Irish indentured servants were Irish people who became indentured servants in territories under the control of the British Empire, such as the British West Indies (particularly Barbados, Jamaica, Bermuda, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis and other Leeward Islands), Newfoundland, British North America and later Australia.
Indentures agreed to provide up to seven years of labor in return for passage to the New World and food, housing, and shelter during their indenture. At the end of this period, their masters were legally required to grant them "freedom dues" in the form of either land or capital. An indentured servant's contract could be extended as punishment for breaking a law, such as running away, or in the case of female servants, becoming pregnant.
Those transported unwillingly were not indentures. They were political prisoners, vagrants, or people who had been defined as "undesirable" by the English state. Penal transportation of Irish people was at its height during the 17th century, during the Cromwellian conquest and settlement of Ireland (1649–1653). During this period, thousands of Irish people were sent to the Caribbean, or "Barbadosed", against their will. Accessed 2018-10-31. Similar practices continued as late as the Victorian period, with Irish political prisoners sent to imperial British penal colonies in Australia. Indentures and transportees have been conflated, though they were different.
Historical background
Like the movement of other European people to the Americas, Irish migration to the Caribbean and British North America had complex causes. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were a time of upheaval in Ireland, while English conquest and colonisation, resultant religious persecution, and crop failures (some as a deliberate result of the Tudor conquest of Ireland) drove many Irish people to seek a better life, or survival, elsewhere. Like their English and Scottish counterparts, Irish people were active participants in the "rush for American colonies" during the early seventeenth century. Most travelled to the New World as indentured servants, but others were merchants and landholders who were key players in a variety of different trade and settlement enterprises.
Many of the Irish laborers who travelled across the Atlantic from the 1620s did so by choice. However, convict labor had been used in English colonies since the early 1600s, and the forceful transportation of "undesirables" from Ireland to the West Indies had begun under Charles I. The practice took place on a much larger scale during the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the years 1649–58. In the ensuing conquest of Ireland, many prisoners were forcibly sent to the Caribbean islands, particularly to Barbados.
Some of the first Irish people to travel to the New World did so as members of the Spanish garrison in Florida during the 1560s, and small numbers of Irish colonists were involved in efforts to establish colonies in the Amazon region, in Newfoundland, and in Virginia between 1604 and the 1630s. According to historian Donald Akenson, there were "few if any" Irish being forcibly transported to the New World during this period. Widespread use of forced transportation by the English state did not take place until the 1650s.
Significant numbers of Irish laborers began traveling to colonies such as Virginia, the Leeward Islands, and Barbados in the 1620s. Between 1627 and 1660, laborers from Ireland and Britain crossed the Atlantic in large numbers, with as many as 60 to 65 percent of seventeenth-century migrants being indentured servants. By 1640, large numbers of Irish settlers were present in the West Indies, making up more than half the population of the region by some estimates. Most were indentured laborers, small farmers, or artisans.
The type of labor being used in American colonies shifted dramatically after 1642, as the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Irish Confederate Wars, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms led to a reduction in the number of voluntary migrants, while growing numbers of prisoners of war, political prisoners, felons, and other "undesirables" were sent to labor in the colonies against their will. After the Siege of Drogheda, for example, Cromwell ordered most of the Irish military prisoners who surrendered to be shipped to Barbados. In 1654, the governors of several Irish counties were ordered to arrest "all wanderers, men and women, and such other Irish within their precincts as should not prove they had such a settled course of industry as yielded them a means of their own to maintain them, all such children as were in hospitals or workhouses, all prisoners, men and women, to be transported to the West Indies."
Barbados
Servants who arrived in Barbados between 1640 and 1660 arrived at a time of great change, when the colony was transitioning from tobacco and cotton cultivation to sugar. The resulting "sugar boom" created a massive demand for labor, which prompted a gradual shift from white servant to black slave labor. In 1638, the population of Barbados was about 6,000, with 2,000 of that number being indentured servants and 200 being African slaves. Fifteen years later, the Islands slave population had grown to 20,000, while indentured servants numbered 8,000. There were also more than 1,000 Irish freemen (former indentured servants whose term had expired) living on the island at that time. By 1660, there were 26,200 Europeans and 27,100 African slaves on the Island.Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997. During the initial stages of sugar production, white servants sometimes found themselves working side by side with black slaves, and according to historian James Dunn, they "became wild and unruly in the extreme" during this period. By the mid-1650s, however, white servants and black slaves no longer worked side by side, and by the mid-1660s, white servants were used only in skilled or supervisory roles.
Irish servants on Barbados were often treated poorly, and Barbadian planters gained a reputation for cruelty. The decreased appeal of an indenture on Barbados, combined with enormous demand for labor caused by sugar cultivation, led the use of involuntary transportation to Barbados as a punishment for crimes, or for political prisoners, and also to the kidnapping of laborers who were sent to Barbados involuntarily.
Irish indentured servants were a significant portion of the population throughout the period when white servants were used for plantation labor in Barbados, and while a "steady stream" of Irish servants entered the Barbados throughout the seventeenth century, Cromwellian efforts to pacify Ireland created a "veritable tidal wave" of Irish laborers who were sent to Barbados during the 1650s. Due to inadequate historical records, the total number of Irish laborers sent to Barbados is unknown, and estimates have been "highly contentious." While one historical source estimated that as many as 50,000 Irish people were transported to either Barbados or Virginia unwillingly during the 1650s, this estimate is "quite likely exaggerated." Another estimate that 12,000 Irish prisoners had arrived in Barbados by 1655 has been described as "probably exaggerated" by historian Richard B. Sheridan. According to historian Thomas Bartlett, it is "generally accepted" that approximately 10,000 Irish were sent to the West Indies involuntarily, and approximately 40,000 came as voluntary indentured servants, while many also traveled as voluntary, un-indentured emigrants.Bartlett, Thomas. "‘This famous island set in a Virginian sea’: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801." In The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume II: The Eighteenth Century, by Marshall, P. J., Alaine Low, and Wm. Roger Louis., edited by P.J. Marshall, and Alaine Low. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Leeward Islands
Irish people also made up a sizable portion of the Leeward Islands (Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St Kitts) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 Many of these Irish were either indentured servants or former servants, and many of them lived "materially impoverished" lives; however, the Leeward Islands were also home to more affluent Irish, who were members of powerful merchant families and had numerous servants themselves.
Montserrat became the principal island amongst the Leeward Islands where Irish people coming from the adjacent islands found refuge against British persecution. Divided between the Catholic French and the Protestant English, the Irish people sought refuge in Montserrat where they established their first Catholic church. In 1632, Anthony Brisket became the first Governor of Montserrat. With ties originating from Ireland, Brisket was able to navigate the Island and its people. He would remain in this position until his death.
Unlike Barbados, the Irish population of Montserrat was primarily made up of individuals who had been "recruited to emigrate" by the islands' elite residents (who were often Irish themselves), rather than vagrants or convicts, and some of them had arrived as free laborers rather than as indentured servants.
Treatment Once indentured, these servants had little control over their destination, as their contracts were sold to local planters on arrival. Ships were often overcrowded, and the mortality rate on voyages could be high: one ship which arrived at Barbados in 1638 had lost eighty of its 350 passengers (23%) to sickness by the time it arrived.
In Barbados, indenture terms of four or five years were common, but those who arrived as prisoners were sometimes sentenced to ten years' indenture.
While all indentured servants were treated harshly, Irish Catholics were also subject to English settlers' "sense of cultural and religious superiority" and considered to be "naturally inferior." According to historian Jenny Shaw, the Irish people's Catholicism and distinct customs "marked the island's population as fundamentally apart from English civilization". English authorities used this perceived difference "to justify the poor treatment of the Irish Catholics they colonized," as well as to lay claim to Ireland itself.Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). Masters and government authorities were often suspicious of Irish servants, and sometimes targeted them with special restrictions. Legislators in Nevis, for example, passed an act to prevent "papists" from settling on the island or holding public office in 1701 – which was later repealed – while Montserrat also considered similar legislation to exclude Irish from public and militia positions. Authorities in Barbados did not place similar restrictions, but did require Irish people to take an oath of abjuration before voting or holding office. After suspecting that Irish laborers had been involved in a 1692 slave revolt, Barbadian authorities wrote to the crown in 1697, asking them not to send further "Irish rebels" to the colony, "for we want not labourers of that colour to work for us, but men in whom we may confide, to strengthen us."Hilary McD. Beckles, "The 'Hub of Empire:' The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century". In Nicholas Canny and Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 1 : Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Comparisons to slavery