“ Shipped for the Barbadoes.” 337 
vicissitudes of the great international wars when islands and parts of islands 
frequently changed hands, or burnt in later days by accident or design. The 
official documentary remains are scanty and information is chiefly available 
in the various Calendars of State Papers, in fragmentary teferences in the few 
colonial writers of the time, such as Ligon, or in the pages of industrious stu- 
dents like Prendergast (The Cromwellian Settlement) J. Rodway (West Indies 
and Spanish Main). Cardinal Moran (Persecutions), N. Darnell Davis 
(Cavaliers and Roundhzads) and Father McInerney (Irish Slaves in the 
West Indies). What light there is only makes darkness visible and 
most writers on West Indian subjects do not deal with the Irish part 
of the problem even ina single passage. The Roman Catholic clergy prob- 
ably kept no records at all in the days of persecution when they 
lurked in disguise among the settlements attending their flocks at 
the risk of their lives, their blood not seldom being mingled with the 
wine of the sacrifice. When the Penal Days came to a close the clergy who 
succeeded the earlier confessors were often without interest in Irish affairs or 
were lacking in the historic sense. Parochial work in a poverty stricken 
mission is in any case hardly compatible with thankless research, In the inter- 
val the Irish bondsmen had frequently rebelled and been shot down or hanged. 
The race suffers from a constitutional aversion to governments, however legal 
and well-intentioned, in which it has no say. This is a peculiarity which it 
shares with that extraordinary people which has been induced to disguise its 
somewhat miscellaneous origin, the Celt predominating, under the misleading 
title of Anglo-Saxon, one of the most remarkable cases on record of the triumph 
of what Bacon calls the idols of the market place. Many escaped individually 
or in organised bands. In Montserrat they appear ata laterdate to have 
temporarily captured the island, killed a number of planters, seized shipping 
andgailed away toCuba. The mortality of Europeans in the canefields must 
have been appalling and of the precise fate of the women and children (of 
whose deportation I must write later) we shall never know. It is not a pleasant 
subject for the story of the children reduces the massacre of Herod by com- 
parison to an amiable attempt of an enlightened monarch to relieve congestion 
in Judaea. 
Mr. Cruickshank speaks of the accent and ofthe expressions, sometimes 
pure Elizabethan English, but, nevertheless, a characteristic survival in the 
Emerald Isle, which have been remarked among the inhabitants of Barbados 
and which he appears justified in ascribing to those Irish bondsmen of the 17th 
century who, he relates, were accused of influencing the negroes and leading 
them into mischief. Thus early had the political boss and the ward heeler begun 
his career among the exiles. The clannishness and quaint humour of the 
Barbadian both white and black he might also have referred to a possible 
Hibernian origin as well as a certain autarkeia. But there the parallel ends. 
The Irishman wears his rue with a difference, unless other West Indians are 
wrong in hinting that the Barbadian is inclined to slam the gates of Bridge- 
town on mankind. 
