The Slaves That Time Forgot
By John Martin
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? After all, 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 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.
http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html
Pretty sure the article meant to state James I, not James II, since James the II followed Charles II after the Restoration. This may have already been addressed in one of the 185 previous posts, but mentioning so facts can be clear in a good article.
get it right. James II did not assend the throne untill 1685, when he then fled England for France in 1688. So at what did he have time to export thousands of Irish slaves??. EVA GASKIN.
Didn’t he flee to France from Ireland.
He was Catholic and the Irish Catholics were fighting for him.
Actualy it was the 10th October1688 gregorian calender or the 21st October1688 under the julian calender….EVA GASKIN.
@ Ali Weiss
– England sent the first forced labour convicts or slaves in the US few months before the Africans of 1619
– English was the first slaves of the new world in the country called USA, before Indians and Africans
– The first Africans who arrived in 1619 were not slaves (Legal) but Indentured Servants, Anthony Angola aka Anthony Johnson was among the first African group in 1619. Few years later he owned himself White and Blacks Indentured servants
So we have try to set up a chronology of slavery in North America by groups :
* 1st: English
* 2nd: Native Indians
* 3rd: Irish and Scots : Colonel William Brayne of Jamaica was the “Las Casas” of the Irish & Scots in Jamaica, he wrote a letter to Cromwell in order to advise him to import African slaves who would be better treated than Irish & Scots, by their masters since they had paid for them.
– 4th: Africans including Moors , many of them being princes (Suleyman Ibn Ayub, Sali Bilali, Ibrahim Abdul Rahman aka Prince etc) or kings (queens) i.e. attention for all the BStters saying that African kings sold their subjects to slavery in the New world…The BIG problem with that theory is that many of them finished as slaves in North, Central, South America and the west indies
It was the Spannish that forced American Indians into slavery. The Spannish controlled more of the area that is now the USA than England ever did.
English enslaved native Indians in North America , it is well documented : Barbara Olexer , Allan Gallay, A.W Lauber.
English also started the bacteriological war by selling infected blankets ( smallpox) to the natives in North America, in order to kill them.
Spanish and British of that times (those who lived in the Caribbeans and America in colonial times) were fiends
I’ve heard the stories about small pox infected blankets, but those do just seem to be rumours. There were no cases of large scale outbreaks of small pox amongst the native Americans.
How could the Spanish and British be friends when they were at war with one another?
I recently left Haiti, I saw a few red headed Haitians, I was told it was due to being malnourished but many had freckles as well so I did not really buy that theory. This to me helps explain some of the differences in the physical features of the Haitians. While in Haiti I visited the remnants of a sugar cane mill from the 1600’s still standing with the ornate timbersamazingly still intact. I could only imagine the hands that were maimed under the giant gear that crushed the cane and the blood left on the floor of that mill. I too have Irish blood in my veins that endears me even closer to my Christian friends I have made in Haiti.
Haiti was Spannish, and then French and finally US before gaining independence.
Britain never had anything to do with Haiti.
Are you trying to say Britain does not have any innocent blood on her conscience?
Britain had to do something with Haiti : British ( the spanish too) tried to get the land (very wealthy, in reality the wealthiest colony of the New world) during the successfull liberation revolt. Toussaint kicked the British out from Haiti. When Kicked out, they helped the Haitians (arms : guns and powder , plus they had ships all over the carribean seas to check the French) to continue the revolt and rid off the French in this Island. Many French officers were sent to British jails, when defeated by Dessalines, like Rochambeau the French predecessor of Hitler in Saint Domingue / Haiti
SLAVERY IS WRONG FOR ANY RACE AND I NO THE HISTORY OF WHITE SLAVERY
BUT THAT DONT EXCUSE WHAT THEY HAVE AND ARE DOING TO BLACKS IF THIS IS TO STOP SOME ONE HAS TO MAKE AMENDS AND THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD IF THE WHITES KILL ALL THE BLACKS THEN THE NATION WILL TURN ON IT SELF IF THE BLACKS KILL ALL THE WHITES THE NATION WILL STILL TURN ON IT;S SELF DO THE WRIGHT THING THE WEALTH MUST BE DIVIDED THEN START OVER OR WE ALL WILL PAY THE PRICE EATHER WAY THAT IS THE ONLY SOLUTION.
I find this entire thread commical! Here the writer SPECIFICALLY states he/she isn’t taking away from what the black and Indian slaves endured, merely educating on their less known counterparts. It is OBNOXIOUS that African Americans and Native Americans TODAY seek preferential treatment and sympathizers for what ancestors they probably cannot even name endured! Yet, here everyone took this article intended to educate and turned it into a racial debate. How ashamed would our ancestors be to know that their sacrifices and injustices were done in vain? To know that they endured the brutality they did in the name of equality and freedom, only for their esteanged decendents to play the card of racial victims.
Knock it off — you are ridiculous. I could write a book about the tragedies I PERSONALLY endured, only to brush myself off and use those experiences to make something of myself and do great things for myself, my family and others, all without taking a handout, expecting sympathy or special accomodations or playing the victim card! Stop playing this trivial game and do something! Is it tragic what ALL our ancestors endured? Yes! The question is not who’s ancestors were inslaved longer or subject to more brutality, the question is now, today, what are YOU doing to ensure their suffering was not in vain; to ensure you make something of yourself WITHOUT expecting handouts?! There is always going to be someone who claims to have a sadder story, so truly, your points are meaningless and moot!
GO AHEAD GENIPHER GO AHEAD I COULDNT HAVE SAID IT BETTER IM TIRED OF ALL THE INEXCUSABLE SIMPLE MINDED RA RA RA RA BLA BLA BLA ABOUT WHOS BETTER THAN WHOS WORSE THAN AND ON AND ON AND ON. AND NOT ONLY HERE AND NOW , BUT FOR A WHOLE TIME AS WE KNOW IT. EVERY ONE IS WASTING SO MUCH TIME. JUST LEARN TO LOVE AND GET ALONG. STOP TRYING TO MACK HUGE GAPS IN OUR UNIVERSE TRY TO COME TOGETHER. AFTER ALL WERE ALL FROM THE ONE AND ONLY CREATOR. LOVE AND PEACE
I believe the point to be made is that the Blacks are not alone in their history. Leaving out white slavery helps the blacks continue with their pity plight thus feeding their reason for lack of self esteem. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and move on to a new subject. If they focus on improvement and release what happened to their ancestors they can rise above and this will help reduce prejudice, instead of playing the never-ending blame game.
I don’t think that is the point. The point is that white slavery is whitewashed over so that african ancestry becomes known as the ones who were enslaved throughout time…. which has its hand in breeding (and perpetuating) racism over and over again. To see one race as the one subject of slavery subconsciously makes the other beleive that they are somehow superior and makes those of african ancestry as inferior… when that is not the truth. In other words it just feeds the belief of inequality and perpetuates racism both consciously and unconsciously. If you see the need for an improvement in anyone it is most likely that you need to improve.
Genipher & MaryBeth, as with Crypto Jew, ‘John Kerry’, I suspect yours, to be possibly not Irish, & in the same camp.
(See the ‘Skull & Bones’ link)
To not know our history, is to not learn. History will then be repeated. The continuing crimes, against our lineages today, are deeply hidden & those secrets are ferociously guarded (Possibly not against your own questionable lineage).
I take note, that not a mention is made about Jews.
The Slave Ships / Coffin Ships, were owned by Talmudic Jew Slave Merchants. The Crown & the Bank of England are Jewish Owned. Freemasonry is the Jew Bankers + Royals’ vehicle, to advance their Talmudic Principled, ‘Protocols of Sion’. The Irish are in the center of the Cabal’s Crosshairs :
The Talmud :
http://www.rense.com/general79/talmud.htm
The Real Holocaust :
http://www.rense.com/general86/realholo.htm
: The ‘Protocols of Sion’ :
http://www.educate-yourself.org/cn/protocolsofsion.shtml
The Crypto Jew ‘Skull & Bones’, which JFK had warned :
: http://www.bilderberg.org/skulbone.htm
http://www.bilderberg.org/usglobal.htm#nazi
http://www.bilderberg.org/masons.htm
Cap & Gown (Sister fraternity, to ‘Skull & Bones’) :
http://www.whale.to/b/griggs.html
Their Choice, for NSA General :
http://www.whale.to/b/aquino.html
http://www.whale.to/b/monarch_q.html
The Cabal’s “Slow Kill” Murder, against folks such as myself :
http://www.bio-misuses.info/open-letter.htm
http://www.baranovfamily.org
http://www.surveillanceissues.com
The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, & their Foundations :
http://www.whale.to/b/mullins5.html
http://www.whale.to/b/mullins46.html
http://www.newsfocus.org/cfr.htm
The Cabal’s 911, & JFK’s Murder :
http://www.911missinglinks.com
http://www.rense.com/general75/latest.htm
http://www.911truth.org/pnac.html
http://www.afrocubaweb.com/news/mossadjfk.htm
http://www.4rie.com/rie%204.html
Let Me Introduce Myself : http://www.DavidFulton3.com
On Face Book, I am , & also , (Yes I was tortured by the Cabal, & I am alive today, thanks to JFK’s brother, Senator Ted Kennedy)
“Knock it off — you are ridiculous. I could write a book about the tragedies I PERSONALLY endured, only to brush myself off and use those experiences to make something of myself and do great things for myself, my family and others, all without taking a handout, expecting sympathy or special accomodations or playing the victim card”
Classic GOP style, simply intended ( pardon the pun ) to whitewash earlier European tyranny in the americas
who is asking for handouts? the race based prison caste system in america today would certainly negate any of this fictional “privelege” that conservatives falsely claim minorities are getting too much of.
and isn’t the holocaust a prime ( if not only ) example of this quest for special status, or does our writer here not see the discrepancy?
The point is America is the only country to constantly remind itself of black slavery. How can we get overcome it if it’s brought up everyday through BS text books, liberals, movies ETC….. The Jewish people had the hardest times of any race (The Holocaust) but they had the mind power to overcome it; now most of them are wealthy. All we ever hear in schools and in everyday life is how bad the black slaves had it and here you are defending the black slave history and acting like the Irish slave trade was nothing. I know what happened to African’s was horrible but every race has been through the same or worse. The Irish slave trade was just as bad as the black slave trade. The Irish just don’t whine and protest about it. Today we still have several slaves and no one seems to care. Asian women and children are being sold as sex slaves but that’s being ignored so we can focus on black slavery. I can’t believe some of you seem to condemn what other races have been through but celebrate and never STFU about the black slave trade. Plus Marybeth is talking about the present; we still have slaves today that are ignored and may as well be forgotten right before our eyes but people act like the African slave trade is still going on. Get in touch with reality, you guys are brainwashed. I hope everyone has a great day; take care.
We aren’t brainwashed, you are. You’re glossing over the African slave trade like it was a walk in the park. While the holocaust was equally bad, remember it only lasted a decade. 10 years compared to Africans being beaten, raped, & killed for over 100 years. I’m not gonna excuse the holocaust as nothing but stop acting as if Jewish oppression was equal to that of black people. It was not. Black people were still getting lynched, tarred & feathered 50 years after slavery ended. I would never tell a Jewish person that they should get over the holocaust because it was a long time ago. That’s just plain wrong. But using them as a scapegoat like “they got over it, you should to.” Is major BS. We’re aren’t the problem. You are. Deal with the fact that your kind committed the most heinous deeds this planet has ever seen to your own brethren. Not just to indigenous Africans, but Polynesians, Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, etc… The list goes on and on. You can’t just say “well, it’s in the past now, move on.” You treated us all like animals. Many of us have inherited mental illness from our ancestors. Post traumatic slave disorder is a real thing. No amount of interracial relationships & biracial children is gonna change that. Evil is evil and Europeans were(lol @ were) evil incarnate. And the scary thing about it is they used God as a way to justify all of what they did and still are doing today.
Folks read one column and think they know all there is to know without comparing and contrasting research. Slavery was a worldwide practice but I challenge anyone to prove that the Irish slave trade was longer and more brutal (using more than just this book) than the Trans-Atlantic slave trade involving Africans. Around 1607 to 1864 when the emancipation proclamation was issued, is the timeline for chattel slavery. One year after the proclamation, the convict leasing system was introduced and wasn’t dismantled until 1945. They are nowhere close in length.
Not to mention Arab imperialism and conquest in the continent of Africa before Europeans showed up. Think, read and do research, folks.
Look man, two separate white populations endured horrible slavery in that same time period. Irish and Russian serf populations were more or less slaves, except that slaves generally ate better than they did. Do your own research into the very long period of serfdom in both countries and tell me that it does not resemble slavery. It is true that racism regarding african americans is still present but honestly Ireland and England still have unbridled hate for each other too. So in short get off the damn high horse about how african americans are special little snowflakes. Life is hard get over it.
Well said, thank you!
We should be doing something and working together not against!!!