# Primary evidence file: Cromwellian transportation, and the Hebrides descriptions Compiled 4 October 2026. Sources read in full text, not summarised from secondary accounts. ## METHOD NOTE Everything below was read from the actual digitised text. Where a claim is quoted I have checked it against the source myself. Where I could not check it, I say so. --- # PART 1. PRENDERGAST, THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT OF IRELAND (1865/1922) Full text read: 182,894 words, Internet Archive id `cromwelliansettl00prenuoft`. Prendergast worked directly from the Dublin state archives. He is the most sympathetic major 19th century source on this subject, which makes his figures significant. ## 1.1 THE ACTUAL NUMBER SEIZED FOR THE CARIBBEAN Prendergast, verbatim: "In the course of four years they had seized and shipped about 6,400 Irish, men and women, boys and maidens, when on the 4th of March, 1655, all orders were revoked." [cites A(10), p. 283] SIX THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED over four years, from the historian most motivated to find a larger number, working from the archives themselves. ## 1.2 WHY THE BIG NUMBERS ARE WRONG, AND WHERE THEY COME FROM Prendergast also gives the large figures, but they are for a DIFFERENT destination: "Between 1651 and 1654, thirty-four thousand (of whom few ever saw their loved native land again) were transported into foreign parts." And quoting Petty's Political Anatomy (1672), p. 27: "The chiefest and eminentest of the nobility and many of the gentry have taken conditions from the King of Spain, and have transported 40,000 of the most active spirited men, most acquainted with the dangers and discipline of war." THESE WERE SOLDIERS GOING TO CONTINENTAL MILITARY SERVICE, PRINCIPALLY SPAIN. Not the Caribbean. This is almost certainly the origin of the 100,000 figure in circulation: the Spanish-service number gets merged with the Caribbean number. ## 1.3 THE JAMAICA ORDER, 1655. The single most important document for Daniel's question. Prendergast, verbatim: "In 1655 Admiral Penn added Jamaica to the empire of England; and, colonists being wanted, the Lord Protector applied to the Lord Henry Cromwell, then Major-General of the Forces in Ireland, to engage 1,500 of the soldiers of the army in Ireland to go thither as planters, and to secure a thousand young Irish girls ('Irish wenches' is Secretary Thurloe's term), to be sent there also. Henry Cromwell answered that there would be no difficulty, only that force must be used in taking them; and he suggested the addition of from 1,500 to 2,000 boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age. 'We could well spare them,' he adds, 'and they might be of use to you; and who knows but it might be a means to make them Englishmen, I mean, Christians?' The numbers finally fixed were 1,000 boys, and 1,000 girls, to sail from Galway in October, 1655." CITATIONS GIVEN BY PRENDERGAST: Thurloe's State Papers, vol. 4, pp. 23, 40, 75, 100. So: 2,000 Irish children ordered to Jamaica, October 1655, from Galway, with Cromwell's own son acknowledging in writing that "force must be used in taking them". ## 1.4 THE NAMED CONTRACTORS AND CONTRACTS - Bristol merchants active as agents: David Sellick, Mr Leader, Robert Yeomans, Joseph Lawrence. - 14 September 1653: Captain John Vernon, employed by the Commissioners for Ireland, contracted with Sellick and Leader to supply "two hundred and fifty women of the Irish nation above twelve years, and under the age of forty-five, also three hundred men above twelve years of age, and under fifty, to be found in the country within twenty miles of Cork, Youghal, and Kinsale, Waterford, and Wexford, to transport them into New England." [A(84), p. 663] - 23 October 1653: Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill empowered to search for and arrest them. - January 1654: Governors of Carlow, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Wexford, Ross and Waterford ordered to arrest and deliver to Captain Thomas Morgan, Dudley North and John Johnson, English merchants, "all wanderers, men and women, and such other Irish within their precincts as should not prove they had such settled course of industry as yielded them a means of their own to maintain them, all such children as were in hospitals or workhouses, all prisoners, men and women, to be transported to the West Indies." [A(85), p. 66] - 22 December 1654: orders prohibiting all shipping in Irish harbours bound for Barbadoes from weighing anchor until searched, so persons seized without warrant could be recovered. - 29 November 1658, Dublin Castle, to Mr Edward Smyth: ten men and two women consigned to "the Indian Bridges or other port in the Barbadoes", signed Thomas Herbert, Clerk of the Council. [A(30), p. 343] ## 1.5 WHY IT WAS STOPPED "These men-catchers employed persons to delude poor people by false pretences into by-places, and thence they forced them on board their ships. The persons employed had so much a piece for all they so deluded, and for the money sake they were found to have enticed and forced women from their children and husbands, children from their parents, who maintained them at school; and they had not only dealt so with the Irish, but also with the English, which last was the true cause, probably, of the Commissioners for Ireland putting an end to these proceedings." Note the sting in that last clause. Prendergast's own reading is that it was stopped when English children started being taken, not Irish ones. ## 1.6 A NAMED FAMILY Daniel Connery, a gentleman of Clare, sentenced 1657 by Colonel Henry Ingoldsby for harbouring a priest. "This gentleman had a wife and twelve children. His wife fell sick, and died in poverty. Three of his daughters, beautiful girls, were transported to the West Indies, to an island called the Barbadoes; and there, if still alive (he says) they are miserable slaves." Source Prendergast cites: Morison, Threnodia Hiberno-Catholica, Innsbruck, 1659, p. 287. ## 1.7 PRIESTS 8 December 1655: Commissioners wrote to the Governor of Barbados advising him of a ship carrying dispossessed proprietors and three priests, asking "they may be so employed as they may not return again". 3 May 1656: governors ordered to send arrested priests to Carrickfergus for shipping to Barbadoes. By 27 February 1657 the policy shifted to interning them on the Aran Islands and Inishbofin instead, Prendergast suggesting cost may have been the reason. --- # PART 2. MARTIN MARTIN, A DESCRIPTION OF THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND (1716) Full text read, Internet Archive id `descriptionofwes01mart`, 99,069 words. The TikTok account @yadaiskey quotes this book at pages 194 and 239. I checked both. ## BOTH QUOTATIONS ARE ACCURATE. Verbatim from the 1716 text: Isle of Skye, p. 194: "THE Inhabitants of this Ifle are generally well proportion'd, and their Complexion is for the moft part black." Jura, p. 239: "THE Natives here are very well proportion'd, being generally black of Complexion, and free from bodily Imperfections. They fpeak the Irifh Language, and wear the Plad, Bonnet, &c. as other Iflanders." The Jura passage is immediately followed in the original by "THE Ifle of Ila lies to the Weft of Jurah", which confirms the island. ## A THIRD PASSAGE THE ACCOUNT DID NOT USE, which cuts both ways Around p. 224, Martin writes of another isle: "THE Inhabitants of this Ifle are well proportion'd, generally brown, and fome of a black Complexion." This matters. Martin had a GRADIENT vocabulary, brown and black as distinct terms, applied within the same island chain. He also elsewhere describes inhabitants as "of a good Complexion" without colour. So he was making distinctions, not using one word loosely. ## THE HONEST POSITION The quotations are real and correctly transcribed. The account is not fabricating. What "black of complexion" MEANT to a Gaelic-speaking Skye native writing in English in 1716 is the genuinely contested question, and it cannot be settled by the quote alone. In early modern English "black" as a complexion term was commonly used for dark hair and swarthy colouring within a European range, and was also used of Africans. Martin's use of "brown" alongside "black" shows he was grading, which is evidence the words carried specific meaning to him, but it does not by itself establish which meaning. Anyone researching this should quote Martin accurately, as the account does, and then argue the semantics openly rather than treat the word as self-evident. That is the strongest possible footing, because the quote itself is unassailable. --- # PART 3. THE CONVERGENCE POINT Three independent sources land on the same argument: 1. Williams 1932, read in the scan: no planter named Burke appears in the 1670 Jamaica land survey, so Black Jamaicans named Burke did not take it from a master. 2. @jamaicans.r.scots.irish, March 2025: raises the surname puzzle. 3. @yadaiskey Part 16, June 2026, summarising Williams almost exactly: "they noticed that the Jamaicans, who looked like us, had a lot of Irish surnames, but when they searched the records, they could not find plantation owners with the same name." The 1670 survey argument is the single strongest documentary plank in the whole case, and it originates with Williams. It is worth going back to the survey itself rather than relying on Williams' summary of it.