Part 23

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.

[Illustration:

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!

The sentiments of these people were the same as of the present emigrants from Ireland. They were composed in a very small part of Scotchmen, Englishmen and other nationalities, but the essential part of the pioneers of this section, in fact, nearly all of them, were Irishmen, for I assume that where men were born in Ireland, as they were, where many of their fathers, some of their grandfathers and great grandfathers were born, they were men who can unqualifiedly be called Irishmen.

Adopt any other standard and a large part of the inhabitants of Ireland at the time they emigrated would not be considered Irishmen, and probably few persons in this town today would be considered Americans.

These Scots (who, it must always be remembered, were of ancient Celtic origin) from whom the pioneers of this section trace their ancestry landed in Ireland, as the Londonderry, New Hampshire, history records it, in 1610, more than a century and a quarter before their descendants came to this country in 1736.

The early settlers of this vicinity may be taken as typical of the men who settled other towns in southern New Hampshire. They were practically all Irish, many from the northern counties, with some from the middle and southern counties of Ireland.

The towns settled by these Irishmen were, in most instances, named in honor of one of the settlers, or from towns in Ireland; some, however, submitted to a change from the names first adopted by them, in order to insure the obtaining of their charters; thus, when John Taggart and others from Peterborough in 1769 settled in what is now Stoddard, they named it Limerick and it was thus known up to the time of incorporation in 1774, when its present name was adopted; the name of the township of Boyle was changed to Gilsum when incorporated in 1763; other similar changes were made under English régime and through English influences. When, however, these Irish settlers themselves selected names for their towns, no English influence obtained, for it must be remembered that the present English and Scotch sentiments, we now hear so much about, did not possess that sturdy, loyal Irish people; the modernly invented name of “Scotch-Irish,” for instance—so far as we have any history, tradition or information—was unknown, unmentioned and unrecorded by any of them at any time, the originators and promoters of this strange and peculiar “Scotch-Irish” theory being strictly products of our own time and of our own country; there were, for example, no such names as London, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, given to towns where these settlers located, but the selection of names was from their own people, or from their own Ireland, which they loved so well, where they and their ancestors for many generations were born, where their kinsmen and their descendants remaining are found today resenting this modern “Scotch Irish” appellation, as these settlers would undoubtedly do themselves if living; it was in Ireland their sympathies centered and found expression in their selection of distinctly Irish names for the towns they settled, such as Dublin, Belfast, Coleraine, Boyle, Limerick, Derry, Kilkenny, Antrim and many other purely Irish names.

These Irish, who settled southern New Hampshire—the pioneers in the march of civilization—became the establishers and defenders of popular government here; their blood, transmitted to the generation following them, produced patriots who stood as a secure bulwark in defense of the political structure their forefathers had reared; thus, Irishmen have been identified with every movement in our state history from the time when the Irishman Darby Field discovered the White Mountains (naming them after Slieve Bawn or White Hills, in the barony of South Ballintubber, County Roscommon, Ireland) down to the present day. I cannot in this brief sketch refer to the part played by men of Irish descent such as Gen. John Stark, Gen. John Sullivan, Gen. James Miller, Col. Hercules Mooney and hundreds of others, who have left their impress upon the annals of our commonwealth. In the history of our state and nation one thing is satisfactorily settled and entirely clear, namely, that where Irish blood is found, there you will find true, unflinching, uncompromising defenders of the honor and integrity of our government and laws. The late Judge Jeremiah S. Black once said: “I have seen black swans, and have heard of white crows, but an Irish traitor to American liberty I never saw nor even heard of.”

These early Irish settlers were, in their religious belief, uncompromisingly rigid Presbyterians of the strictest stamp.[15] Their progeny, however, have almost entirely abandoned that severe old doctrine for the, so called, liberal modern modes of worship. However well anchored these old timers may have been in their religious belief, it seemingly was not such as commended itself to their posterity,[16] and today we find no church of their denomination in this section, and indeed comparatively few in the state.

In 1799 the disaffection in Peterborough with the old mode of Presbyterian worship took tangible form; it was too strict; personal controversies at first broke out which led to dissensions and the somewhat easier ritual of Congregationalism attracted a considerable number, and, having at that time only one church edifice, in the interest of peace and convenience, communion was served at stated times in the Presbyterian form and at other times in the Congregational form; but liberalism was not then satisfied and Unitarianism appeared to claim its share; with these dissensions came the Baptists and Methodists, then other religions of modern invention and atheism with no religion at all, finally shared in the general mix-up; a sort of go-as-you-please condition, embodying the so-called up-to-date ideas, where each strikes out a new religion to suit himself, or takes a hand in reforming old notions, until the original anchorage was abandoned and entirely new dogmas were substituted for the old.[17]

None of these old Irish settlers were Catholics, far from it; but the Catholic Church, which they abhorred, was destined to flourish and grow in the town they established, and today that church has a resident priest and the largest religious congregation in Peterborough.

But the religion of these Irish settlers is not important in our present inquiry; I merely mention it in passing. We are not asking whether they were Catholics or Presbyterians, Whigs or Tories, but are dealing with the more pertinent inquiry—from a cosmopolitan standpoint at least—namely, the nationality of the men who brought civilization to this section.

While many of us may not indeed agree with all their religious ideas, we cannot but admire their sterling qualities and take a racial pride in the fact that the land from which they and their forefathers came, was the same land from which we and our forefathers came; a land where the people possessed the fear of God, and clung to virtue, fidelity and patriotism as cardinal principles; a people having the courage, constancy and industry necessary for successful pioneers in this new country.