Sette PeEDeronm THE BARBADOES.” 
Some Fragments of forgotten Chapters in Irish and West Indian History. 
“Tharsei moi, tharsei, teknon ! 
Chronos gar eumares theos.’’ 
Sophocles, Hlectra 174. 
Mainly Introductory. 
As the relations of Irish and West Indian history are very little known even 
in the United Kingdom, I considered when I began this paper a few days ago that 
it would be unfair to assume any special knowledge of the causes and sources 
of Irish colonization in the West Indies to the people of British Guiana. 
This country is very remote from Ireland and was not drawn into the 
orbit of British imperial policy until nearly a hundred years after the last 
bondservant had died among the cane-fields or escaped to a happier fate in lands 
less hostile to his race and creed. The present paper, therefore, is chiefly intro- 
ductory and is partly an effort to disabuse my readers’ or listeners ’ minds of 
what I may call the conventional or “ wood kerne ” theory of pre-Cromwellian 
Trish civilization, to which Mrs. Alice Stopford Green (the widow of the his- 
torian John Richard Green) has dealt so shrewd a blow by her brilliant “ Mak- 
ing of Ireland.” Tn the conventional writers, with whom one must class 
Carlyle, in spite of his other departures from the normal, we seem to read 
only of rough rug-headed savages charging furiously upon eivilizing British 
influences from some wooded fastness and retreating as rapidly into bogs 
whither cavalry cannot follow them, unveracious, disobedient men, out of 
harmony with fact. We hear little of the great commerce of Galway with 
the continent of Europe, for Galway’s quays and tall Spanish houses are gaunt 
and lonely now, or of White’s school of 2,000 students maintained throughout 
the wars in that once flourishing town, or of the great colleges built and sup- 
ported throughout Europe by the scanty doubloons and reals of the exiled 
swordsmen* after their native colleges of Youghal and Dublin and their 
Monastery schools were suppressed and confiscated—Prague, St. Omer, Rome, 
Lisbon, Valladolid, Louvain, Salamanca and yet more. The tradition of 
learning was not easily destroyed in the children of Columba, Columbanus, 
Virgilius, Erigena and Duns, and this very Cromwellian century w.s to 
produce a marvellous brood of Hibernian pundits, turning out their vast tomes 
amid the thunder of the shop of war. Chief Justice Davis records that 
ay In a note to his Azstory of Trinity College, Dublin. Professor MacNeil Dixon has been 
kind enough to cite as an authority on the subject of the exiled swordsmen a paper of the 
writer’s which was published in the proceedings of the Dublin University Philosophical Society 
for 1899-1900, when it received a Gold Medal. The writer went abroad before it appeared 
and has never seen the paper since. THe believes it has been out of print for many years. 
baa of the references in the present essay are based on his recollections of the earlier 
effort. : 
