Banished And Forgotten: Irish Slaves In The West Indies, by Louise Gherasim, Illustrated by Neecol Johnson

This book is a short one, only about 175 pages including maps, references, and a historical appendix that looks at some of the noted myths and history about Irish founding traditions that go back to biblical times and the mysterious Milesians and Tuatha de Danaan, but there are a lot of things that the book is full of: many references to Irish gaelic, some of which is helpfully translated in explanatory footnotes, a riveting and complex story about two girls who are kidnapped in Ireland, become friends on the boat, and are sold into slavery in the West Indies, leading them on very different paths, and a great deal of hostility to the English in particular and to Protestantism in general. This is a book that, without discussing Roman Catholicism in any great detail, is full of high regard for vile popery and bitterness and hostility towards the English that has not died in almost 400 years. As an example of ferociously political works written with a preteen or teen audience in mind, despite its unpleasant material, this book fits in with our contemporary concern for historical victims, and seeks to place the Irish into that rarified group of victims that includes the descendants of African slaves who suffered a similarly wrenching Middle Passage, as this book discusses in grim and expressive detail.

In terms of its organization and structure, the book is perched somewhere on the boundary between history and historical novel, being divided into several parts and focusing alternatively on the divergent fates of its two heroines, who are thrown together in the maelstrom of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland [1]. The first part shows Sheila McCarthy as a beautiful and spirited young woman, and then shows her with a historical Ann Glover being sold into slavery on Barbados. After their harrowing passage across the Atlantic is discussed, and they are sold into slavery, there is a discussion of the planter mindset on the islands, the general lack of morality of said planters, and the equality between Irish and black slaves. An attempted escape from slavery on a raft leads Sheila to become shipwrecked on Montserrat, which becomes the location of the second part of the story, a discussion of that island and its lengthy tradition of Irish culture [2], where Sheila finds herself as a governess and eventually marries a planter in a plot that sounds like it was taken out of a Jen Turano romance novel [3]. Meanwhile, the resolutely historical Ann Glover eventually makes her way as a stowaway to Boston where she lives long enough to see her daughter marry but ends up being executed as a witch after her thieving ways and a chance sickness lead her to come under the scrutiny of Cotton Mather and the Puritan leadership of Massachusetts, which is just one more opportunity for the author to show her bigotry against Englishmen and Protestants.

As far as a book is concerned, this book is a hard one to judge. On the one hand, its history is pretty harrowing, and despite the clear biases of the writer, the truth about its historical personages is bad enough. These horrifying historical elements sit uneasily next to the fictional elements of the book, which appear as a sort of West Indies regency romance novel, albeit somewhat anachronistically so given that it is set in the mid-to-late 1600’s. Both of these elements sit uneasily with the appendices of the book, serve as pro-Irish propaganda about the importance of Ireland to saving medieval civilization which could have come from the Lebhor Gabala or How The Irish Saved Civilization. As a result, it is not a straightforward or easy matter to divide out the various portions of this book, whether it is appreciation of the author’s skill at crafting a romance, at her desire to uncover a historical crime against humanity that has not been remembered as part of the larger horror of slavery, or whether it is frustration at the fact that the historicity of this book is greatly harmed by both the fictional romance elements as well as the author’s blatantly propagandistic approach to Irish myth and history. This is a book that must be carefully weighed and balanced, and cannot be swallowed whole as historical truth, despite the author’s wish to be seen as a historian and not merely a writer with a very heavy ax to grind.

[1] See also:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/book-review-destiny-our-choice/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/vindicae-contra-tyrannos/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/07/15/book-review-the-irish-americans/

[2] See also:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/book-review-the-sun-never-sets/

[3] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/03/05/book-review-after-a-fashion/