There is a long history of English, Scottish and Irish men being transported to Barbados. Indentured servants arrived with the first English settlers as early as 1627. The arrival of indentured men increased significantly in 1648 when Cromwell began transporting prisoners captured during the Irish Rebellion, as well as during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Scottish prisoners continued to be transported well after these battles up until at least 1745, following the Jacobite Rebellion.
Though, according to, Lost Lives, New Voices, “it seems wholly unlikely that any Dunbar men could have been sent to Barbados before January 1652”1
The Battle of Worcester prisoners are more likely to have been sent to Barbados, “A propaganda campaign ensued and attacks were launched in which Scots captured at the Battle of Worcester were deployed. These men had been sent aboard the Virginia fleet to serve as indentured or bonded labourers and had arrived off Barbados as reinforcements on 1st December 1651.”2
Credit: Map from A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados by Richard Ligon, 1657
- Christopher Gerrard, Pam Graves, Andrew Millard, Richard Annis, and Anwen Caffell, Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers at the Battle of Dunbar 1650, (England: Oxbow Books, 2018). Chapter Six [↩]
- Christopher Gerrard, Pam Graves, Andrew Millard, Richard Annis, and Anwen Caffell, Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers at the Battle of Dunbar 1650, (England: Oxbow Books, 2018). Chapter Six, Page 164 [↩]