Early Ireland was much more complex than commonly believed, and, in their perch above the western ocean, the Irish preserved a great wealth of European culture and primordial savagery in uneasy concourse.

The medieval Irish, beginning with its traitor kings, who castrated and blinded enemies, raped holy women and buried the enemy with dogs, were the nastiest of the their age, buying English slave boys since the 1000s, seem to have well-earned a place in the mercantile hell of the future British Empire. Alice the Vicious, the Norman hell-bitch who killed seventy men to avenge the death of her lover, is a favorite.

Cromwell was such a savage that he had a garrison commander beaten to death with his own wooden leg and gave orders that men women and children would be killed with clubs to save bullets. Cromwell began the systematic extermination and deportation of the Irish.

Of the west of conquered Ireland, one English lord said, “There is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang him, nor earth enough to bury him.”

The Christian Wars of Europe, between catholic and Protestant, found fertile ground in Ireland, and the solution of “the Plantation” the first modern experiment in social engineering . Of course, in this documentary the slaves sold into American bondage are called settlers, but they were not. The term settler comes from English moving to Ireland to enslave Irish natives. But when those Irish slaves are shipped to America, in retrospect, we apply the term settler to them, associating it with their, movement rather than their condition. The term Planter, however says it all, a planter of people.

The holocaust of the 1620s and 1630s are skipped, overshadowed as they were by the savagery of Cromwell’s protectorate of the 1650s and 60s. Again, our vantage is chronologically clouded and hopelessly backward looking.

“We have been your slaves all this time…” says one Irish rebel in the 1640s Ulster Rising.

So, it is there if you look.

There is scant information—in this documentary—on the enslavement of the Irish. However, the savagery of the Protestant-Catholic conflict in the British Isles well explains how Catholics became the standard slave of early North America.

The coverage of American immigration completely skips the Irish slaves and focuses on the Scotch-Irish immigrants who displaced the escaped Irish slaves of Plantation America.

A History of Runaway White Slaves in Plantation America: Part Two