From: mike@fionn.lbl.gov (Michael Helm)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic,soc.culture.british
Subject: Barbados & other Caribbean settlements (was Re: Queen &c...)
Date: 21 Dec 1992 03:06:38 GMT
Organization: N.I.C.E.
Reply-To: mike@fionn.lbl.gov (Michael Helm)
NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.128.60

Fragano Ledgister writes:
mike>Most of the very thin coverage of this peculiar settling of Barbados
                                            ^^^^^^^^ 
mike>&al that I have managed to find, sets it in Cromwellian times.

>Which would be rather odd, given that Admiral Blake had to take the
>island from the Cavaliers (Prince Rupert sought refuge there). The
>settlement of Barbados took place under Charles I.

Please, read & respond to what I wrote.

This is also a good opportunity for me to toss this out onto the table.

From "Story of English", McCrum, Cran, MacNeil, Sifton-Viking 1985,
Ch 5 pp 179-180.

History has charged the English with using Barbados as a dumping
ground for Black slaves.  In fact, they first used the island as
a place of penal exile for Whites.  A Jesuit priest who visited the
island in 1634 noted that "some few Catholiques here be, both 
English & Irish."  Oliver Cromwell used it as an internment camp
for prisoners taken during his battles in Ireland.  IN September 1649,
reporting the storming of Drogheda, he wrote to the Speaker of
the English Parliament: "When they submitted, their officers were
knocked on the head; and every tenth man of the soldiers killed; and
the rest shipped off for  the Barbadoes."  This wholesale transportation
of some 12,000 men gave rise to a new verb, "to barbadoes" ....

Initially, these involuntary exiles, now known as "redlegs", worked as
indentured servants and were treated almost as badly as the Blacks.
In due course, they were joined by Scottish rebels from the Highlands
and, after the failure of the Duke of Monmouth's rising in 1685, by
West Country Englishmen.  With the passage of time, some of these
luckless Barbadians became "poor Whites" and today their descendants
live in a small, impoverished community in the St Martin's bay parish,
speaking a kind of English which is indistinguishable from that of the
Blacks.
....

The influence of the Irish -- names & place names -- is also found on
the island of Montserrat, "the emerald isle of the Caribbean".  The
Irish came here fleeing religious persecution in neiboring St Kitt's &
in Virginia.  In 1643, an Irish priest, Father O'Hartegan, wrote of
"French, English, & Irish, all of which are used freely in that part
of the world."  The center of the island has a valley named Glennmo/r,
the Irish for "big valley".  The first Irish planters here -- men with
family names like Riley & Sweeney -- came here of their own free will.
After Cromwell, they were joined by involuntary exiles like those on
Barbados. WWhen the first slaves cmae from West Africa, some of the
Irish took Black wives & mistresses, giving rise to the so called
"Black Irish" comunity on the island.

[Reference for this section points to Jill Shepperd, "The 'Redlegs' of
Barbados" K T O Press 1977, which I have not yet found]

[There is also some testimony in other books about other Irish &
Scottish settlement in Caribbean sites but this is the most 
coherent information I have on hand.]