Chapter XII: Introduction (6)

He first halted. Then he retreated. Determining to reinforce his army, before resuming his march, with the three thousand men under General Leslie at Portsmouth, Virginia, he ordered that officer to join him by way of Charleston. He recrossed the Catawba and posted himself at Winnsborough on the 29th day of October, intending to await the coming of Leslie. On the 4th day of December, 1780, General Nathaniel Greene succeeded General Gates in command of the American army in camp at Charlotte. And now began the series of stirring events which culminated in the most remarkable and surprising battle of the war and the destruction of the second division of Cornwallis’ proud army.

The whole American force at this time did not exceed two thousand men, only eight hundred of whom were regulars. It was an army almost entirely devoid of necessary equipment. It had no tents and few wagons; it was badly armed and its supply of ammunition was short. Its men were almost naked, with not more than three days’ provisions in store. General Greene’s orders, under these circumstances, were as necessary as wise—he determined to divide his force into two bodies and post them on the right and left flanks of the British. Under his own command, the main body was to occupy a position on the Pedee River; while a detachment under General Morgan was to operate between the Broad and Pacolet. The detachment under Morgan consisted of five hundred and eighty men in all—three hundred and twenty-eight light infantry, two hundred Virginia militia and about eighty cavalry. They were put in motion on the 20th of December, 1780, for the country between the rivers I have just named. Greene offered him wagons. He refused them as being incompatible with the nature of light troops. When Cornwallis learned of Morgan’s movement, he misinterpreted it to mean an attack on the British post called Ninety-Six. On the 2d day of January, 1781, Cornwallis addressed this familiar note to Tarleton, which is indicative of the close personal relations existing between the parties to it, as well as the wholesome respect they had for Morgan:

“DEAR TARLETON: I sent Haldane to you last night, to desire you would
pass Broad River with the legion and the first battalion of the 71st
as soon as possible. If Morgan is still at Williams’, or anywhere
within your reach, I should wish you to push him to the utmost. I have
not heard, except from McArthur, of his having cannon, nor would I
believe it, unless he has it from very good authority. It is, however,
possible, and Ninety-Six is of so much importance that no time is to
be lost.

“Yours sincerely,
“CORNWALLIS.”

Tarleton promptly obeyed these instructions and was soon in possession of sufficient information to warrant him in assuring Cornwallis that Ninety-Six was in no immediate danger from Morgan. He then conceived and proposed to Cornwallis the plan of operations against Morgan which ended in the celebrated battle which we commemorate tonight and immortalized the name and fame of the big raw-boned boy with the Irish brogue who came to the Valley of Virginia in 1755 “out of the land of God-knows-where”!

That plan contemplated a joint movement against Morgan on the part of Tarleton and Cornwallis by which they would compel him “either to fight, disperse across the mountain or surrender.” It was at once approved. Cornwallis sent Tarleton a reinforcement of two hundred and fifty men and on the 7th of January put the main body in motion to act in conjunction with him. On the 16th day of January Cornwallis reached Turkey Creek. Filled with anxiety lest Greene should attack and defeat the troops under Leslie, and having no doubt that the dashing Tarleton with his superior numbers would defeat Morgan if he overtook him, Cornwallis determined to await at Turkey Creek until General Leslie joined the main army. It was a fatal decision. Not more than twenty-five miles away was about to be enacted the tragedy to the British arms, in which a rude and untutored genius, commanding undisciplined woodmen half-naked and half-starved, was matched against an educated and accomplished officer in command of regular troops greater in number, well-fed, well-conditioned, and as thoroughly disciplined as any troops in the world. The beginning of the end of British authority over American soil was at hand.

Through his superior system of scouts and their knowledge of woodcraft, Morgan was always thoroughly informed of the movements of his enemies. The orders of General Greene required him to hold his ground as long as he possibly could and not to dispirit the inhabitants by a retreat unless it were a necessity to save his troops from destruction or capture. But the time had now come for him to retire in haste before the British or to give battle to Tarleton before Cornwallis could join him. With a noble confidence in his troops, Morgan determined to fight. He made his camp on the night of January 16, 1781, two miles from a grazing-ground for cattle known as the Cowpens, sixteen miles from Spartansburg, South Carolina, and five miles from the North Carolina line. The news that he had determined to give battle to Tarleton was received by his men with exclamations of joy. He knew the enemy’s strength was superior to his own—that the British infantry embraced twice his number and the cavalry three times the little force under his command. He knew the advantage of the British because of their artillery. But he was unafraid. Against the superiority of numbers, he placed the skill of his riflemen and their zeal to punish an enemy who had wantonly inflicted upon them and their kinsmen and kinswomen personal wrongs of the most grievous character. But above all, he placed their love of country and a willingness to die in its defense.

“The night before the battle,” says Major Thomas Young in Orion, Vol. III., page 88, “he went among the volunteers, helped them to fix their swords, joked them about their sweethearts, and told them to keep in good spirits, and the day would be ours. Long after I laid down, he was going about among the soldiers encouraging them, and telling them that the ‘Old wagoner would crack his whip over Ben (Tarleton) in the morning, as sure as he lived.’ ‘Just hold up your head, boys,’ he would say, ‘three fires and you are free! And when you return to your homes, how the old folks will bless you and the girls will kiss you for your gallant conduct.’ I don’t think he slept a wink that night.”

It is as far beyond my purpose, Mr. President, as it is beyond my ability, to describe the action which began at sunrise on the 17th day of January, 1781, and ended at “two hours before noon.” In the judgment of Bancroft, Morgan was at this time the “ablest commander of light troops in the world,” and I content myself with saying that on that bloody but happy day his disposition of his troops, his personal bravery, and the result which attended it, all, all confirm the pronouncement of the great historian. The battle was fought in an open wood, “affording to the movements of an army all the facilities of a plain.” Tarleton himself declared it to be “as proper and convenient a place for an action as he could desire.” It resulted in an American loss of twelve killed and sixty wounded. Of the enemy, “ten commissioned officers were killed and more than a hundred rank and file; two hundred were wounded; twenty-nine commissioned officers and more than five hundred privates were taken prisoners besides seventy negroes.” Two standards, upward of a hundred dragoon horses, thirty-five wagons, eight hundred muskets and two field pieces were also captured. The British army was practically destroyed—the fragment which survived, with the flying Tarleton at their head, being driven pell-mell in ignominious flight to the main body at Turkey Creek. Thus again, by a single blow, was another third of Cornwallis’ proud army annihilated.

The fame of this surprising victory spread throughout the country. Greene announced it to the army in general orders, saying the victors were “the finest fellows on earth, more worthy than ever of love.” The governors of the Southern States made proclamation of the event. The Commonwealth of Virginia, in the plenitude of her gratitude, voted Morgan a house and sword as a testimonial of “the highest esteem of his country for his military character, so gloriously displayed.” From Charlotte, under date of January 21, 1781, the gallant General Davidson, who was so soon to yield his life in resisting Cornwallis’ passage of the Catawba, sent Morgan a note by “Parson McCaully” extending his “warmest congratulations on the late glorious victory,” and saying “you have, in my opinion, paved the way for the salvation of the country.”

Greene wrote him from Camden August 20, 1781: “The people of this country adore you.” “Great generals are scarce—there are few Morgans to be found.” From Montok Hill, August 15, 1781, while Morgan was recuperating his health, Lafayette wrote: “My dear Friend: I have been happy to hear your health was better. I hope the springs will entirely recover it; and then, my dear sir, I shall be happier than can be expressed, at seeing you with the army. You are the general and the friend I want.” In the Congress, a resolution was adopted placing on record on behalf of the people of the United States “the most lively sense of approbation of the conduct of Morgan and the men and officers under his command.” It ordered that a medal of gold be struck and presented to him in commemoration of the gratitude of his countrymen. It attempted to sum up his merit in three words: “_Virtus unita valet._”

Modest, indeed, was the report of Morgan himself of the battle. “Our success,” said he to Greene, “must be attributed to the justice of our cause and the gallantry of our troops. My wishes would induce me to name every sentinel in the corps.” He did name some of his officers in that original report of the battle dated “Camp near Cain Creek, Jan. 19, 1781,” and it will arouse the pride of every man of Irish blood to read them. Listen to this much of it: “Major McDowell, of the North Carolina volunteers, was posted on the right flank in front of the line, one hundred and fifty yards; and Major Cunningham, of the Georgia volunteers, on the left, at the same distance in front. Colonels Brannon and Thomas, of the South Carolinians, were posted in the right of Major McDowell and Colonel Hayes and McCall, of the same corps, on the left of Major Cunningham. Captains Tate and Buchanan, with the Augusta riflemen, to support the right of the line.” In the Maryland Regiment, were Major Edward Giles, Morgan’s aid; Captain Gilmore, and Ensign McCoskell. McDowell and Cunningham and Tate and Giles and Gilmore and Hayes and McCoskell and McCall and Brannon, commissioned officers all, in one battle! From this array, it would seem that the Irish may modestly lay claim to have struck at least one blow for Independence!

The military career of Morgan was now nearly ended. Immediately upon the termination of the engagement, he began that masterly retreat for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles before the troops of Cornwallis and Leslie, to form a junction with Greene, which was so necessary to save his little corps from annihilation or capture. To overtake him, Cornwallis destroyed his entire baggage train, and converted his army into light troops. But in vain. Though heavily encumbered by the captured munitions of the enemy and his celerity retarded by the prisoners of war, Morgan conducted his retirement with great prudence and success, and in twenty-one days joined Greene at Guilford Court House, his pursuers being but twenty-five miles in his rear. His heroic band was saved.

Emaciated from want and crippled with disease resulting from hardships he endured in the Canadian campaign, Morgan was now scarcely able to sit upon his horse. When mounted he could not ride out of a walk. He “was a sufferer to the verge of human endurance, and was forced to ask for leave of absence to regain his broken health. Slowly and painfully he made his way homeward; and he was never again physically fit for active operations. But his warlike spirit was never at rest while an armed enemy of his country was in the field. In June, 1781, when Tarleton was raiding eastern Virginia, he raised and equipped a body of cavalry at his own expense and at the earnest importunity of Benjamin Harrison and Archibald Cary, Speakers of the House of Delegates and Senate of Virginia, he placed himself at their head to join Lafayette. But in August his old malady compelled him again to retire.

The spirit of the old hero chafed under his enforced idleness. The termination of the titanic struggle was now discernible to his experienced eye and he longed to participate in the closing events. The French fleet was in the Chesapeake, cutting off the escape of Cornwallis by sea. In his rear was Lafayette—there was no retreat to the southward. On his flank was the Marquis of St. Simon—there was no flight to the mountains. And from the north, at the head of the main army, marched George Washington with his veteran troops.

The stupendous event which took place at Yorktown on the 19th day of October, 1781, at 4 o’clock p. m., and its influence on the history of the human race, all the world knows. Morgan was at home at that time on a bed of sickness. He wrote Washington under date of September 20, lamenting that his condition prevented him from serving in the field. It was a letter full of personal and patriotic utterances—so much so that Washington felt impelled to answer it in kind. His answer is dated “Headquarters, before York, 5th October, 1781.” “Surrounded as I am,” he wrote, “with a great variety of concerns on the present occasion, I can yet find time to answer your letter of the 20th ultimo, which I have received with much satisfaction; not only as it is filled with such warm expressions of desire for my success on the present expedition, but as it breathes the spirit and ardor of a veteran soldier, who, though impaired in the service of his country, yet retains the sentiments of a soldier in the firmest degree.

“Be assured that I most sincerely lament your present situation, and esteem it a peculiar loss to the United States that you are, at this time, unable to render your services in the field. I most sincerely thank you for the kind expressions of your good wishes, and earnestly hope that you may soon be restored to that share of health which you may desire, and with which you may again be useful to your country in the same eminent degree as has already distinguished your conduct.”

Within two weeks’ time from the date of that cordial letter, Cornwallis surrendered his army, the war of the Revolution had been fought to a finish and the military life of Daniel Morgan was ended.

To his estate in Clarke County, Virginia, which he proudly called “Saratoga,” he now retired; and there he spent his declining days. For two years, in obedience to the call of his people, he served them in the Congress of the nation; but, as he had been most warlike in time of war, in time of peace he preferred the quiet shades of private life. On the sixth day of July in the year 1802, in about the sixty-seventh year of his age, he passed out at Winchester, in Virginia, and there lies his dust in an humble grave.

Mr. President, the dust of Daniel Morgan is noble dust. Saving alone those of the commander-in-chief, his services to his struggling country are the most remarkable in the annals of the war. From the valley of the Hockhocking in 1774, he pledged himself to the services of his brethren of Boston and marched his riflemen six hundred miles to their relief. Into the hardships of the Canadian Campaign he led the van; and three times before Quebec he guided his men to the fire-fringed heights with the courage of a demi-god. To him belongs the chief glory of Burgoyne’s surrender; and at the Cowpens he won what Bancroft affirms was “the most astonishing victory of the war.” His life was a succession of sacrifices for his country. Measure his services as you may—in number, in value, or in brilliancy—they are not surpassed by those of any officer of the Revolution, saving always the unapproachable Washington. In fifty contests with the enemy he participated—eight of them being general engagements—and in those in which he was charged with the responsibility of command, he was either successful or achieved results which were equivalent thereto. His patriotism was proof against British allurements when he was a ragged prisoner of war; and his sense of honor repelled the temptations of a superior brother-officer in the hour of victorious exultation. Into every danger where wartime duty called him, he “fought a good fight”; in spite of every wile of the seducer, “he kept the faith”; into the quietude of private life he carried the praises of the whole army and the plaudits of the civil representatives of his country. But he did not escape calumny. He paid the inevitable penalty which success entails, and paid it with the smile of scorn and the noble silence of conscious rectitude. The American people, as yet, have no Madeleine, no Valhalla, no Westminster, wherein repose the ashes of their mighty dead. But when that national mausoleum comes, as come it ought and come it will, to it in some future generation the dust of Daniel Morgan will be tenderly borne and in honor inurned beneath its vaulted halls. Meantime, he sleeps yonder at Winchester amidst the lovely hills of Old Virginia, and, “in honored rest,” sleeps well well—

“His truth and valor wearing.”

No marble pile marks his resting place. He needs none! Congresses may, his countrymen never will, forget his devotion to the Republic. On the portals of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the stranger who would behold the monument of its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, is admonished in stately Latin to “look around him.” _Si quaeris monumentum, circumspici!_ Ye who would behold the monument of Daniel Morgan, lift your eyes to the towering dome of your country’s Capitol and consider all that it represents! Read the Bill of Rights incorporated in the charters of your commonwealths, and reflect upon the inalienable prerogatives it preserves to eighty millions of freemen! Study the constitution itself and realize with Gladstone that it is “the most wonderful work ever struck off in a given time by the brain and purpose of man!” Ponder those blessings of liberty which, in their full flower and fruition, every American enjoys tonight! And when ye have done this, remember that Daniel Morgan was of the fathers by whose blood and spirit they were established. Sublimer than effigies of brass, more enduring than granite shafts, are these memorials of the men of the old heroic days. Upon the rights of mankind are they founded, and they will remain even unto the last day of recorded time. And when Time shall be no longer—when, in the ultimate convulsion of nature, the archangel-trumpeter shall sound his summons for the living and the dead to render final accounting of their stewardship—before the Judge of the Nations in the group of immortals who blazed the way for the glory of the American Republic, will stand the tall Irish chieftain of the Virginia Riflemen, “with a countenance like the lightning and in raiment as white as snow.”

ST. BRENDAN, AMERICA’S FIRST DISCOVERER. HOW A LEARNED AND ADVENTUROUS IRISHMAN AND SIXTY MONKS OUTSTRIPPED COLUMBUS BY NEARLY TEN CENTURIES IN HIS QUEST OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE—A GRAPHIC AND CONVINCING TREATISE.

BY THOMAS S. LONERGAN, NEW YORK CITY.

During all historic time, the Irish have been noted for their love of adventure and travel, and had commercial intercourse with the leading ports of Europe and Asia for centuries before and after St. Patrick’s time, which is proof that they had sailing vessels of no mean order. The conversion of the Irish people to Christianity, in the fifth century, is unique in the annals of Christendom, because it was accomplished by one man and without the shedding of a single drop of human blood—but the discovery of America by Irish monks in the middle of the sixth century is still a mooted question, notwithstanding the historical researches of Irish, French, German and American scholars, which prove that St. Brendan was the first discoverer of this western hemisphere. His expedition was essentially a religious undertaking, as well as the fulfillment of a well-known prophecy.

St. Brendan was born in the year 484, at a place now called Tralee, in the County of Kerry, Ireland. He was the son of Finnlogha, of the race of Ciar, son of Fergus. He was educated by his relative, the Bishop of Erc, who was head of a local monastery at Kerry. When a child, young Brendan was placed in charge of St. Ita, at Killeedy, in the County of Limerick, where he remained for five years, after which he returned to Bishop Erc’s monastery, and began his ecclesiastical studies with marked ability. He was sent from there to St. Jarlath’s College of Tuan for the purpose of studying the laws and rules of the saints of Ireland, with the injunction to return to Bishop Erc for holy orders, and in due course of time he was ordained.

THOMAS S. LONERGAN, ESQ.,

Of New York City.

Member of the Society, Litterateur and Lecturer.
]

St. Brendan belonged to what is known as the second order of Irish Saints. Shortly after his ordination, a passionate desire took possession of him to go forth on expeditions for the discovery of strange lands and the salvation of souls. At his ordination the words of St. Luke produced a profound impression on his mind, which subsequently formed his determination to forsake his native country and to embark on a voyage to a mysterious land, far from human ken and beyond a mighty ocean.

It is certain that Irishmen, in ancient days, found their way to the Hebrides, the Shetland and Faroe Islands, and even to Iceland. St. Brendan is said to have visited the Western and Northern Islands, and Brittany in France between 530 and 540. When he returned home the passion to discover the Land of Promise, as foretold in St. Patrick’s prophecy, was stronger than ever. He went to St. Ita, his old nurse, for counsel, and she advised him to build a ship of wood, and she told him that he would find the distant land beyond the great ocean. He immediately set out for Galway in Connacht, and gathered several of his faithful monks about him, and they there and then began to build a large wooden ship. We are told that they built a peculiar mast in the middle of the ship, and secured all the other rigging for such a craft. They put aboard various kinds of herbs, seeds and provisions. They sailed from Galway along the Irish Coast to the Bay of Kerry.

In 545, according to the Irish annals and the Latin manuscripts, St. Brendan and sixty Irish monks, sailed from the Bay of Kerry, which still bears his name, and after an adventurous voyage of forty days, they reached the shores of what is now Virginia or Carolina, and are said to have remained in this western hemisphere for seven years, exploring and preaching the Gospel of Christ to the natives, especially along the shores of the Ohio River. Most probably they trod the soil of New England. The reports of what they saw and endured are simply marvellous. They found a fertile land, thickly wooded and full of birds and flowers, strange animals and strange human beings.

There is every reason to believe that before the close of that eventful century the story of St. Brendan’s voyages and discovery was well known in every part of Europe. There are still extant thirteen Latin manuscripts in the National Library of Paris which have come down from the tenth century, and contain elaborate accounts of St. Brendan’s discovery of America. The Bodlien Library of Oxford and the Nuremburg Library of Germany contain several of the Brendan MSS. There are also versions of the discovery in Gaelic, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

In the year 1892, the late General Daniel Butterfield, the noted American soldier and scholar, photographed one of the original Latin manuscripts of Brendan in the Bibleothèque Nationale of Paris, which he translated on his arrival in this country, and he subsequently prepared a learned lecture on the subject, which he delivered before the New York Gaelic Society. The translation, has been vouched for by Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore as being almost literal.

The manuscript begins with a sketch of St. Brendan’s career and of the confession made to him by Father Barindus, which was instrumental in firing the imagination of the great abbot to make a voyage in search of the Land of Promise, which was America. St. Brendan laid his full statement of the confession before the seven wisest counsellors of his community, which concluded in the following words, as translated:

“My Beloved Fellow Warriors: I now ask of you counsel and help,
inasmuch as my thoughts and my heart are bent on one desire, if it be
the will of God. That land whereof Father Barindus has spoken, is the
land of promise of the saints. I have yet set my heart upon. What say
you? What counsel do you give me? Their answer was, ‘Abbot, your will
is ours; have we not left our parents, have we not forsaken our
inheritance, have we not delivered ourselves up unto you? Therefore
with you we are ready to go unto life or death.’”

They considered the story or confession a revelation to enable them to reach the land, of which Patrick’s prophecy had foretold. When once upon the highlands of Munster, and looking out upon the Atlantic Ocean, St. Patrick said that a man of renown should arise in those lands and go out upon the sea and find the promised land. That prophecy has been a household word with the people in the Kerry region for more than fourteen centuries, and was well known for several years before St. Brendan was born. The traditions of the Brendanian voyages, like Banquo’s ghost, will never down, because they are embodied in the literature of many European nations.

The following passage appears in Otway’s Sketches, published in Dublin in 1845.

“Brendan, having prosecuted his inquiries with all diligence, returned
to his native Kerry, and from a bay sheltered by a lofty mountain,
that is now known by his name, he set sail for the Atlantic land and
directing his course towards the Southwest, in order to meet the
summer solstice, or what we call the ‘tropic’ after a long and rough
voyage, came to summer seas where he was carried without sail or oar
for many a long day. This, it is presumed, was the great Gulf Stream
and which brought his vessel to shore, somewhere about the Virginia
Capes, or where the American coast tends eastward and forms the New
England States. There landing, he and his companions marched far into
the interior and came to a large river, flowing East and West, which
was evidently the Ohio River. After some years’ exploration, the holy
adventurer was about to cross the river when he was accosted by a
person of noble presence (but whether a real or imaginary man does not
appear), who told him that he had gone far enough in that direction
and that further discoveries were reserved for other men who would in
due time come and Christianize all that pleasant land. The above, when
tested by common sense, clearly shows that Brendan landed on a
continent and went a good way into the interior.”

It is now supposed that St. Brendan and his companions soon returned to Ireland. Some writers state that he made a second voyage to this country, but there is no proof for that statement.

In the sagas of Scandinavia, America is called Irland Mikla, or “Great Ireland.” The Scandinavian records contain an account of three voyages made to America after the time of St. Brendan and before the arrival of Columbus. Voraginius, the Provincial of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in the thirteenth century, devotes much space in his “Golden Legend” to St. Brendan’s Land. Wynkyn de Worde, the first English printer, wrote a life of St. Brendan, which was published in 1483, just nine years before Columbus sailed from Palos. Several Italians, who wrote in the fifteenth century, had much to say about St. Brendan’s discovery, and it is to be presumed that the mind of Columbus was well stored with the traditions of America’s first discoverer, which had come down through the Middle Ages.

Here are a few sentences spoken by St. Brendan on the banks of what is now supposed to be the Ohio River:

“Behold the land which you have longed for so long a time.

“The reason you saw it not sooner was that God desired to show you the
secrets of the ocean.

“Return, therefore, to the land of thy nativity, carrying with you of
the fruits and gems of all that your ship will carry, for the days of
your journey are near to a close, and you shall sleep with your
fathers. But after the lapse of many years this land shall be made
known to your descendants, when Christianity shall overcome Pagan
persecution. Now, this river which you see divides the land, as it now
appears to you rich in fruits, so shall it always appear without any
shadow of night, for its light is Christ.”

If the foregoing is not positive proof, it is at least pretty good circumstantial evidence of St. Brendan’s discovery of this western hemisphere.

Nearly all writers on Columbus bear witness to the traditional value of the voyage of St. Brendan in guiding and inspiring Lief Erickson in the tenth century, and Columbus in the fifteenth, to the discovery of the New World.

The legend of St. Brendan is treated in the general histories of American discovery. In Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of America,” volume I, page 48, there is a list of some of the different texts of the legend. Payne’s “History of America” gives a brief summary of the legend. He says: “No story was more popular in the end of the fifteenth century. The critic who does not absolutely reject it, as the Bollandists have done, may take his choice of original versions of it in eight different languages: and St. Brandan occupies ten dense pages in William Caxton’s version of the Golden Legend.” An English version of the legend was published by the Percy Society in 1844 under the title, “St. Brandan, a mediæval legend of the sea, in English prose and verse (London, 1844).”

Gaffarel’s “Histoire de la dècouverte de l’Amerique,” volume I, contains a chapter entitled “Les Irlandais en Amerique avant Colomb,” in which he gives an extended account of the story of St. Brendan, with references to authorities.

HON. THOMAS B. FITZPATRICK,

Of Boston, Mass.

Vice-President-General of the Society.
]

De Roo, in his “History of America Before Columbus,” published in 1900, says: “The story of St. Brendan was one of the most remarkable and widely spread of the middle ages. The number of its ancient copies, carefully preserved to the present day, its various translations and its learned commentaries, published of late, sufficiently testify to the living interest which the ‘Navigatio’ of St. Brendan excited. There is scarcely a MSS. Collection in Europe, of any account, where it cannot be found.” There is a copy of the “Navigatio” in the Vatican Library since the Ninth Century. De Roo gives full credence to the St. Brendan narrative.

Learned writers like Moosmuller of Germany, Gravier of France, Palfry and De Costa of America, not to speak of Irish scholars, have written much on St. Brendan and prehistoric America. Cardinal Moran of Australia has recently written a very able work on St. Brendan. O’Donoghue’s Brendaniana and Webb’s Compendium of Irish Biography make mighty interesting reading.

There are several ancient maps in the European Libraries which mention St. Brendan’s Land or “Great Ireland” and those maps are being closely examined by historical students interested in pre-Columbian discoveries.

Columbus himself, while he was endeavoring to fit out his first expedition, wrote these words: “The land of St. Brendan is the land of the Blessed, towards the West, which no one can reach except by the power of God.”

It is not too much to claim that the Irish chapter in American history began with St. Brendan. It is to be hoped and expected that the future historians of this Western Hemisphere will recognize Brendan, the Irish monk and famous navigator, as America’s first discoverer and give credit to whom credit is due.

There is still extant in the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, an ancient MS. containing the prayer of St. Brendan for the safety of himself and his companions in his trans-Atlantic voyage.

“Judging by the ancient documents,” says the learned Dane, Professor Rafn, “we can have no doubt that Great Ireland was settled long before the year 1000 by a Christian Colony from Ireland.” What Rafn calls Great Ireland, we now call the United States of America. Rafn also claims that a people speaking the Irish language were found in Florida as far back as the eighth century.

The latest book on this subject is by Mrs. Marion Mulhall, the wife of the famous statistician, entitled “Explorers in the New World Before Columbus,” recently published by Longmans, Green & Co. Every student of pre-Columbian discoveries ought to read that splendid work, which deals with a mighty interesting theme in the field of historical research.

In the sixteenth century, traces of Gaelic speech and a knowledge of the poems of Ossian were discovered among the Indians of Florida. Ossian was an Irish poet who flourished two centuries before St. Brendan was born. Both Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon considered him the greatest poet that ever lived.

In the light of modern historical research, it is absurd to claim that Columbus was the first discoverer of America. I am fully satisfied that Lief Erickson and his Norsemen from the islands of the Baltic discovered this Continent 500 years before Columbus; and I am as fully convinced that St. Brendan and his Irish Monks landed on the shores of this country about the middle of the sixth century. Owing to the fact that no permanent settlement or lasting results came from these discoveries, therefore they do not take a jot or tittle from the achievement of Christopher Columbus, whose name and fame are bound to live forever in the annals of the human race.

The Oxford University press has just published a number of Irish manuscripts in the English language which have been in the Bodlien Library for centuries. Some of those Gaelic manuscripts also refer to the Brendanian voyages and discoveries.

The early Portuguese explorers believed in the existence of the El Dorado, the undiscovered country of St. Brendan. The strongest proof of this is that when the Crown of Portugal was ceded to the Castilians, the treaty included St. Brendan’s land as a certain future discovery.

The high religious reputation and singular fame of St. Brendan gave considerable value to his manuscripts, from which sprang up an unique literature, that planted in the brain of Columbus a desire to find the long lost Land of Promise, which he eventually discovered in the year 1492, a year forever memorable in the history of civilization.

Why is it that nearly all the original Brendan manuscripts are in the Latin tongue? Chambers in his “Cyclopedia of English Literature” gives an excellent explanation: “The first unquestionably real author of distinction is St. Columbanus, a native of Ireland, who contributed greatly to the advance of Christianity in Western Europe and died in 615. He wrote religious treatises and Latin poetry. As yet no educated writer composed in his vernacular tongue. It was generally despised by the literary class, and Latin was held to be the only language fit for regular composition.”

Both Columbanus and Columkill or Columba were contemporaries of St. Brendan. Doubtless St. Brendan was an accomplished Latin scholar. Throughout Europe, during the Middle Ages, Brendan’s voyage was a most popular subject in church literature. The Brendanian Manuscripts are still locked up in the various libraries of Europe, and only a few of them have been translated into any of the modern languages. It is to be hoped that some of the great scholars of Germany, as well as those of Ireland, will soon turn their attention to those old manuscripts. The Book of Lismore contains a life of Brendan in the Gaelic language, and the annals of Clonmacnoise devote considerable space to the career and achievements of the famous navigator.

In view of St. Patrick’s prophecy, which was fulfilled by St. Brendan’s voyage, it is a singular fact that the Atlantic Cable was laid by Cyrus W. Field in 1857 within sight of Mount Brendan, which stands out in bold relief on the Irish coast, at an altitude of fully three thousand feet, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

In childhood young Brendan inhaled the ocean breezes, and was familiar with the magnificent scenery of his native Kerry. At the foot of his mountain retreat was Brendan Bay, from which he sailed for this Western continent almost fourteen centuries ago.

The Sailor Saint is known as St. Brendan the Elder, in contradistinction to St. Brendin, the Abbot or Bishop of Birr. Some writers have confounded those two illustrious Irishmen who flourished in the same century.

Many beautiful poems on “The Sailor Saint” are to be found in the modern languages of Continental Europe, and some historical ballads by Denis Florence McCarthy, Thos. Darcy McGee and others in the English language. Here is one stanza from McGee’s well-known ballad:

“Mo-Brendan, Saint of Sailors, list to me,
And give thy benediction to our bark,
For still, they say, thou savest souls at sea,
And lightest signal fires in tempest dark.
Thou sought’st the Promised Land far in the West,
Earthing the Sun, chasing Hesperian on,
But we in our own Ireland have been blest
Nor ever sighed for land beyond the Sun.”

It has been recently pointed out by a writer on the subject that the ancient Irish would have turned the discoveries of St. Brendan to good account, and would have kept up communication with America, if their attention had not been drawn to the severe combat carried on in England between the Britons and the Saxons. Then, at a later period, the Danes invaded Ireland, and for almost 300 years the Irish at home were engaged in continuous warfare against those Pagan marauders, and consequently were in no position to carry out any great peaceful enterprise in distant lands.

In the year 553, St. Brendan founded the famous monastery of Clonfert, in the County Galway, Ireland. In after years that seat of learning had over 3,000 students within its walls, most of whom came from foreign countries. They were educated and entertained without fee or reward, and the same was true of all the other great schools and colleges during the Golden Age of Ireland, which embraced the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. History tells us that Ireland was then “the school of the West, and the quiet habitation of sanctity and learning.”

During that age, “the monasteries at Bangor, Clonfert and elsewhere,” says Montalembert in his “Monks of the West,” “became entire towns, each of which enclosed more than 3,000 students. The Thebiad reappeared in Ireland, and the West had no longer anything to envy in the history of the East. There was besides an intellectual development, which the Eremites of Egypt had not known. The Irish communities joined by the monks from Gaul and Rome, whom the example of St. Patrick had drawn upon his steps, entered into rivalry with the great monastic schools of Gaul. They explained Ovid there; they copied Virgil, they devoted themselves especially to Greek literature; they drew back from no inquiry, no discussion; they gloried in placing boldness on a level with faith.”

Religion and education went hand in hand in ancient Ireland from the birth of St. Brendan in 484 to the Danish invasion, which took place in the closing years of the eighth century. In that period Ireland was the most learned country in all Europe. The fame of her schools had travelled far and wide. The languages of Greece and Rome, as well as her old Gaelic tongue, were studied and mastered, and thousands of pilgrim students came to her shores, among them were Alfrid, King of Northumbria, and Dagobert II., King of France.

Love of learning has been an Irish attribute from time immemorial; no mind, not even the Athenian, had ever a greater thirst for knowledge than the Irish mind. Ossian, who lived in the third century of the Christian Era, is to Gaelic literature what Homer is to Greek literature. Intellectual vigor, spiritual fervor and love for travel have been and still are the predominant characteristics of the Irish. Wherever the Irish monks went they founded monasteries, churches and colleges, and laid the foundation for modern civilization and culture. The truest history of Ireland is to be found in the poetry of her bards and in the writings of her exiled monks. For proof see Zimmer’s “Irish Element in Medieval Culture” and Hyde’s “Literary History of Ireland.”

St. Columkill, a contemporary of St. Brendan, has been called the father of monasticism in the British Isles. He and Columbanus are acknowledged to be the two most learned men of their age. It is a well established fact that St. Brendan visited his countryman, Columkill, at his monastery at Iona on the west coast of Scotland in 564. On that occasion he founded two monasteries in Scotland. He also travelled in Wales and England, where he founded some churches and schools and converted thousands to the Christian faith. He built the Monastery of Ailech in Britain, which is now called St. Malo. That was several years before St. Augustine landed on British soil. So we see that Lecky was justified in stating that “England owes a great deal of her Christianity to Irish monks, who labored among her people before the arrival of Augustine.”

Most of the history which has been written during the past four centuries has been a conspiracy against truth, but in these opening years of the twentieth century history is being rewritten in the light of historical research, and in keeping with the spirit of truth and justice. The late Lord Acton was the pioneer, and his example is being followed by some of the great scholars of Germany and other European countries, which may throw a flood of light on the chronicles and traditions of St. Brendan, as well as on the golden Age of Hibernia.

St. Brendan attended the inauguration of Aedh Caemh (anglicized Hugh Keeffe), the first Christian King of Cashel in Tipperary in 570, when he took the place of the official bard, who was a Pagan. On that occasion he converted the bard to Christianity and gave him the name of Colman, now known as St. Colman of Cloyne, in whose honor St. Colman’s College at Fermoy was named.

According to Ussher, St. Brendan died at Annadown in 577, in the 94th year of his age, and was buried in his own monastery at Clonfert. His day on the calendar is May 16—a day forever sacred to the memory of Hibernia’s greatest navigator. No complete compilation of biographical work fails to mention the name of St. Brendan, who is preëminently the mariner saint of the calendar.

The literary fame of historic Clonfert is known only to the students of history. Most of the precious manuscripts of that great institution of learning were destroyed by the Danes and Anglo-Normans centuries ago, and its walls have long since crumbled into ruins.

“Clonfert,” says the scholarly Butterfield, “should be dear to all Americans, because our first discoverer was Clonfert’s Bishop. The Sea of Clonfert will doubtless remain during future ages as a shrine of pilgrimage to numberless tourists, for it holds in its midst an honored grave, where rests the dust of the patriarchal navigator who first designated this hemisphere as a paradise of loveliness, to give happy homes and altars free to the myriad outcasts of the human family.”

During the past two centuries, countless thousands of Erin’s sons and daughters have found happy homes and civil and religious liberty in “Brendan’s Land,” now and forevermore the land of Washington, which has been for more than a century and a quarter an asylum for the poor and oppressed of every race and every clime.

Owing to the ruthless destruction of vast numbers of ancient Irish archives by the Danes and English, our knowledge of the first discovery of America is not as exact as could be desired, yet there is enough known to justify Americans, regardless of race or creed, in claiming the honor of that discovery for St. Brendan and his sailor monks, almost a thousand years before Columbus landed on the soil of San Salvador.

HON. JAMES F. BRENNAN.

Of Peterborough, N. H.

Historiographer of the Society.
]

THE IRISH SETTLERS OF SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE.

BY HON. JAMES F. BRENNAN, HISTORIOGRAPHER AND MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE
COUNCIL OF THE AMERICAN IRISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY, A MEMBER OF THE
NEW HAMPSHIRE HISTORICAL SOCIETY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHER OF THE
PETERBOROUGH HISTORICAL SOCIETY, PETERBOROUGH, N. H.

The men who endured the hardships of this rough climate and encountered the dangers incident to the opening up of this wild country, had to be a class of men with strong hearts and resolute purposes. It was no place for the weak; each had to be a soldier in the battle for existence; each had to do his share in conquering the hardy soil and defending himself and his family against the ever present dangers of Indians and the wild beasts which then infested the territory.

The Plymouth Colony, composed largely of Englishmen, had for over a century established itself in Eastern Massachusetts, provided itself with comfortable settlements and enacted laws as intolerant as this country has ever known, but had not penetrated into New Hampshire. These Puritans, who, it is said, “first fell on their knees and then on the aborigines,” had roasted witches, driven Quakers, Baptists and all others, who were outside the pale of the Church of England, with buck shot into the tender mercies of the savage interior; fleeing from the intolerance of their own church in their quest of religious liberty, they inaugurated a system of unparalleled religious slavery here.[14]

These Puritans were not the kind of men, with their selfish views, best calculated to extend civilization; they received with disfavor and imprecations the hardy Irish Presbyterians who arrived in Boston in 1736. These Englishmen always treated the emigrants from Ireland in a way calculated to discourage further Irish emigration, but this did not deter these hardy men, who, however, found the inhospitable and cold interior preferable to the section where the influence of Puritanism had established itself and left the darkest record of intolerance to be found in the history of this country.

Irish in considerable numbers had landed eighteen years before, but the continuing antipathy, which had ever existed in these English Puritans against the “Wild Irishmen,” as they termed them, were renewed on the arrival of the men in 1736 who were destined to bring civilization into New Hampshire.

In the summer of 1718 five ships, with a hundred or more emigrant families, came over from Ireland to Boston; some of them found their way to Worcester and thence to Palmer, Pelham, Coleraine and other towns in Massachusetts; a large number, under the lead of the Rev. John Morehead, founded the Federal Street Church in Boston, and one ship with some twenty families, sailing for the Merrimac late in the autumn, was driven into Casco Bay, and was frozen in for the winter at the place, which soon afterwards became the town of Portland; their provisions giving out, they suffered some hardships, but found relief among the inhabitants there.

A few families settled in that vicinity; the rest, in the spring of 1719, sailed up the Merrimac to Haverhill, and thence proceeded to that high and beautiful region of country that was called Nutfield, because it abounded in nuts; and there they determined to locate their grant of twelve miles square of land.

This grant had been made by Gov. Samuel Shute, then governor of both provinces, upon a petition signed in Ireland, March 26, 1718, by 217 persons, all but seven signing “in a fair, legible hand,” before they set out on their voyage. These sixteen first settlers and their families that had thus arrived, on the 22d day of April, 1719, had come over in company with their pastor, the Rev. James McGregor, most of them from his parish of Aghadowey, six miles south of Coleraine in the County of Londonderry, Ireland. Among them were Samuel Allison, James Gregg, James McKean, John Mitchell, John Morrison, Thomas Steele and John Stuart. They were soon joined by a large number of their compatriots, the lands were divided out to a long list of grantees, and in 1722 the town was incorporated by New Hampshire authority by the name of Londonderry.

In 1736, seventeen years later, another ship, with emigrants from Ireland, landed at Boston. These families passed the winter at Lexington, and in the next summer settled at Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and other towns in that vicinity. Among them were the names Cunningham, Ferguson, McNee, Little, Robbe, Scott, Smith, Stuart, Swan, White and Wilson.

From these two colonies southern New Hampshire was first settled.

At the time when Londonderry, New Hampshire, was founded, descendants of the English Puritans from Massachusetts had settled along the Merrimac River as far north as the old town of Dunstable. Bitter jealousies existed between the two sorts of people. At first it was said the Puritans hardly knew what to make of the newcomers; they called them the “Wild Irish.” When they started up the Merrimac in boats, and one boat was upset in the rapids, a Puritan poet wrote:

“They soon began to scream and bawl,
As out they tumbled one and all,
And, if the devil had spread his net,
He could have made a glorious haul.”

The Puritans, in ridicule, said of these Irishmen that “they held as fast to their pint of doctrine as to their pint of rum.”

Thus was shown the relations existing between these Englishmen and Irishmen at that early period. Will this feeling of unfriendliness ever change? When the English people release Ireland from bondage and permit her to take such a position among the nations of the earth that Emmet’s epitaph can be written, then and not till then will the Irish people look with favor upon England and her government.

These Irish settlers were intensely anti-English long before that sentiment found violent expression in the War of the Revolution, in which they participated with such zeal and self-sacrifice. As recorded in the Peterborough town history, it was the attempts to establish the Church of England and to destroy the prevailing religious systems, so dear to the people, together with the oppressive land laws, that created in these Irish Presbyterians a hatred for the form of government under which they lived. In Ireland they were made by that church the objects of persecutions as mean, cruel and savage as any which have disgraced the annals of religious bigotry and crime. “Many were treacherously and ruthlessly butchered, and the ministers were prohibited, under severe penalties, from preaching, baptizing or ministering in any way to their flocks.”

And it is further stated that the “Government of that day, never wise in their commercial relations or their governmental affairs, began to recognize them only in the shape of taxes and embarrassing regulations upon their industry and trade. In addition to these restrictions, the landlords—for the people then as now did not own land, they only rented it—whose long leases had now expired, occasioned much distress by an extravagant advance of the rents, which brought the people to a degrading subjection to England; and many of them were reduced to comparative poverty.”

They would no longer submit to these wrongs, and “animated by the same spirit that moved the American mind in the days of the Revolution, resolved to submit to these oppressive measures no longer, and sought a freer field for the exercise of their industry and the enjoyment of their religion.” How like the present condition!