In one of my first Ireland: Did You Know? posts, I wrote about the existence of a tiny island in the lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea called Montserrat. This small place (it’s only 10 miles/16 km long and 7 miles/11 km wide) is known as the Emerald Island of the Caribbean because of its lush green coastal line just like Ireland’s and its population, some of whom are of Irish descent. I shared this fact, thought “well isn’t that nice” and moved on without really knowing the whole story. Let me tell you, it’s a lot more interesting than I thought!

In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus discovered Montserrat and named it after a mountain in Spain. By the 1630s, the island fell under British rule and was accordingly populated with an interesting grouping of people.  Joining the island’s original inhabitants, the Arawak and Carib peoples, were Irish settlers from the province of Munster and also failed Irish settlers from Virginia and other places in Europe. (English and Scots later came to the island too.) The population grew even larger when the settlers began to import slaves from Africa to support their plantations and the cotton, sugar, and rum based economy.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting: The Irish and their descendants were barbarous slave masters. Despite the fact that many of the Irish were forced to live on island because of anti-Catholic conditions in Ireland and abroad and brutal treatment they themselves had endured in the past from the English, the Irish treated their slaves just as cruelly.  There’s a common myth that the Irish were truly kind masters (probably created by the tourist trade who sell the island as a unique Irish destination in the Caribbean) but it is fiction.

Today Montserrat is coping with two horrific tragedies, one being a massive hurricane that destroyed 90% of the island’s infrastructure in 1989 and the second being a still-active volcano that demolished the capital city in 1995. Consequently, many islanders moved off of the island; however, in 2005 there were still 5,000 residents. The island is still under British rule today (islanders received UK residency in 1998 and citizenship in 2002) but there are lingering effects of the Irish culture on the island. Montserrat’s coat of arms is an image of a woman dressed in green with one arm wrapped around a cross and the other arm holding a gold harp. And of course, there’s the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day* (celebrations last a week), which is actually a national holiday, making Montserrat one of only five places in the entire world honoring this tradition with an official day off.

To learn more about traveling to the tropical island of Montserrat, check out www.visitmontserrat.com.

*March the 17th also commemorates a failed slave rebellion which occurred during the later 1700s.
Source: Connolly, S.J., ed. Oxford Companion to Irish History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998;Source; Flickr Image Source 1: MikeSchinkel; Image Source 2

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5. The Book Of Kells: Why Isn’t It In Kells?