Among the many untold stories of migration, the forced repatriation of the Irish in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most often to serve English political purposes, ranks particularly high. In this guest blog, Nadege Ford-Vidal gives an account of this episode, with specific reference to Barbados.
Redlegs in Barbados
I first came across the story of the Irish in the Caribbean when I discovered the book To Hell or Barbados by Sean O’Callaghan. I was working with the BBC development team, hoping to put together some programme ideas about the real pirates of the Caribbean, given the success of the film. I was astounded to read about the long-term forced migration of the Irish to the New World colonies by the English – an episode in the history of slavery I had never come across before. It interested me not only in relation to work but also on a more personal basis. My husband, whose family originates from Barbados, has an Irish name. He, and others like him, had always been led to believe that his name derived from the Irish plantation managers, who gave their names to the African slaves they ruled with an iron fist. O’Callaghan eloquently challenged this common belief, asserting that there was no evidence to support it. So where did these names come from, and when did this practice of forced migration begin?
An example deed of indenture, from the eighteenth century.
The first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement on the Amazon River in 1612 during the reign of James I (1603–25). During the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603), 30,000 Irish military prisoners had been captured and were officially banished over the following years – in the main to end up serving in European armies or, as the Proclamation of 1625 ordered, to be transported and sold as indentured servants to English planters, who were settling the islands of the West Indies and the New World colonies.
An engraving of one of the battles of the Nine Years’ War, artist unknown.
As the settlement of North America and the Caribbean moved ahead, the demand for slave labour grew and the policy of transportation became official and continued to the late 18th century.
During the Cromwellian period (called the Reign of Terror for good reason) the practice took on a new form. From around 1652 onwards, any member of the Irish Catholic population was liable to be ‘Barbadosed’. As sugar production began to take off on the island, Parliament saw it as its duty to provide an adequate labour force. It devised numerous ruses for ‘legally’ capturing individuals. Every petty infraction – including looking as if you were about to do something illegal or just being caught in the street (vagrancy, as it was officially termed) – carried a sentence of transportation. Forced migration had multiple up-sides for Parliament and Cromwell: it served to rid Ireland of unwanted Irish antagonists; it freed land that could then be given as gifts to English and Irish Parliamentarians; it produced a profit from slave trade while supporting the English in the colonies with labour.
A map of Barbados from the mid-17th century, with slavery already a firmly established feature.
The greed for profit from this (practically free) slave resource was so excessive that gangs called ‘Man Catchers’ became a common feature of the landscape, combing the city streets and countryside to kidnap enough people to fill out their quotas. No one in the lowest classes was safe, whatever their nationality, religion, sex or age.
Over 100,000 young children, who were orphans or had been taken from their Catholic parents, were sent abroad into slavery in the West Indies [and other colonies] … that they might lose their faith and all knowledge of their nationality
(Dr Thomas Emmet ‘Ireland under English rule, or a plea for the Plaintiff NY 1903)
Estimates suggest that the population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000 between 1641 and 1652. Banished soldiers who had taken part in the Confederation Revolt, and those kidnapped for servitude, were not allowed to take their wives and children with them. As a result, of course, there was a growing population of homeless women and children, who in turn had to be sold themselves.
Special demand for girls and women ‘not past breeding’ appears to have arisen from the planters’ desire for white mistresses (less frequently wives). Captain John Vernon, employed by the Commissioners of Ireland, signed a contract on behalf of Bristol merchants (many of whom preferred the Irish slave trade routes, which were far more profitable) to find 250 women over the age of 12 from five districts in Ireland. The Captain categorically stated that he could fulfil this quota from the region of Cork alone.
Captain John Vernon, not a huge friend to Irish women, especially those from Cork!
Patrick Prendergast in The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1865) states:
‘But at last the evil became too shocking … particularly when these dealers in Irish flesh began to seize the daughters and children of the English.’
And not just the daughters and children – on 25 March 1659, a petition of 72 Englishmen was received in London, claiming they were illegally ‘now in slavery in the Barbados’.
The Irish welcomed the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. The profitability of the slave trade, however, encouraged the King to charter the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1662, which later became the Royal African Company. The Royal Family – including Charles II, the Queen Dowager and the Duke of York – then contracted to supply at least 3,000 slaves annually to their chartered company.
Contemporary accounts suggest that there was little difference in the means of transportation from the African experience. A slave was a slave no matter the colour. Catholic priests in disguise sent letters to Rome describing the Irish herded into pens like cattle tied to each other by ropes around their necks before embarkation. We have the name of several slave ships involved in the transportation of the Irish to the Colonies: The Jane, The Susan and Mary, The Elizabeth and The Two Brothers, to name a few. It is clear that the same ships travelled the African slave routes, further supporting the likelihood that the Irish were treated in the same way during the voyage itself. Even as early as 1638 Thomas Rous, a Planter, sailed to Barbados with a ship holding 350 with the expectation that at least 20 per cent of the people would not make the journey.
‘… the mind shrinks from imagining the horrors of their suffering at sea … their hardships excited no sympathy in England … to them … there was little to choose between a cow and an Irish Roman Catholic – neither … could feel sorrow or pain’
(Elliot O’Donnell, The Irish Abroad, 1915)
An 18th-century illustration showing men from Dublin and Cork, chained and ready for deportation.
Little first-hand information is available to help us understand the plight of these white slaves: few returned, and those who did decided not to describe their experiences publicly. Colonel John Scott commented that ‘… [they] are just permitted to live, and a very great many Irish, derided by the negroes and branded with the Epithet of white slaves.’
Plantation managers enforced breeding between African slaves and Irish women to produce a free labour resource. The preference was for Coromantine and Mandingo men, who were noted for their strength and intelligence. The more attractive of the offspring produced by these breeding ‘farms’ were often at work in brothels from the age of 12 onwards. Planters also preferred them as mistresses to Irish women, whom the planters considered cold – no surprise, when one imagines the life they must have experienced.
‘They lived as in a prison, their faith banned, their race and nation despised, their virtue outraged, their tears derided.’
(Reverend EA Dalton 1910)
This was such common practice, apparently, 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’. The basis for this law was no moral objection but grave concern that the practice would adversely affect trading profit.
There are records of Irish and African slaves joining forces to rebel against their masters in Barbados. In 1649, the harshness of the servitude to which they had been subjected caused the Irish to rebel with the Africans against the English colonists.The rebellion failed, and many were hanged, drawn and quartered, and their heads deposited on pikes on high ground around Bridgetown, so that the entire population would be warned against future rebellions.
These rebellions increased the fear slave owners felt and thus the severity with which slaves were treated and the repercussions of any minor infraction. In Barbados, the Assembly (which controlled the Island legally and economically) was entirely made up of white plantation owners who served their own interests (and nominally those of the motherland) by turning harsh controls over slaves into law.
The treatment of Irish slaves is reflected in a letter written by Colonel William Brayne to the English authorities in 1656, urging the importation of African slaves on the grounds that, ‘as the planters would have to pay much more for them, they would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of (the Irish) … ’
When there were skirmishes with rebels and runaways, the ‘servants and slaves fought to the bitter end, and often sought death, knowing the tortures that awaited them if taken alive’. One event in October 1657, which saw 12 of the militia (employed to police the Island) and 30 runaways killed, also resulted in six Irish captives being nailed to a cross, burnt and beheaded, as a public spectacle. Their owners were given £25 a man in compensation.
Some rebels and runaways tried to leave the island by boat, but even in this endeavour they were thwarted: the Assembly passed a law requiring all boat owners to guard their vessels, mostly out of the widespread fear that they would offer the French and Spanish vital information about the island’s fortifications and military strength. Some runaways clearly did escape by sea and appear to have been part of the crews of the pirate ships which trawled the Caribbean waters. They were known at the time as ‘Brethren of the Coast’. Many who escaped had been in the Irish armies defeated by Cromwell and were well trained in the use of weapons and used to hard living. Some were experienced gunners, who were welcomed with open arms. ‘Red Legs’ Greaves, an infamous marauder of the seas, was known to have escaped Barbados with three other Irish fellow slaves. He had been transported as a Tory (originally an Irish term for ‘outlaw’ or ‘robber’) and sold to a planter with a reputation for cruelty. The four men slipped their chains, killed the watchman guarding a lugger (a traditional fishing boat) and set sail. They were intercepted by a French captain of a pirate fleet of 10, who gladly took them on board and with whom they fought for more than two years.
The longevity of Irish slavery is demonstrated from records of Irish sold as slaves in 1664 to the French on St Bartholomew. In 1713, the Treaty of Assiento was signed: in it Spain granted England exclusive rights to the slave trade, and England agreed to supply Spanish colonies with 4,800 slaves a year for 30 years. England also shipped tens of thousands of Irish prisoners after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, who were sold as slaves in the Colonies and Australia. By the time African slaves in Barbados were emancipated in 1834, the transported Irish had disappeared into history; and by the time of the census of the 1880s no Barbadians were identified as Irish. What remained was a small population of poor whites, often called ‘redlegs’, who may well be the descendants of the Barbadosed Irish.
Erlene Downie and Betty Fenty, two of the Barbados ‘Redlegs’ – also known as ‘Baccra’ as a result of being allowed to sit only in the back row of churches. Betty Fenty is the great-aunt of the singer Rihanna. There are a few hundred Redlegs left in Barbados. ©Sheena Jolley
It would appear that during the 19th and early 20th century this period of Irish history, and the prolific involvement of the English in the white slave trade, was mentioned in several history books. It does raise the question why it has so seldom since featured in our modern history books and why many have, on occasion, attempted to deny that it ever happened …
Nadege Forde-Vidal studied ancient history and Egyptology at UCL before taking a masters in Egyptian archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology. She assisted with the cataloguing of 80,000 objects for the online project, ‘Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology’, and her thesis was on ‘The Emancipation of Greek Women in Ptolemaic Egypt’. She likes to sculpt!
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