I was reading this outstanding article this morning by Kevin J. Jones for CNA website about Saint Patrick’s dedication to freeing the Irish slaves from the hands of the pirate Coroticus, who had taken him away as a youth from Brittany. I did not know that Coroticus slaughtered all the servants of his father’s household sparing Patrick. Jennifer Paxton, a history professor at CUA, relates that in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, the saint pleaded for the release of the captives:
Paxton notes that St. Patrick’s Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus was intended to shame the fifth century general whose raiding soldiers the saint declared to be “blood-stained with the blood of innocent Christians, whose numbers I have given birth to in God and confirmed in Christ.” He denounced those who “divide out defenseless baptized women like prizes.”
Patrick said he did not know what grieved him more: those who were slain, those who were captured, or the enslavers themselves – “those whom the devil so deeply ensnared.”
Coroticus was “reincarnated” among the English in the seventeenth century, notably Oliver Cromwell (1652-1659). Tens of thousands of Irish women and sturdy young men were taken by arms from their homeland to the Caribbean in chains and sold as “indentured servants.” The men had already been slaughtered. Babies were not spared. Cromwell’s troops would tear the babies from their mothers’ arms, toss them in the air, and catch them on the sabers. Cromwell killed one third of Ireland’s men. His machine was financed by the Rothschild banking dynasty.
In Barbados alone there were between twelve and sixty thousand Irish slaves in the mid 1600s. This gave rise to the term “Barbadosed” to such as suffered this cruel fate. And just as many Irish slaves were taken to Bermuda. Even Virginia, at this time, received shipments of Irish slaves.
In 1649, the Irish young men joined the Negroes in a rebellion against their oppressors in Barabados. They failed. The “rebels” were hung, drawn, and quartered in Bridgetown. Their heads were posted on spikes as a warning not to “mess” with the English slave masters. You will not read about this in American history courses as written by Anglophile historians. Bridgetown is a historic site, preserved for tourists by UNESCO. No wonder! UNESCO!
