than a mention from an unknown writer?

Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To
(unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and 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.

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http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=332&issue=115

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Best

A. Mani



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