Barbados - Cromwell, Red Legs and the ethnic cleansing of Ireland

 

Quite by chance, as I was browsing through a bookshop in Belfast a few years ago, I came across a copy of Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.  It’s a fascinating book that deals with the little known ‘white slavery’ in the Caribbean islands, when many Irish, Scottish and, indeed, poor English were sent off to islands like Barbados to work as indentured servants on the labour-intensive sugarcane plantations.

To Hell or to Connaught

The title of O’Callaghan’s book needs no explanation to anyone, like myself, who was educated in the Republic of Ireland – ‘to Hell or to Connaught’ is a phrase famously attributed to Oliver Cromwell, when he invaded Ireland and tried to force the native Irish population to move to Connaught, Ireland’s western-most and poorest province. 

The idea was to populate Ireland with Protestant Dutch and English settlers, much as Elizabeth had authorised the plantation of Ulster with Protestant settlers in the late 16^th century. Needless to say, after the chaos of Cromwell’s conquest, Ireland proved to be an unattractive destination for potential settlers, who preferred to risk their lives with the savage 'Red Indians' of New England, than the unruly native Irish in Leinster and Munster. 

Ethnic cleansing in the 17^th century?

Ethnic cleansing is a term that is bandied about a lot these days, stemming from the etničko čišćenje of the 1990's, that characterised the breakup of Yugoslavia.  I think it’s difficult to apply a term like this to a 17^th century context, as ethnic cleansing somehow infers a concept that is particularly rooted in the late 20^th century.  Having said that, it’s clear that Cromwell would have preferred to remove all native Irish (and Catholics) from Ireland and it’s scary to think that, in a 20^th century context and with modern technology at his disposal, he could have committed genocide in Ireland or ‘ethnically cleansed’ the country in the way that O’Callaghan seems to suggest. 

It didn’t work, of course – the reality was that the people most predisposed to live and work in Ireland were the native Irish and Cromwell’s army found that the only way they could work the land in the 'ethnically cleansed' provinces, was by employing native Irish labour.

Indentured service in the Caribbean

Beach at Bathsheeba by IrishMBO

Another way of getting rid of lots of native Irish men, women and children was by sending them as indentured servants to Barbados.  Far from being the slightly upmarket tourist destination that Barbados is today, a trip to Barbados in the 17^th century was nothing less than a death sentence.  O’Callaghan does an interesting comparison of the conditions of indentured servants versus the conditions of the slaves imported from Africa. 

He points out that, as indentured service was nominally for a fixed period of time, usually 7 years, the plantation owners had little interest in the long-term well-being or health of their indentured servants.  Slaves, on the other hand, were a long-term investment and it was in the plantation owners’ best interest to get the most out an adult slave during their working life.

Barbados Parliament by IrishMBO

For that reason O’Callaghan claims that the life of an indentured servant was, in some ways, worse than that of a slave.  He claims that they had worse living conditions than the African slaves and almost as little control over their destinies.  Many of the Irish people who were sent to Barbados couldn’t speak English and had little idea what was written in the contracts they were signing.  Worse than all of this, O’Callaghan portrays the grotesque living conditions of indentured servants – he describes how the women were often raped whilst working in the fields and how indentured servants could be beaten to death or hanged, if they tried to escape, with few legal repercussions for their ‘employers’

Anti-Irish racism

Some of the language used by Cromwell and his troops is shocking in how they described Irish people as somehow 'sub-human'.  It’s no surprise that there was little sympathy in Cromwell’s England for a race of people considered to be worse than animals.  The extreme nature of Cromwell’s Protestant revolution also meant that anyone professing the Catholic faith was considered to be a natural enemy of England.

The Irish in Jamaica

Ironically it was Cromwell’s hatred of Catholics that led to freedom for some of the Irish sent to Barbados.  His ‘Western Design’ was an attempt to take all Catholic Spain’s Caribbean possessions and bring them into the English commonwealth.  Two of Cromwell’s henchmen, Penn and Venables, led a disastrous campaign to capture the island of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).  They led a rabble of thieves, criminals and newly-freed indentured servants which suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Spanish. 

Not wanting to retreat from their campaign empty-handed (and therefore invoking Cromwell’s wrath), they decided to invade another Spanish island instead, even though it the island was strategically unimportant and with little natural wealth.  The campaign to capture Jamaica was successful and the island remained in British hands until the 20^th century.

Jamaica provided a great opportunity for those Irishmen and women who had survived their servitude in Barbados, to start again with an offer of land and work.  There weren’t many others who were willing to colonise Jamaica and the Irish population ultimately integrated with the black slave population, which might explain why Jamaican English has a distinctly Irish lilt!

The 'Red Legs' of Barbados

It would seem as though most of the Irish who remained in Barbados completely lost their language and identity.  Many were brought to Barbados as children, with little to anchor them in their ancestral culture.  O’Callaghan describes a definite policy of (what he describes as) ‘miscegenation’, when plantation owners would use Irish women and West African men to produce a new race of mixed-race slaves, that would be the property of the plantation owners and could be employed in the fields or sent to the whorehouses of Bridgetown.  It makes pretty grim reading and it’s a shame that there is so little recorded history of what happened to Irish women and the children they gave birth to in Barbados.

Dad swimming by IrishMBO

One remnant of 17^th and 18^th century ‘white slaves’ in Barbados is the small population of ‘red legs’ who still live on the island.  They seem to occupy the lowest level on Barbados’ social scale and it’s unusual to come across a country where a ‘white’ population is in a lower social strata than a black population.  I find the survival of the ‘red legs’ fascinating, although they are more likely descended from Scottish settlers, who were sent to Barbados in the 18^th century, than the Irish servants who were sent at the time of Cromwell. 
The ‘red legs’ of Barbados are notoriously reclusive and O’Callaghan’s attempt to communicate with these descendants of Irish and Scottish servants was relatively unsuccessful.  I wonder what responsibility, if any, Ireland and Scotland have towards these people.  Perhaps the governments of Ireland, Scotland and Barbados could work together to ensure greater opportunities and prosperity for a population that seems incredibly isolated and vulnerable?

Image credits:

The image of the book cover was taken by me.

All other images have been shared with us by flickr member IrishMBO, aka Mary Beth Kurspahic, who is a retired school teacher from the US.  Mary has lovely collection of Barbados photos, which you can see on her photostream.  You can also find out more about Mary at her website. Thanks to Mary for sharing these images with us, using the Creative Commons license. 

Jamaica Part Three

Perhaps the greatest challenge of all was cooking a traditional Jamaican dish. And what could be more taditional than Jerk Chicken?

There are lots of great Jerk Chicken caffs in London, but I still haven't managed to get to one. So, with no idea of what it should look like or taste like, I gave it my best shot!

A site I've used a lot for recipes is http://www.allrecipes.com/ so I found a recipe there that seemed doable, two recipes in fact - one for Jerk Chicken and one for Peas Rice. I dutifully blitzed my marinade in the food processor and marinated my chicken in the fridge for no less than a day and a half. I get the feeling Jerk is something that is best made on a smoky street grill, rather than the relative sterility of my kitchen, but it turned out okay. The Scotch Bonnets gave it a kick and the Peas Rice was gorgeous and so easy to make.

You can see the results below.

Still want to try the real thing though!

Image credits The photo of the Red Stripe advertisement is by flickruser and amateur photographer born in Trinidad nicholaslaughlin

You can also check out his blog http://www.nicholaslaughlin.blogspot.com/

Jamaica Part Two

Being a subscriber to Songlines magazine, I like to think I'm well up on world music and countries like Cuba certainly feature high in world music terms. Not so Jamaica. I guess reggae, ska and rocksteady don't really fit into our idea of what world music is. It's too mainstream. Which, in many ways proves that Jamaican music is incredibly popular in the Anglophone world and, indeed, has influenced whole generations of American and British artists.

And then there's Bob Marley.

A legend in his own right. I chose not to listen to the music of Bob Marley, for the same reasons I chose not to listen to the music of Bjork, when I was learning about Iceland. I wanted to learn something new. So, I ordered the Rough Guide to the Music of Jamaica.


As well as their series of guidebooks, the Rough Guides have also produced a series of music compilations. Not for connoisseurs perhaps, but a good introduction to a nation/culture's music nevertheless. I really enjoyed this CD. The early tracks, such as Basil Gabbidon's Going Back to Ja conjured up images of paradise beaches in Montego Bay and exclusive resorts where American film stars of the 50's and 60's used to hang out. The tracks seemed to move chronologically from a naive bliss to a much darker, drug induced paranoia, as some of the later tracks seemed to resonate.

The track I want to share with you this time is Don't stay away by Phyllis Dillon. In a male-dominated musical culture, it's refreshing to hear a voice as light and warm as a Caribbean breeze. I could go really over board and see this song as a love song from Jamaica to the rest of the world but, well . . . I won't :)



Image credits - the image of the reggae singer is by flickruser onlinejones who is a practising artist based in the West Midlands. You can find out more at his website http://www.onlinejones.co.uk/

Jamaica Part One

Jamaica was quite a challenge for me.

I guess, like a lot of people I have a certain image in my mind of Jamaica as a homophobic, gangsta's paradise. It was good to learn that there is a lot more to Jamaica than the misconceptions we're fed by the media, although I still find homophobia a cultural difference that is hard to stomach. All the evidence of how LGBT people are treated in this country flies in the face of depictions of a people who are otherwise fun-loving, charitable and politically aware.

My exploration of Jamaican culture centred a lot around the history of this nation. I read a very straight-forward and informative summary called History of Jamaica by Clinton V Black. Starting with the Carib tribes who colonised the island from their original homelands in what is now Venezuela and Guyana.

The word 'cannibal' is a corruption of Carib. The original American tribes were completely devastated by European diseases and the survivors systematically annihilated by the Spanish in, what would now be termed, 'genocide'. Spain's role in the New World was destructive to shocking proportions and, on some deep psychological level, I can't even begin to relate that to the Spanish nation as we know it today.

One thing I learned about Spanish colonisation was that, apart from wiping out the native populations, Spain had much more serious intentions in America than the English and French, who saw their American colonies purely as sources of revenue. The Spanish on the other hand wanted to create a New Spain in America, building magnificant cities such as Panama and La Havana.

The Spanish American 'dream' has roused an interest in me and I'm sure I'll learn more about this in due course. Certainly the societies established by Spain seem to have achieved a level of stability that we don't associate with their British and French counterparts, Jamaica and Haiti.

Of course, both Jamaica and Haiti were colonised by Spain before England and France got in on the action. The English and later, British, colonisers were given a lot of autonomy from the outset, but ultimately Jamaica became a giant plantation for the increasingly popular sugarcane, a labour intensive crop that required a massive African slave population to force a profit out of the land.

Many a coloniser made their wealth in Jamaica through the exploitation of slave labour, so much so that the expression, as rich as a West Indian planter, was common in 17th century parlance.

Interestingly, listening to a Jamaican talk show on Power FM, one caller was demanding that the British government pay reparations to the descendents of Jamaican slaves. Listening to a Jamaican talk show gave me the impression that Jamaicans are a people who are still painfully aware of historical injustice.

Being Irish, that's something I can easily relate to and I think we too, as a people, live with a great awareness of the past and traumatic episodes that have impacted on the national psyche, like the Great Famine, are talked about as if they happened yesterday. I guess this is essentially the inheritance of any post-colonial society.

Knowing a bit more about the history of neighbouring Haiti, it was interesting for me to map events in Jamaica onto what was happening in Haiti at the same time. Despite the fact that they so courageously seized control of their destiny 150 years or so before the Jamaicans, I can't help feeling the Haitians have fared much worse in the past few decades than their neighbours. Certainly Cuba and the Dominican Republic seem to contrast sharply with both nations.

Anyway, enough about history for now! More about food and music in the next post, I promise.

Image by flickr.com user David G

Other image credits:

Flag courtesy off www.33ff.com/flags

Map of Jamaica is copyright free, as is the drawing of an Arawak woman by John Gabriel Stedman