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Montserrat was first settled on by Irish Catholics in 1632, who were sent there by Sir Thomas Warner, the first British governor of neighbouring St Kitts. [1] After the settlement, more Irish settlers were attracted from colonial Virginia and they established plantations to grow tobacco and indigo, which would eventually be followed by cotton and sugar.
In 1902, The Irish Times quoted the Montreal Family Herald in a description of Montserrat, noting that "the negroes to this day speak the old Irish Gaelic tongue, or English with an Irish brogue. A story is told of a Connaught man who, on arriving at the island, was, to his astonishment, hailed in a vernacular Irish by the black people."
Anglo-Irish colonists began to settle Montserrat in the 1630s following tensions with English colonists in nearby Saint Kitts [1] and started importing African slaves in 1650 to work on the island's cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane plantations. [2]
Montserrat is often referred to as the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean, due both to its resemblance to coastal Ireland and to the Irish descent of most of its early European settlers. Its Georgian era capital city of Plymouth was destroyed and two-thirds of the island's population forced to flee abroad by an eruption of the previously dormant ...
Both these symbols allude to the Irish settlers who immigrated to Montserrat from 1632 onwards. [1] [6] The first census conducted in the British Leeward Islands in 1678 found that 70% of the island's white residents claimed Irish ancestry, marking the highest concentration of Irish inhabitants in the federation. [8]
Many of the Irish settlers died or re-emigrated to other countries. At the same time, several prominent Irish figures served in diplomatic posts in Brazil for the United Kingdom (as Ireland was part of the British Empire). Irish nationalist and British diplomat Roger Casement, served as British Consul in Santos, Belém, and in Rio de Janeiro. [64]
The pre-Elizabethan Irish population is usually divided into the "Old (or Gaelic) Irish", and the Old English, or descendants of medieval Hiberno-Norman settlers. These groups were historically antagonistic, with English settled areas such as the Pale around Dublin , south Wexford , and other walled towns being fortified against the rural ...
Political boundaries in Ireland in 1450, before the plantations. The first Plantations of Ireland occurred during the Tudor conquest.The Dublin Castle administration intended to pacify and anglicise Irish territories controlled by the Crown and incorporate the Gaelic Irish aristocracy into the English-controlled Kingdom of Ireland by using a policy of surrender and regrant.