How Did The Irish Influence The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

The Irish occupy a unique place in the history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, being white Europeans who were both slaves and slave owners, depending on which way the political and economic winds were blowing from the seventeenth century onwards. From the ruled to the rulers the Irish played a significant and almost universal role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and their story is one which is deserving of a greater knowledge both at home in Ireland but also worldwide. In relation to the question, what is certain is that during two centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, Irish merchants managed to build vast dynasties on the back of the suffering of astronomical numbers of innocent people and this is living proof that the Irish have not
always been the victims of history.

Irish involvement in Trans-Atlantic slavery began in the 1625 when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners to the ‘New World’ for profit because of the new settlements being made over there at the time. This proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to British settlers in the West Indies to work on the plantations. These political prisoners having no choice and were lifted from their home country for the economic reasons of the British. From the period of 1641 to 1652 over three thousand Irish were sold as slaves by the English. In one decade the population fell astronomically. Likewise during the 1650’s, over one hundred thousand Irish children between the ages of ten and fourteen were taken from their parents and sold to the West Indies, Virginia and New England. This was further supplemented by thirty thousand Irish men and women who were also transported and sold to the highest bidder.

In 1650, Cromwell captured Jamaica from the Spanish and immediately he set about colonising it.
Cromwell’s initial plan was somewhat moral as he did offer freedom to indentured Irish slaves in Barbados and give them thirty acres of their own to farm. However, when this plan was met with very little enthusiasm or success, Cromwell rethought his plans and instead offered the indentured a plot of land on completion of a certain duration of slavery in the West Indies which was usually seven years. They were given a free passage across the Atlantic in exchange for these years but had little option in deciding whether or not to go. During these years of slavery however the slave had no pay nor rights and lived in primitive conditions. The great number of these Irish emigrants were either indentured servants or prisoners and experienced conditions far worse than even the prisoners where they originally
inhabited.
At a similar time to when the first round of indentured servants were finishing their time of service, the ‘sugar boom’ hit the West Indies. With sugar being an extremely labour intensive crop, thousands of workers were required to harvest the cane. The price of land increased significantly and the promise of land for these indentured servants who had finished their period of service was not honoured. Barbados land owners grew short of workers, so they moved to Jamaica with their slaves and naturally their requirement for labour was met by Cromwell as he turned to his ‘man catchers’ in Ireland whom would gather the amount of men, women or children they deemed sufficient. Cromwell ordered these ‘man catchers’ to round up several thousand women and “as many young men as can be lifted out of Ireland” to work in Jamaica and the West Indies. Two thousand children were also then ordered to be sent to the new world. The prisons of Ireland were emptied of both political and criminal prisoners. Conditions for these new slaves were sub-human, with ghetto colonies of these white workers still in existence today in Monserrat. The deaths of these slaves were rarely recorded so the final tally remains unknown. These slaves were buried within the sugar fields. The conditions these slaves found themselves in were hellish and punishment for misbehaviour was of extreme severity. For example, if a slave struck the plantation owner they were buried alive, while repeated attempts of escape led to hanging

A visitor to Jamaica in 1687 reported that “they are nailed to the ground with crooked sticks on every limb and then applying the fires by degrees from the feet, burning them gradually to the head whereby their pains are extravagant”. Unfortunately this was a common occurance for disobedience in these Islands at this time and also grew worse with failed rebellions and revolts. Under Cromwell, thousands of people from Ireland were expelled to the West Indies. They arrived at the same time as the first importation of African slaves to the regions. Both cruelly taken from their homes, the Irish and Africans shared a common suffering and grievance and lived together in peace and common understanding forming close relationships. This is borne out by the presence of Irish surnames such as O’Gara, O’Donnell and Sweeney in the West Indies to the present day, some of which went onto be powerful families in the West Indies in later years (Section three and four: Hilary McD. Beckless, ‘A righteous and unruly lot’: Irish indentured servants and freemen in the English West Indies, 1644-1713(Omohundro Institute of early American history and culture), pp.505-522.).
The involvement of the Irish as slave merchants may not be as well known, however there is evidence that some Irish wielded power over their own counterparts in the West Indies. For example in Monserrat, the first three governments were headed by men who were Irish born. A fact which is unexplainable if the Irish were merely considered indentured servants at the time. However it is possible to offer some explanation. It has been reported that around the time the first indentured servants were transported to the West Indies, a second group from Cork settled on the island of St. Kitts. The despair experienced after the battle of Kinsale had driven these settlers away from their beloved homes in Ireland. Their plan to start trading in tobacco was thwarted by rows with English “puritans” and so they settled on the nearby island of Monserrat instead (‘The black Irish’ by Radharc Studios, 1976)

Two of the largest plantations in Monserrat were O’Gara’s estate and Galway estate. The first governor of Monserrat was Anthony Brisket from Wexford who had been removed from his Irish estate in 1613. In compensation for this he was given commission by the British crown to travel to the West Indies and set up a planation on Monserrat. The Irish were now the masters and like all West Indian planters, they also had a quota of African slaves. A census from the mid 1600’s states that on the village of Monserrat there were two thousand Irish, seven hundred English and fifty two scots and one thousand African slaves (‘The black Irish’ by Radharc Studios, 1976).

To study Irish involvement as slave merchants one must look at the Irish slaving clans of Nantes in France who were descendants of the Wild Geese. They effectively ran the trade in humans for the French nobility, with the Walsh family of Ballynacody, Co. Kilkenny being described as “a personal taxi service for the Stuarts”.

By the early 1700s, the port of Nantes, with a large, close-knit and hardworking Irish slave trading community, became the chief slaving port for the kingdom of Louis XVI.
At this time, half of the ships which sailed out of Nantes were owned or stocked by Irish merchant families including the Joyce’s, Walsh’s, McCarthy’s, O’Sheil’s, Sarsfield’s and O’Riordans. Manufactured goods, guns, textiles, liquor and knives were brought from Nantes to the Slave Coast, exchanged for slaves who were transported to the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint Dominque (now Haiti) where they were sold for sugar and tobacco, which then returned to Europe. The profits made from this trading were spread far beyond Nantes. It made fortunes for the ports of Bristol, Liverpool and Amsterdam. The merchant princes of Cork, Limerick and Waterford profited greatly by supplying the ships, feeding the slaves and slavers alike to great reward and family fortunes. Huge family fortunes were built in Cork. The city centre was rebuilt and some of those dynasties that were built on the backs and bellies of millions of slaves are still with us today his trading went on for decades, with the wealth of nations and Empires built up on unimaginable human misery. For example, In 1748 Antoine Walsh left France to manage the family slave plantation in Sainte Dominque (Haiti), where he died in 1763. Ten years earlier, in 1753, Antoine had been enabled by King Louis XV of France and the family estates on
the lower Loire were consolidated by Royal letters-patent into the “Com On De Serra”. The Walsh’s were hence Comtes De Serra. The exiled Irishman had personally bought and sold over twelve thousand African slaves and launched forty cross-Atlantic slave voyages. He was the greatest-or worst of the Irish Nantes slavers.

From my research of this topic it is clear to see that the Irish in the West Indies, Monserrat, New England and Virginia had a very unorthodox role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as they were both common slaves and plantation owners with a quota of their own slaves. Historically speaking, this fact is almost solely unique to the Irish of these islands and is a piece of history in which I feel its importance if disappointingly almost unheard of. This piece of history all came about through because an unfortunate turn in the Irish public’s freedom and everyday lives. With the coming of the Cromwellian plantation came the enhancement of the Irish public’s pain and suffering and this was felt almost instantaneously with the exportation of the men who ideals were of an independent Ireland and one which was free of Cromwell and his equally hostile partners. Both the Irish political prisoners and ‘free men’s’ fate was set in stone from the outset with Cromwell as the rejection of his first proposal just leading to a mere enforcement of his own rules which could not be stopped. Yet the torture of leaving their own country was not the worst pain of all, quickly realised from the outset after witnessing the conditions in which they would find themselves in for the uncertain time they would be spending there. Yet, as previously stated it would be irrational to just paint the Irish as victims of history so when I delved deeper into this topic I discovered an entire section of history unknown to myself and peers, I am of course referring to the Irish as planters, slave owners and ship merchants around the same time. Stories of men owning and controlling merchants ships containing up to a couple of thousand passengers I feel need to be documented significantly better as I feel it is somewhat of an unusually proud part of our history that coming from the barrens of the Cromwellian plantation, a group could rise up and be masters of their own future. To conclude, I thoughourly enjoyed the research of this project and hope I have enhanced your knowledge of this topic also