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THE IRISH HOLD a unique place in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, white Europeans who were both slaves and slavers, depending on which way the political and economic winds were blowing from the seventeenth century onward.
Transported to the West Indies as indentured labour after the Cromwellian conquest or enthusiastically profiting from the inhuman triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Sugar Islands, cast as victims and villains as circumstances changed. And over two two centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, Irish merchants, seamen and financiers built vast dynastic fortunes at home and abroad.
The many Haitians and West Indians who trace their ancestry back to Africans transported on Irish-owned slave ships are living proof that the Irish have not always been the victims of history.
And it was the Irish slaving clans of Nantes in France, descendants of the Wild Geese, who effectively ran the trade in humans for the French nobility.
One Irish soldier turned pirate and saver, Philip Walsh of Ballynacooly in the Walsh Mountains in Co Kilkenny, was present at the signing of the Treaty of Limerick on 3 October 1691, which marked the end of the Williamite War and the scattering of thousands of exiled Irish soldiers and commanders across the sea to the continent or west to North America.
“A personal taxi service for the Stuarts”
Walsh senior, together with his son Antoine, commanded the ship that carried the defeated King James II from Kinsale in Co Cork to France after the Battle of the Boyne. The family were a sort of personal taxi service for the Stuarts during their ill-fated adventures: Philip’s son Antoine Vincent was the owner/operator of the armed frigate Doutelle, the ship that landed Charles Stuart, James II’s son and the ‘Young Pretender’, in Scotland in 1745 in his doomed bid for the throne.
Philip had settled in St Malo in Brittany (where Anthony or Antoine was born on 22 January 1703) and looked at start-up opportunities in the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade. Philip Walsh was a shipbuilder, merchant and at times a daring and ruthless privateer or licensed pirate for the French crown, with free rein to attack and capture British shipping in the English Channel while the two great European powers were at war. He sailed fast, heavily-armed, but relatively small ships such as Le Curieux under letters of marque from the French crown.
Philip Walsh would venture far in search of a prize, on one occasion taking two ships, the Ruby and Diligent into the Indian Ocean and on another, sailing Le Curieux around Africa and to the mouth of the Red Sea to attack Dutch-owned coffee stores in Moka in the Yemen. On that raid against the largest coffee market on the coast of Arabia, the Irish corsair captain plundered an estimated 1,500 tonnes of the highest quality coffee beans. Philip, who married an Irish woman called Anne White and had ten children, died on a later voyage to Africa.
It was left to one of his sons, Antoine to get the real family business – slaving – off the ground.
By the early 1700s, the French port of Nantes, with a large, close-knit and hard-working Irish slave-trading community, became the chief slaving port for the kingdom of Louis XIV, the Sun King. It was said that half of the ships that sailed out of Nantes at the time were owned or stocked by Irish merchant families, including the Joyces, Walshes, MacCarthys, O’Sheils, Sarsfields and O’Riordans. Manufactured goods, guns, textiles, liquor and knives, were brought from Nantes to the Slave Coast, exchanged for slaves who were transported to the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) where they were sold for sugar and tobacco, which then returned to Europe.
The Irish merchants built fine homes on the Île Feydeau, which still stand today, but the profits were spread far beyond Nantes: they made fortunes for the ports of Bristol, Liverpool and Amsterdam. To their great credit, the merchants of Belfast, under the future United Irishman William Putnam McCabe, refused to take part in the inhuman slave trade. However, the merchant princes of Cork, Limerick and Waterford profited by victualling the ships, feeding the slavers and slaves alike to great reward and family fortune. Huge family fortunes were built in Cork, the city centre was rebuilt and some of those dynasties that were built on the backs and bellies of millions of slaves are still with us today. And so it went on for decades, with the wealth of nations and Empires built up on unimaginable human misery.
Antoine Walsh was, until he was comfortable enough to retire to an office job on land, a slave ship captain. The voyage, from France to East Africa and then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, was long and perilous and those making it faced everything from disease and foul weather to the possibility of piracy and mutinous human cargoes.
“From slave-ship captain to slave merchant”
By the early 1730s, Walsh had seen enough of the disease ridden coast of East Africa and the dangers of the middle passage and promoted himself from slave-ship captain to slave merchant.
Antoine had been lucky enough to avoid the bloody below-decks uprisings that claimed the lives of many slavers, including some of his employees and relatives. In 1734, the slave ship L’Aventurier, outfitted by Walsh’s father-in-law Luc O’Shiell (a former Jacobite officer), spent nearly four months moving up and down the West African coast, looking for slaves.
At Ouida (also called ‘Whydah’ by the slavers) on the coast of Benin, the captain (a J. Shaughnessy) went ashore to trade, leaving Barnaby O’Shiell, Antoine’s teenage brother-in-law, in command of a crew laid low by fever and dysentery. The slaves took their chance and broke free, cutting the barely-conscious pilot’s throat and locking the other invalid sailors below hatches. It was up to young Barnaby to rally the five sailors who could carry a gun and in the ensuing fight to regain the ship; two crewmen and forty slaves were killed. In commercial terms, they had lost one-sixth of the cargo and Captain Shaughnessy was forced to tie up at Ouida until he had collected 480 native men, women and children to transport in chains to Saint-Domingue and Martinique. Both Barnaby and Shaughnessy survived to have careers as slaver captains for Antoine.
Antoine Walsh would suffer a major setback after 1748 when he attempted to monopolise the French-East African slave trade – his business rivals forced him out and he left France to manage the family slave plantations in Sainte Domingue (Haiti), where he died in 1763.
Ten years earlier, in 1753, Antoine had been enobled by King Louis XV of France and the family estates on the lower Loire were consolidated by Royal letters-patent into the “Comte de Serrant.” The Walshes were henceforth Comtes de Serrant.
The exiled Irishman had personally bought and sold over 12,000 African slaves and launched 40 cross-Atlantic slave voyages. He was the greatest – or worst – of the Irish-Nantes slavers, far outstripping rivals such as the O’Riordan brothers, Etienne and Laurent, who had family back in Derryvoe, Co Cork. The Roches, originally from Limerick, where their extended clan included Arthurs and Suttons, managed a mere 11 slave voyages with around 3,000 slaves.
The dynasties and fine chateaux they built stand testament to their family names.
However, the writer Balzac might have coined a more fitting tribute when he observed; ‘Behind every great fortune there is a great crime’.
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Shhh! It’s bad enough half the world hates us with the crisis, could you not have kept this a secret for a few years? *plays victim*
No one hates you!!!! You are loved !!
That’s history for you. What country hasn’t been the instigator. Our slate is far less dirty in comparison to the likes of Britain, Germany, the US and basically most of Europe. What matter is now not then and dealing with the likes of North Korea and Israel.
Israel actually had its fair share of Jewish slave ships and traders.
But like Irish slave traders, its rarely talked about.
Israel was only founded in 1948 so I don’t see how it was involved in the slave trade.
@waffler i meant israelies/jews. I was replying to the above post.
Not singling them out just pointing out that like most of us who dont know about the Irish slave traders, dont know about other countries who partook. we only see and hear of Europeans etc.
so, does this mean that Irish now accept
their own sh1t smells as well?
Many of us Irish always thought ours didn’t. Past & present.
Not being able to tell the difference between very difficult economic circumstances & the rape, horror & sheer dehumanisation of slavery … #firstworldproblem
It’s still happening today all over the world. This may be a historical thread but if you open your eyes and ears you’ll discover it’s just more underhand now!!!
Absolutely. And not so secretly/ underhand. http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/column-why-isnt-modern-day-slavery-criminalised-in-ireland-350965-Feb2012/
Hold on a minute we were victims of a slave trade from the 8 th till 11 th centuries. The Vikings invaded us and sold us ( well some of us ) as slaves in Constantinople.
there may have been a few idiot Irish out there that were involved in the slave trade. But let us not forget the amount of Irish sent to Australia for petty crimes such as stealing an apple to survive hunger. Or the Irish sent to the west indies to work the plantations with the African slaves. Or what about the Irish that were forced to build roads in the southern US states because they were considered less valuable then black slaves.
Yeah Aaron, lets not forget all the Irish slave ‘owning’ plantation owners and masters who were very prevalent in the same southern states that you claim the Irish were forced to build roads in, (a new one on me I have to admit) the reason why so many people from the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean have Irish surnames is because they were owned by Irish slave traders and plantation owners. Even Ireland’s patron saint came to be as a result of Irish pirates and slave traders. Also many of the Irish sent to Australia were not slaves, they were criminals and in many cases rebels, also don’t forget the British sent many hundreds of thousands of English, Welsh and Scottish people down under as well for just as paltry a crime as the ones you mention. Too many Irish people like to think we’re all saints and scholars, like to cover their eyes and ears and pretend the Irish have never wronged anyone which as history shows is NOT the case by a long shot, the Irish were there up to their necks in every dirty little colonial war or dubious trade that took place, they were slave traders, empire builders, mercenaries and many of them made fortunes and done very well for themselves out of all these enterprises so leave off with the ‘victim/persecuted” chip mentality. Also you can’t judge history by today’s standards like somebody else on here noted Irish slavers were just part a business network that nobody would have batted an eyelid at back in the day. George Washington was a slave owner as were many of the ‘founding fathers’ of the USA, many an Irishman fought for the confederacy in the American civil war because they wanted to maintain the slave economy.
ed is close to being right the poor from ireland and anywhere else where used by the elite for there gain the history o humanity is one of exploitation with the masses being bent to the will of the few
As someone once said, life is always a blend of the good the bad and the ugly, which includes the Irish obviously. The “saints and scholars” image is also grounded in fact, Ireland of the early middle ages and the scriptorium of the monks. Slavery could not stand up to the Judaeo-Christian dispensation, however, and it was consigned to the dustbin theologically by Irishmen who had also plied the slave trade a century earlier.
Only in the past few centuries has the slave trade become abhorrent. For tens of thousands of years slavery was just part of normal society. At the time those Irish were involved in the slave trade nobody would have batted an eyelid at the thought that they made a fortune from trading in slaves. Most western Europe was built on slaves in the sugar,rubber, coffee and Tea plantations etc. America only got rid of their slaves 150 years ago.
Now before you all get excited and start condemning me I am not condoning Those Irish that were involved but I can understand that at the time it was acceptable.
Good points, Mick Jordan. We can’t view past societies by today’s standards. What was acceptable & standard practice then was then.
How come then did the Belfast traders mentioned in the piece saw it as reprehensible?
Mass slavery has been practiced at least since the discovery of copper and mining thousands of years ago. Also… When the Vikings captured Irish men, they would generally castrate them before selling them on. Though it’s not perfect, the world today is nowhere near as bad as it was. We should be grateful we are alive today, in this country, in this generation.
Jayus Declan, I’ve a sudden urge to cross my legs after reading your comment.
the King of Dahomey (I think it was) was one of the richest men in the world through selling his own subjects to the slavers, and most slavers capturing and transporting negroes to the coast for sale were also african, albeit Arabs from the north. But why am I not remotely surprised that Paddy was involved in brutal exploitation…?
Mick your statement is an exercise in moral relativism and makes no historical sense. As long as slavery has existed there has been opposition, especially from those that were to be enslaved. It was never acceptable. You’re almost dehumanising our ancestors. Torture was also common place in our history – do you think no one batted an eyelid at that? These people who engaged in the slave trade are as guilty as the SS. Have a look at the Manicheans , they called for slaves to free themselves sin the 4th century, or hoe about St. Patrick’s condemnation of Christians being enslaved. Or go even further and read about the “first abolitionist”, Gregory of Nyssa who condemned the institution of slavery over 1,500 years ago.
This is no surprise. The elite don’t care who they exploit. It’s still happening now fgs.
The Walsh family of Kilkenny were married into the Hogans.
We are living on the backs of the third world, our lives are subsidised and when it all falls apart and it will! they will be the survivors. They have retained the skills to live without. Us? We are victims of our own success. Doomed I tell you, doomed!
Bring on the thumbs down!!
We will still be doomed!
Definitely on my reading list. There has always been a streak of brutality and inhumanity in the Irish.
Some things never change , glad to see That slavery is still alive and kicking today in modern Ireland.
Maybe we could resurrect this industry, could bring in some badly needed tax revenue and on the other hand remove the dead wood from our shores….
Scary that people are agreeing with you
But what kind of a price would we get for a FG/Lab or FF politician … as they are the only deadwood I can see!!
Reading the book right now its great the Luke Ryan chapter is brilliant would make a great film
The past is the past… Move on and learn from it …
Oh. And the beloved Bears won in the last 4 seconds .. Da Bearz..
must have been deleted from history the rise and fall of the Irish empire.
Lol wow that this suprises anyone if pathetically funny and somewhat sad. Of course we’ve had scounndrels, pirates, and general eejits lol look at our govt!!!! Uh I mean our history plus all the turncoats who sold out their own to the brits for power n favour. Lol yup id say thatd cause we’re human.
What we now know as Dublin Bay and the islands within it, was, before the Vikings, before Christianity, the very centre of the Western world slave trade, as well as having a very organised, social hierarchy with slaves at the bottom, naturally. Male slaves were called mugs, ironically. the islands were used to keep captured slaves, which were then traded. The Irish have always been slavers, and then along came the Anglo Normans…. Karma’s a bitch.
It sounds like a fascinating book. I was only recently reading about the Wild Geese (granted, it was the Wikipedia entry!) and what happened to them next, nowhere did I come across their involvement in the slave trade. I knew Nantes was built off the back of the slave trade spoils, and it is indeed a magnificent city architecturally, but I didn’t know that the Irish or their descendants had such a key role in this business. Indeed a lot is made of Irish people who went abroad and achieved success, and rightly so – perhaps it is only natural that we don’t hear about the shadier characters. Indeed, only last month I saw the monument to the Wild Geese overlooking the River Shannon in Limerick – it would be interesting to go back there and check if any of the family names inscribed on that are the same families mentioned in the piece above.
I think there is a key contrast though between the Irish who were sent as indentured labour across the Atlantic after the Cromwellian defeats and the Irish who sold others into slavery: those Irish who were sent to work in the Caribbean were sent as part of the official ruling policy at the time, while those Irish who profited from the sordid business were unscrupulous individuals happy to make their fortune off the back of others’ suffering. As the blurb about Joe O’Shea’s book says, the focus is on Irish “characters” who did wrong – so it’s about the misdeeds of individuals, rather than those of the country as a whole. Doesn’t by any means exonerate those involved in the slave trade of course.
“Walsh senior, together with his son Antoine, commanded the ship that carried the defeated King James II from Kinsale in Co Cork to France after the Battle of the Boyne”
“Philip had settled in St Malo in Brittany (where Anthony or Antoine was born on 22 January 1703)”
The battle of the boyne was fought in 1690, but you say that Antoine commanded the ship that carried King James II after the defeat at Boyne.
But then in the next paragraph you say that Antoine was actually born in 1703.
It’s basic errors like this that would make me look at the rest of your article very sceptically.
It seem that in America the slave owners had to pay the for the Cost of keeping them after they were too old and feeble to work anymore.
Now there’s an answer worth pondering by the social service ‘
For older people nearing retirement. The state could simply sell them off.
W
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