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
IamALonelyWhiteBrayingDonkey,
Violence breeds violence, and the terrible terrible things your friends, your family, and yourself have had to go through over the years,is unendurable,and has its roots in the long term violence and injustice which robbed African people of their right to live in peace in their own land, which drove the enserfed, robbed, and emotionally injured white people off of their land, and sent all to live in America as the subjects of the criminal white European elite, those who had robbed both “races” in the first place. It is incredible to think that an act of terrible violence, perpetrated three hundred years ago on our great…….great grandparents is still destroying our lives today. It is a small consolation to believe that those who organized such horror are now facing horror of a much greater magnitude in the afterlife. Because they no longer go around wearing crowns, dressed in sumptuous clothes, riding in in golden carriages, planning wars, does not mean that they have gone away. It would be naive to think they have, they were very real when they destroyed your society and ours, and they are very real now. Their days are numbered, and they will go to their master.
The aspirations of badly educated, stupid racists are a nasty by-product of the activities of this mainly white criminal elite. “Black-Americans” have never asociated themselves with this culture and can hold their heads up high on Judgement Day.
I have visited several countries over the years, but I have never visited America, so I really couldn’t describe the aspirations or the temperament of “Black-Americans”, I believe that is really very important to know these things, ( Our full growth as human beings depends on a deep understanding of ourselves and our own People), and it is likely that since you all were violently seperated from your ancestral culture, with no contact whatsoever since that day, your ancestral consciousness has closed down, gone asleep, and only by your own research can it be re-awakened.
anyway,
Peace.
This story was supposed to be directed to the Irish Slave Trade. You[‘re ALL a bunch of racists, INCLUDING sailor moon. The Irish were still being brought here as indentured servants AFTER the emancipation of the brownish-purples. The red-headed pinks were still “slaves” after slavery was abolished for the African captives. There’s the real truth for you dummies. They were forced to make war against the South when they arrived here,and they were spit upon while stepping off the ships at Ellis Island. That’s the facts, and if you don’t defend this truth, YOU ARE THE ONE dishonoring those people from the Old World. Dummy.
Mc Pheadair,
If you have included me in the bunch of racists, I would like you to give a very short list of any racist comments I made in my previous comments.
The Irish, having been robbed and evicted by the English Crown, starved into working for the immigrant Crown criminals who had robbed them, despised and sneered at for being POOR, categorised as being of menial nature by the scum of Cromwells invaders and by those marvellous products of an Eton education, (currently murdering and robbing Afghani’s), were not exactly at home in a country ruled by a similar type of person to those who had invaded them. The majority of Irish people spoke mainly Irish and knew little English when starvation, opression, or slavery drove them to America, they were prey to every petty official and every conman who dealt with immigrants.
McPheadair, Rasta Livewire is mainly about Black identity and the place of Black people on the world stage, this section is part of a bigger whole, my long, non-racist comments were in keeping with the bigger picture. Irish and Black people have a common enemy and they aren’t Black.
Peace.
Hey Irishmen! Guess what as soon as the civil war was over in 1864, guess what, the Irish who fought got to home and be white. The Irish who chose to immigrate to American due to the potatoe famine had it tough yes but also got to enjoy being white in America which kinda became a big deal when civil war reconstruction failed and Jim Crow laws and segregation took slavery’s place. Many irish ppl today in phily and new your are very wealthy and were able to make it because they benefited from being white under segregation. Stop making incorrect historical statements, your all better than that!
Bernie, I have never gone into the details of post civil war America, I am learning from you. I suppose many Irish immigrants took ruthless advantage of their unearned privileges and exploited their semi- liberated countrymen. Shame on them, their affluence was blood money.
Some people in the Jewish culture in NY try to say that most of the Irish in the US came here with money and pretty much live like royalty I always found that strange that they should think that
I’m fascinated by the Jews and their attitudes, if there is any body who knows why Jews would believe that about the Irish, please tell me.
I gather that all those pedophile Irish Catholic priest were made to do it by the Brits. They are really quite the limit.
All Catholic priests are obliged to give up sexual intimacy and gratification for life. They lead a hardworking life, where they are available to everybody at any time, they get little privacy or leisure, but quite a lot of hardship and lonliness. There is little surprise that 5% of them are unable to continually live up to such high standards. The vast majority of priests do live lives of purity for the sake of God’s Kingdom, for the sake of God’s people.
Paddy, if you read better books and asked more questions, you could be a kinder person.
Come on Malachy there must be some sense in your brain. How is that Catholicism fails to denounce all abusive priests, punish them harshly, and move forward by allowing priests to married. Guess what Eastern Byzantine Catholic Priests can get married, so can all Orthodox Preists so maybe the Church needs to make a few adjustments. And if you read the New Testament you might understand jesus’ teachings were not about purposeless self Sacrafice and living in poverty like many catholic priest and monks attempt to live but to be leaders of character and teach people how to love each other. It’s kinda hard to accomplish that goal if you can’t fulfill basic human needs like have a spouse.
Bernie, the captcha code is deleting my replies, so this will be short.
I would love to be an Orthodox Christian, since I have such a great respect for its ancient liturgy, its holiness, and many other things.
I do think that monks priests brothers nuns and sisters should be married to Christ, and show that by living a life of celibacy. It is dangerous to live such a lifestyle, but Jesus told us to be perfect, and then asked those of us who would be perfect, to give up everything and follow him. It seems that many professed Catholics try to give up everything and then later find that they cannot endure the lonliness. They then seek consolation, in alcohol, sex, or in some other harmful way .
McMalachy, I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt here.
The ‘very different temperaments and aspirations’ bit troubled me. It is a generalisation, and generalisations are harmful. Every single one of us has our own temperaments and aspirations. If you were trying to suggest that culture and environment play a part in the development of an individual, then I can’t argue with that. However, the part it plays is different for each individual, no matter their colour.
Your next bit was a bit confusing, but I think you may have been putting forward the theory that if the majority of the world’s resources were not available to the white, western world but to the African nations then the whole race issue would possibly be flipped on its head. If that is the case then I can accept that could be possible, though it’s a theory that could never be proved or disproved.
I don’t think you’re a racist. I think you mean well, but some parts did come across as a little close minded, though I don’t believe that was your intent.
I’m sorry that you received the level of anger you did, but as you pointed out yourself it is a very emotive subject.
What a relief to get a calm and reasoned reply. Andy, I wasn’t putting forward a theory of a reversal of global economic history, with African people as the great capitalists and white people as their labour.
I was trying to describe the tragic inequality that occurs when two distinct cultures, equal in dignity but different in their aspirations are abruptly brought into contact with each other.
I think that most visitors here live in a cultural melting pot, and don’t believe what i am saying. I am saying that each of us have come from a unique ancient clan, a clan isolated for thousands of years. Our clans joined up with kindred clans, and became a self protecting people for yet more thousands of years. Our peoples have only begun mixing in the last century, and we are still at heart attuned to our own ancestral voice. television can’t give us our identity, ownership of our clan’s culture can.
Those people ripped from their people, enslaved, antagonised, and deprived of edcation, have to rediscover their identity. I think that maybe personal power is based on a sound identity.
Paddy, an irony of geography is that the English are not British, they are West-Germans.
Another strange irony is that there has rarely been an English king on the throne of England.
Much of the anger directed at the English people from abroad is undeserved, as the English people too have been compelled to do the bidding of their foreign masters.
I now understand the “rift” between Ireland and England! Why has this been kept so quiet?
Wouldn’t it be great if Hollywood made a truthful movie about Irish Slavery!!!! I’m getting a bit overloaded with a seemingly constant stream of Oh-doez- Poh-Black movies.
Amalia, Irish slavery isn’t that popular because it involved only a few thousand ppl between 1600 to 1700, African Slavery involved a much more massive slave trade and slave population of well over 400,000 in chains that led to a civil war where 1 million lives were lost with old technology and no air power. That’s hard to do with muskets even rifled muskets with mini ball and still fails in comparison to millions of African Slaves who died in chains or their ancestors who were faced with segregation! The Irish were not victims of black codes and segregation for the next 100 years. That’s why this Irish slavery info isn’t mention in films or texts.
I can’t see Hollywood doing the subject much justice. It would probably be the story of how the American Marines defeated Oliver Cromwell and freed the poor, grateful Irish.
Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot-I think that was a title of a book,I will ask my friend Al Franken if he knows.
Someone finally has the integrity to tell the whole truth and bring this information to intelligent thinkers who know what they learn in school is either incomplete or a lie . I am glad there are networking sites like FB that allow people to post the truth. Up till now we have been sold a lie by mainstream media and only given the side of the story that want to tell. I want the truth, and not a manipulated version of what a media giant wants me to know. I blame mainstream media for the conflict in this country between people. Let’s admit that there have been no culture in history that have not suffered at the hands of others. Slavery in the western states existed long after the Emancipation Proclamation, which did not effect them. These were Native-American slaves, and we never hear about them, either. Thank you for an honest and truthful article.
True there were Native American slaves and Chinese slaves that worked on the railroads but the thirteenth amendment to the constitution outlawed slavery and would have lead to racial equality if that prick southern confederate Andrew Johnson was not elected president after Lincoln.
McMalachy I apologize for attacking your responses multiple times. I should not have been so harsh however I stand by my opinions on the topics
Much appreciated Bernie.
However I still hope to change your opinions.