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
It’s so sad that everyone is fighting and comparing there suffering from the cruelty that was inflicted on there ppl. It’s so hard, so painful to read and to only imagine the terrifying things that these humans were made to experience and endure 🙁
I hate that this could happen to them and that man could be so cruel and evil to hurt any living being let alone living thing in such a disgusting sick and in justified way!!!!
I don’t understand it, I just wish I could change it!!!! but I can’t, I hate I cant, I hate that this is our history!! I hate that they were so cruel and could let this kind of thing happen, I hate slavery!!!
I hate that they think they are better and not a equal or deserve to think they have a right to hurt one but not feel there pain!!! How could anyone do that and not feel shame or beg for forgiveness, but to hide it and keep going on!!! It’s sick!! It’s not mentally right!!!
I’m sorry :((((
I think it’s so important tho that we learn these things by hearing everyone’s voice of suffering so we can make a change, do what’s right, make sure all is heard, every voice, open our eyes, see all as one, share our love, stop hating and fighting with one another, but get back at the ones who actually are on top, the money hungry and still in control now!! How can these evil ppls love for money and power over another mans pain and life still be above and ruling the world (us) today 🙁 ( as what I have heard )
What about the world and its pain
Why are we not taking care of our world instead of being consumed in what they are feeding us to end our world.. Why are we busy fighting among each other.. Are we that gullible that we just take take coz agh it’s what we have to do coz they are.. And argh we need to do the everyday to day same thing coz that’s what we are told we have to do.. ?!?!?!
Stuff money, money does not compare to that great feeling you get when you can help one or even grow a tree! Not even close
You will never find your purpose or happiness
If you can’t find the purpose of what our father in heaven , Creator of all things created all things for and why? You will never find true happiness until you see and look after all things for what they were created for. I hope that made sense 🙂
Please don’t fight about what happened but learn from what happened to one another’s ppl and take back what was made for all of you to enjoy, share, care for and love with out the big buildings money ect killing it and us!!
I prayer for ????
love, peace and happiness
What about Cambodia? Does anyone know what happened with those poor ppl 🙁 ?
Great comment. Now there needs to be a dialogue about what can be done together. I strongly suspect what is truly making the feeding of these tensions worse is the economy, and the fact that the divide between those who are living comfortably and those who aren’t is widening at such a great pace. Everyone is trying to hang on to what they have, looking around for someone to blame, and trying to climb to the top of the heap. What’s tragic about this that instead of massing in numbers, we are fractured and fighting amongst ourselves for our small pieces of the pie; while systematically the powers that be at the top are trying to take and keep as much of the pie for themselves as they can. This has gone on throughout history also. Lives are being hurt, lost, damaged and destroyed, across the board for greed. As it was then, it is now that it’s about profits, money and wealth. What’s even more tragic is that this is going more global than any of us can imagine. Instead of bringing slavery and exploitation to the US, the US is now taking it to the world, and leaving those who were brought here in the dust. The world’s wealthiest aren’t going to be happy until they have it all. Fighting with each other is not going to make the world or this country a better place. Understanding that we have more in common than more different is what is going to unite us to right the wrongs.
all of you guys need to “bing” “google” whatever your favorite search engine is about slavery TODAY. I am sure we all have someone in our history who was mistreated one way or another. Today it is referred to as “human trafficking”. Search 55 little known facts about human trafficking. One fact.. there are more human slaves in the world today than EVER in history. Another fact there are an estimated 27 million adults and 13 million children AROUND THE WORLD who are victims of human trafficking. .. aka “slavery”. The key phrase here is AROUND THE WORLD. Men, women, children of all races. It is mostly sex trafficking but it is also for “organ harvesting”. Most human trafficking occurs in New York, California and Florida. There are many more sad facts. We all need to stop worrying about what the government might owe us because of our ancestors suffering and figure out what we might be able to do to stop SLAVERY today.
Well said. I couldn’t agree more.. Thank you for saying it.
I agree with you Darlene. No people today are responsible for anything that happened back then! But today, right now somebody’s loved one is being kidnapped & sold in Human trafficking, organ harvesting etc. Wake up, people of all colors from everywhere in th world are disappearing. GOD’S LOVE to you all
I am Irish and Indian..Both sides of my ancestors were “mistreated”…But I wasn’t mistreated!! And I know tons of Black people that aren’t mistreated because they are black..FACT!!..I know personally because I grew up side by side with them…Some even married into my family!!..I have nephews,cousins and Uncles who are black!!..Racism is taught..It’s not something you are born feeling..If you want to stop racism then start with your children!!..Hate begets Hate..
Please people, stay on topic. This is not about human trafficking in the 21st Century or slavery in America or anywhere else. It’s about the Irish being put to slavery back in the 1600s by the English. It was from a time none of us can related to and it was awful. No comparisons to any other race or incident should be made. It isn’t relevant to the topic. People need to admit that there were slaves of various races and/or ethnic groups. This is one group and this is what the article is about, what happened to the Irish at this time period. Anything else has no bearing.
Enlightening article. Ridiculous comments. History is just that, the recorded past. It is unfortunate that more people do not take the time to read more than just their own self satisfying version of the past. I believe that the history of these United States begins with our revolution. From 1775 until the Emancipation Proclamation was less than 100 years, and from then til now is less than 200 years. We as a nation have far out paced our European and African ancestors in the area of human and civil rights. Be proud of who we are.
People need to do some history research before commenting. Slavery has been around for as long as history has been recorded. Automatically we focus on the Atlantic Slave trade when we hear slavery but I will encourage you to not only read more on the Irish Slave trade but also the Arab Slave trade and the Saqaliba as a start.