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
Note that there are no references or sources in this article. Where are they getting the numbers from? In fact, this is just a piece of Irish Nationalist propaganda to get people riled up at the English. It has since been recirculated through white supremacist sites in the US, into more moderate conservative sites, and now has gone viral and is every way.
Here is a good debunking of this false narrative: http://www.academia.edu/9475964/The_Myth_of_Irish_Slaves_in_the_Colonies
If it does not go along with what you all want to accomplish of course it is propaganda. Lets not talk about the Irish slaves in Barbados, lets not talk about the African slaves in Barbados….lets just talk about this American thing that we only know from the side of the upper class ruling society who tells the story. You have no heritage, because you are regurgitating what someone else has fed you. do your own research, and of course never believe everything you find on the web….anyone can post anything as fact.
That link does not debunk anything. The author didn’t include sources but the information that was given in the article is accurate. I’m not sure about the numbers but the narrative it self is true. I have been a historian for over 25 years; I have seen plenty of historical documents that prove the Scot-Irish were the first slaves in North America.
You really should search for articles on Chinese and Irish slaves building lines of railroads in America and stop thinking that the Irish weren’t forced into slavery.
There you have it. Divide and rule works a treat.
Blacks owned slaves in America. Blacks still own slaves today. Just saying. Anyway back to the subject of the article. All whites at one time were and STILL are slaves today. You do not go to public school for knowledge you go there for programming. You learn to be an obedient slave.
The root of all evil is wanting something and not being willing to work for it. This is where slavery came from.
So, boys and girls, you want something? Time to go to work! Find ways to earn what you want. Or stop wanting. Either way, you are free.
I have always wondered why the Irish were put in slavery.
On researching that the origin or all European countries was indeed black, your statement appears in a different light.
Many black people were shipped from England and Ireland to the Americas. The white Irish as the so called white people came because of the mixing between the “white” invaders mixing with black inhabitants(Celts etc) and creating a lighter people. I guarantee you that you are probably not aware of the biggest lie you were ever told, that all black people came from Africa. In fact black people peopled all lands of the Earth for thousands and thousands of years before the Albino was birthed, creating what we call the white race today. In fact if the Albino or so called white man has a country of origin, it is indeed India(+Pakistan) as this is where the first Albinos appeared and later became the white peoples as they left the heat to find more suitable climates.
You can research all of this. Do not be made dumb by just what you are taught, go and learn for yourself.
@Para
Exactly, these people will look at this video here and tell you that the little boy is Indian!
While in the video it says that these people were lead to genocide. That is a lie! They were shipped to the Americas mainly north and the Caribbean where they mated with native blacks in these lands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSDfz3qV9vI
Thanks to Jahdey and co for getting this video!
And to quote Lawrence Fishburne in School Daze
WAKE UP!!!!
Irish, Scottish and English poor, criminals. debtors and war prisoners were sent as slaves to the colonies, just as African poor, criminals, debtors and war prisoners were sent as slaves. Blacks fetched about 10 times the price of white slaves because of their greater immunity to tropical disease and hence longer life-spans. White slaves would die much more quickly of disease.
BTW, the greatest victims of slavery in the 20th century were the white Europeans (mostly Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, Ukranian, Polish, German, Romanian, and first and foremost Russians) enslaved in the Gulags by the Bolsheviks whose leaders were mostly jewish.
Estimates of white Europeans enslaved under this brutal system are about 15 million souls between 1916 and 1960.
Why doesn’t anyone talk about these slaves? Boshevik jews also genocided nearly 10 million white Ukrainians in the 20th century.
The Irish need to be human before they can become “white slaves” :p
Do you not know that some of the best authors, poets, and musicians were and are Irish? England loves to claim them as her own but they are not and never will be.