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
ALL RACES HAVE OWENED OR BEEN SLAVES. ENOUGH ALREADY. STOP THE PISSING CONTEST. IT HAS GOTTEN VERY…OLD.
I am human.
After so many years of lying, y’all will make any excuse to see fit that the coloreds weren’t the only slaves but they were. And stop trying to feel special with lies! If you weren’t there to tell me the true history then no history someone made up online to make themselves feel better isn’t going to make me believe this bull. Your lies won’t ever add up, and it won’t stop the government in it’s stand to eradicate the truth. And it wasn’t no dang Indentured Irish slaves that didn’t receive reparations for the ones that actually decided to come here on there own. Smh, yall need Yah! Epic fail stop trying to take away real history….
“If you get them asking the wrong questions , they will never get the right answer” and “When it comes to race, the moment you stop running is the moment You Win” … YOU PPL ARE SPEAKING WRONG … First off, i am not a race! And niether are you … white is the only race, its not a birth right, its a choice, its ideology… its not a culture or nationality, or ethnisity, thats why they had to make a new category called RACE because thats what it is… the word RACE, for the slow ppl, is short for racism and racist , its the same meaning kind of like catholic is short for catholicism… theres no such thing as a whites slave, they were the slave masters, the supremists.
.. caucasians were slaves, (the first slaves) Aficans for instance, were also slaves, just to name a few, these are nationalities, ethnicities and or cultures … so get some already, these are humans … so start acting like it. WHITE is a RACE, a competition , where one wins (dominates) over all. When applied inter species, it means extintion, a cancer to the body where the individual cells dont know who they are any more, i.e lost its identity (thru pollution or slavery) and acts to destroy its environment, the very body it rely upon for life… this is the anti life (antiman), (antichrist), this is cancer, this is how you divide and rule… SO TELL ME? ARE YOU A RACE? THEN TELL ME, WHAT IS RACE?… if so, then who are you racing against… (sometimes its so simple its stupid, and we all know stupid is what stupid does)… btw they tell you what there doing and some still dont get it, instead they pledge there aleagence to something that they have no idea the meaning of?? Why… cause this is what happens when you think with your skin and not your brain, when you use eyesight alone instead of eyesight and insight. So have you figured out that your not a race yet… the word is waiting… ok next question… ARE YOU WHITE?… so tell me, what does white mean? And why would you want to take credit for slavery? And if you donot know what white means, why call yourself that? … the Irish are humans , the Africans are humans… telling the irish or africans that your white is like telling the jews that your a nazi… insidently , the nazis know exactly what it means to be white, as they had to join this gang in order to be a nazi… so did the slave masters and kkk , they all knew what it meant, Supremist, RACING AGAINST THE HUMANS, TO BE SUPREME OVERTHE HUMANS, IN ORDER TO FARM THE HUMANS LIKE CATTLE. (Look up human farming on youtube) WHITE is a BRAND, a MARK that the farmer gives his beast, WHEN WE KNOW HOW WE GOT HERE, ONLY THEN CAN WE KNOW HOW TO GET OUT. IT TIME TO RIGHT THE WRONGS, “A PROBLEM IS NOT A PROBLEM, UNLESS YOU DEEM NOT TO FIX IT” . And nobody wants to fix it, trust me iv asked, there ego gets in the way, intelectual vigilance is not applied. (Btw.. spelling and typeos are the least of our problems, if youfind yourself fixated on them, its a tell, your ego is trying to grasp at straws hoping to provide redirect to distract from the facts… such as USING A WORD WRONG is far worse than spelling a word wrong). So… what are you? And do you know what that thing means that you call yourself? You would if you cared or sencere… BOTTOM LINE, IF IM NOT A RACE, AND YOUR NOT A RACE, THEN HOW CAN RACISM EXIST? CHECK TIM WISE YOUTUBE CLIP ON DENIAL… KNOW THY SELF, ONLY THEN CAN WE GROW…UP. whos ready to shed there ego and face facts? I dont see any hands… ok how bout this… put your hand up if you dont mind being treated for one day the way colored ppl are treated in this society… no hands?… that says you know theres a problem, and you dont want it for you, the question is, why do you allow it for others. Remember, you aline yourself with the thing that you call yourself… and Silence is condoning … unbourden your soul, let your spirit giude you and aline yourself with nature (God) once again…. because if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it is a duck , not looks like a duck, is a duck… this is a modern version of when Jesus talked about the synoguge of satan… dont take the mark either in body or mind , for if the soul does not conect with its tru identity and its tru home, the soul will be cast… it is said that one drop of purity can clean a sesspool. Even if you dont know who you are yet cause of slavery, atleast know who your not, cause of sanity, the rest will come naturaly. Kissinger said “we can fool some of the ppl sometimes, but not all the ppl all the time, so we need to work on the some of the ppl all of the time. Slavery was never realy abolished, it just moved spread and or changed its appearence… for example after slavery ended in america, it (the racist or race) moved on to germany to continue there buisness plan of racism slavery , genocide called the holocaust, it hasnt stoped moving yet, going from country to country, killing murdering, all in the name of saving your skin… its a racket… remember slaver happened cause we participated in it, it could not have happened without our participation, same as the holocaust, by convincing some ppl that they are better than the humans, and now no longer identifiying with the humans, they should have noproblem murdering the humans. (Look up tim wise origins of the white race, or origins of the word white and what it was invented for) i wonder were germany would be today if they didnt have any decency dignity and shame and alowed ppl to keep calling themselve nazis. The brand “white” was invented for one reason. This can be seen in what they did to the irish (btw irish is a human, what that means is an african, by way of ireland ) and what the whites (or cancer) did to the spanish, or to the chinese or asian, or the native americans or the africans or the indians or what the whites did to the caucasians or to the slaves or to the arabs or what they did to the germans or what they did.to the japanese… the list goes on and on… now look what the ppl who dont know who they are so they call themselves white and have no idea what that means when asked thats why they make the best candidate to employ to destroy the planet cause they dont care to know what they are so why care to know or recognize or respect what something else is , are doing to the water , to the air, or what there doing to the food , its not food anymore its just taste, thats it, basicaly just taste, colors and decorations and taste… this must be why american so called foods are illegal im most of the world like europe for instance. What about medicine? Thats gone, replaced by drugs, the list just goes on and on… and i know they keep us so distracted, its hard to find out, and they know that , but they also know its not there fault you never asked.yourself who you are, and the psycological problems that brings because your ok with it such as psycossis… thats why sometimes when old black folks would get called the n word , they would reply “at least i know what i am… and what im not”… so know thy self… i cant teach you everything… what prisoners you know that call themselves the nsme of there captures… isnt that stockhome syndrome… these ppl are crazy , capitol kkk… atleast they know what it means when they call themselves white … do you?… your giving creadence to them, your paying homige to them… so dont sit there and say you care, cause what you call yourself says you dont… and dont sit there and wonder whats wrong with the world, cause if you never wondered.who you are, or more impotantly who your not, then its you… ppl that are ok with being told what they are and what todo, and then go force that philosophy on others, thats whats wrong with this world… ppl like you… is it a wonder why burning books librairys and schools is part of there agenda (proposed agenda..= propaganda )… you realy wana help, realy wana fix this, cause its still happening today, and you just found out that your probably part of the problem stockhome syndrome… for example.. calling yourself white on a job application is like someone calling themselves the n word on a job app… or nazi or batman fot that matter, exept much much worse… im baffled why someone would want to call themselves a supremist slavemaster and would want to take credit for slavery, as if they were proud of it … they’v been trodding on the wine press much too long, repent… its time to separate the wolves from the sheep… so who are you?… (a slavery stroke of amnesia…) ok .. me too .. so who are you not… me… im an american.. from the lands that were once free, and the homes stolen from the brave. I in no way shape or form advocate slavery, racism, genocide its name its mark or its brand… Remember “CHANGE YOUR ATTITUDE, CHANGE YOUR PLAN, CAUSE THERE COULD NEVER REALY BE JUSTICE ON STOLEN LAND”… this talk was to help my pale and light skined aficans (caucasians) out of bondageand accidental fellowship with the slave master supremist… i couldent cover everything, but i will try… remember they brought you down from grace, but you keep yourself there by talking wrong .. you are not what they say you are and you are not what you say you are.. ignorance can only breed ignorance.. stop giving them the benifit, and using terms that buy into a slave system.. see yourself precious once more… they now are playing around with neuclier bombs.. lets get our heads out of the sand and act before its too late.. join us, in humanity. BLESSINGS TO ALL. il address the original africans in the diaspora, and the affects it has and continues to have on them next or after this talk is complete.
I’m extremely disappointed to find that a supposedly conscious site has promoted an article promoting the myth of Irish Slavery. This subject is well documented by an Irish Librarian & scholar Liam Hogan who used original resources to disprove this myth. Please research before you promote articles.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/liam-hogan/two-years-of-irish-slaves-myth-racism-reductionism-and-tradition-of-diminis
The comments here are disgusting quite frankly, if you dispute this perhaps you should go directly to the British sources themselves, they are replete with evidence of Irish slaves been transported in their thousands, hundreds of thousands to the Americas. Irish Americans, are embarrassed by this part of their history, why? Why you are the best army in the world and round up children you assume that’s shameful? Its a sad reality. As an Irish-Irish person this is nothing compared to what they did to us during the great hunger, 2 million of us starved. Black people here denying it need to get a life and read more, Irish need to do the same. The British were so arrogant they thought their Empire would never end and so their records on this part of our history is clear, suggest you check it out for yourself.
Wow, I knew Irish were taken to America but I thought they were ‘Indentured” to pay off debts.