Chapter 16

The ‘New Erin’

The Irish men and women who arrived in South America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century laid the basis for the large-scale migration from Ireland to the continent that followed in the middle of the nineteenth century. Coming from an impoverished country, where ownership of the land was concentrated in the hands of a privileged few, the Irish were captivated by the continent’s vast, empty, fertile plains and valleys.

Francis Burdett O’Connor described arriving in the valley of Tarija in southern Bolivia for the first time as like being ‘among the clouds; the tall, blue summits of the mountains were like islands surrounded by the sea.’¹ But what really caught his eye was down below on the fertile plains. ‘When I arrived, the tarijeño [i.e. natives of Tarija] farmhands, so fine and unaffected, were busy collecting the maize harvest, the only crop which was cultivated on a large scale in this country which was so splendid for agriculture, in which its wealth is hidden.’² O’Connor tried to attract Irish farmers to Tarija, which he called New Erin.³ The idea of fighting for liberty on a foreign shore was inextricably associated with the dream of a piece of lush, green land that could be turned into a productive agricultural enterprise.⁴

The Venezuelan-born leaders of the independence movement and the foreign recruiters who supplied the soldiers who fought in South America blatantly linked the idea of foreign service with permanent emigration in their appeals for volunteers. In an article published in the Correo del Orinoco in July 1819, it was argued:

Among the different benefits that would be derived from the independence of this vast, rich and beautiful continent of South America, maybe none is greater or more interesting at the present moment than adding to our existing population by creating an agreeable home, in which those who emigrate will not only acquire ample resources for their family, but also one day come to be of famed service to the country which gave birth to them ⁵

Eric Lambert suggests that one of the reasons that service in the patriot armies was couched in terms of emigration was to avoid prosecution under the British government’s Foreign Enlistment Act (1819).⁶

In the European imagination of the early 1800s South America was an unknown and exotic land, filled with fabulous creatures and native peoples with strange customs, lost jungle cities and rivers of gold. This began to change when the Prussian geographer and botanist Alexander von Humboldt visited the continent in the years 1799–1804, conducting scientific research. Yet his writings would have found a limited readership. The bulk of what was known about the distant region on the far side of the Atlantic remained within the realm of the fantastic. Most of what the Irish families who travelled to South America knew about the continent came from the recruitment propaganda that began to appear in Irish and English cities in 1817. The lure of a new life in South America, working one’s own piece of land, was used to recruit the Irish volunteers who fought in the wars of independence.

John Devereux was behind a scheme to entice Irish settlers to Venezuela in September 1819. The scheme was overseen by an emigration council, comprising eminent members of Dublin society, and had the support of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, which was charged with examining the suitability of potential candidates.⁷

The following example of a handbill distributed on the streets of Dublin indicates why a penniless ex-soldier or an unemployed artisan’s apprentice might have been tempted to try his luck in Venezuela and shows how service with the patriot armies was linked with permanent emigration:

SOUTH AMERICA

Persons wishing to emigrate to South America have now an opportunity of having land granted to them in the following proportions, viz.:

They may have the choice of the above quantity, either on the banks of the Oronoko [sic], near Angostura, or in the interior of Venezuela; the whole a free gift, but on condition of residence and cultivation.

The country is chiefly clear of wood, and immediately fit for the purposes of agriculture, or feeding of cattle; it abounds with game and livestock, such as cows, horses, mules, etc., etc., and grows sugar, cocoa, cotton, indigo, delicious fruits, etc., and will produce all these articles of commerce grown in the United States, with one half the labour. The climate is salubrious, and may almost be said to possess perpetual spring.⁸

Of course, much of this was untrue, concocted by fraudsters who were interested only in pocketing the savings of poor emigrant families before they were crammed into dirty, overcrowded ships and sent off to a humid, disease-ridden jungle. But throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century there were genuine attempts to settle Irish emigrants in South America. Thomas Nowlan, Charles Herring, Richard Jaffray, William Walton and James Towers English brought a proposal for an immigration scheme before the patriot congress in Angostura in early 1819. The idea was that Irish immigrants would settle in the Guayana province of Venezuela. The province would be called New Erin and would have its own government, which would sit in the capital, New Dublin, as part of a federal Venezuela. According to its proponents, the scheme would ameliorate the circumstances of the impoverished Irish colonists, as well as bring much-needed agricultural expertise and labour to bear upon the region. It was proposed that the colonists would not have to pay a tax on the lands they were granted or on the instruments and supplies they would need for working them. The company that would be given the licence to introduce the colonists would be allowed to set up hospitals in the region. It was proposed also that the colony would be exempt from requisitioning and military service for a period of 10 years, that it would maintain its own clergy and that freedom of expression and religious tolerance would be guaranteed.⁹ This scheme and others came to naught.

In the midst of his troubles in 1830, Daniel O’Leary dreamt of a rural idyll where he would be far away from ‘the attacks of the intriguers and the ambitious who seek to bring about things which I detest.’ In a letter to his wife he wrote: ‘If I manage to get my licence and my liberty, I will go to the South or to any remote province, and there on some piece of land I will hide away from the world, content and may be happy with you, my little ones and the daily chores.’ Rather sweetly, he added: ‘I don’t know whether you would like such a life, but I would make every effort to make it agreeable to you.’¹⁰

What must have impressed the Irish arrivals in the continent most was how empty South America seemed. Just like the pioneers and prospectors of the Old West, the Irish families felt they could make something of themselves there. Not only was there plenty of fertile land but it was a continent rich in all kinds of minerals, including gold, silver, tin and copper. Generations of Irish immigrants to South America had seen the agricultural potential of the continent.

In exile in Peru, Bernardo O’Higgins offered his beloved hacienda in Chile for the relief of the Irish poor. In 1823, in a letter to Sir John Doyle,¹¹ he wrote:

Ireland gave birth to my father and Chile to my mother: I consider myself as belonging to both countries and I wish to serve both as has always been my desire. I think there are no two countries better inclined to complement each other than Chile and Ireland. The excessive population of one is the principal cause of its poverty, as its scarcity is of the other. One can predict, not only without fear of being wrong, but with absolute certainty, that the union of both will bring happiness.

Only one obstacle presents itself to Irish farmers that could prevent them from establishing themselves in Chile: the distance between the bay of Cork and the port of Concepción, a four-month journey.¹²

The most successful resettlement scheme arose from one of John Thomond O’Brien’s projects. After serving with San Martín in Peru, O’Brien had returned to Ireland, where he had attempted to encouraged 200 emigrants to travel to South America. Though the scheme was a failure, O’Brien did manage to persuade John Mooney, a farmer from Streamstown, County Westmeath, his sister, Mary, and her husband, Patrick Bookey, to return to Argentina with him. Both Mooney and the Bookeys were successful, farming hundreds of acres in Argentina, and they wrote home to persuade their neighbours in the midlands to join them. In their wake, thousands of emigrants from counties Westmeath, Offaly and Longford made the long journey to Argentina.¹³

These counties in the Irish midlands supplied the greatest number of emigrants to Argentina throughout the nineteenth century and up to the beginning of the First World War, but emigrants from other counties were also influential in persuading their families, friends and neighbours to start a new life at the other end of the world, most notably John and Patrick Brown, who made money in the meat-exporting business and were the catalyst for emigration from County Wexford to Argentina.¹⁴

By the end of the nineteenth century Irish farmers in Argentina and Uruguay were running huge estancias on the pampas which were exporting beef around the world, helped by new preservation techniques. Born in Ireland in 1804, Lawrence Casey arrived in Argentina in the 1830s, becoming one of the country’s largest landowners and the first to pay a million pesos for a square league – about 12 square miles – of land.¹⁵ In 1881 his son, Eduardo, bought 172 square leagues (about 2,000 square miles) of land in Santa Fe province, reselling it to Irish settlers. He bought a further 275,000 hectares (1,000 square miles) from the government of Buenos Aires, which were worked by French, Russian and Welsh immigrants. Eduardo Casey promoted horse-racing in the country. He organised races, raised thoroughbred horses and founded Argentina’s Jockey Club. He also built what was at the time the largest fruit market in South America, the 47,000-square-metre (11½-acre) Mercado Central de Frutos de Avellaneda.¹⁶

Irish surnames, such as Casey, Dillon, Donovan, Kiernan, Lynch, Mulhall, O’Donnell and O’Gorman, became prominent not only in agriculture but in every aspect of Argentine life, including the Church, banking, sport, education, commerce, railways, industry, politics, the armed forces and the press.

The Lynch family were among the most renowned in Argentina. Patrick (Patricio) Lynch was the founder of the dynasty. Born in County Galway, he was a member of the Irish merchant family who had settled in Cádiz. He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1749, having been given a licence by the Spanish crown to trade in the American colonies.¹⁷ His son Justo Pastor Lynch was employed by the government customs office and worked hard to crack down on smuggling. Justo Pastor’s children became noted names in Argentina. Estanislao José Antonio Lynch studied law in Santiago in Chile and supplied arms and gunpowder to the patriots; he later fought with San Martín in Peru and settled in Valparaíso.¹⁸ His brother, Benito Lynch, served in the Spanish navy before deserting and joining the patriot army in Buenos Aires in 1810.¹⁹

Once significant numbers of Irish families began to arrive, Irish-born priests came in their wake, playing an important role in the development of the new emigrant communities. Father Patrick Moran and Father Patrick Gorman arrived with the first wave of emigrants that began flooding in from the midland counties in 1829 and 1830. Father Anthony Fahy from County Galway was one of the most famous Irish priests to minister to the Irish-Argentine community. He had worked in Ohio in the United States before landing in Argentina. An able administrator, he was a stern moralist, warning newly arrived Irish immigrants in Buenos Aires of the inequities of the city and enjoining them to head out to the countryside.

Father Fahy and another Irish-born priest, Father Michael Gannon, were involved in one of the most depressing episodes involving the Irish-Argentine community in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. Adolfo O’Gorman y Périchon de Vandeuil was the son of Thomas O’Gorman and his French wife, Ana, who had played a central role in the intrigues involving the patriot leaders, the British government and the secret agent James Florence Bourke in Buenos Aires in the early 1800s. Adolfo and his wife, Joaquina, gave birth to a daughter, Camila, in 1828. The O’Gormans were a comfortable middle-class family. Camila took piano lessons, read novels, spoke French and learnt how to sew and embroider. She was chaperoned in male company but was allowed to walk alone to the city’s bookshops. The O’Gormans were friendly with the local parish priest, Uladislao Gutiérrez, from Tucumán in the north of the country, who would visit them in the evenings. In this way the young priest and Camila developed a friendship that slowly developed into something more. Such a relationship would have caused scandal, but the young couple were determined, and they made the difficult decision to elope.

On 11 December 1847 Camila told her family she was going for a walk, while Father Gutiérrez told his superiors that he was travelling to nearby Quilmes. In fact the couple had arranged to meet and travel to the north of Argentina. They planned their escape carefully, travelling under assumed names up the River Paraná into Corrientes province, as far as Goya. It was in this remote town that the enamoured couple hoped to start a new life, far from the moral strictures of Buenos Aires society. They successfully founded a school for young children, and for six brief months they were happy.

But back in Buenos Aires their disappearance provoked a scandal, which began to reflect badly on the government. When Camila had not returned home, and it had been discovered that Father Gutiérrez had never arrived in Quilmes, the truth began to dawn on the O’Gormans and the church authorities. Adolfo O’Gorman denounced Father Gutiérrez as the seducer of his daughter, urged a nationwide search and called for the priest’s imprisonment. The story became public, shocking Buenos Aires society. The opposition used the case as a stick with which to attack the Rosas government. Both the civil and the Church authorities were desperate to find the couple and launched a manhunt. Father Fahy condemned Camila O’Gorman’s behaviour from the pulpit and demanded that the couple be severely punished. The newspapers speculated about their whereabouts, and all sorts of rumours circulated around the city.

It was Father Michael Gannon who unveiled the true identities of the young schoolteachers. After recognising them at a social function in Goya, he wasted no time in denouncing them to the authorities. The governor ordered their arrest, and news of their capture was sent to President Rosas, who in turn ordered that they be sent to the town of Santos Lugares (which translates as Sacred Places) and held incommunicado. It was during these awful days that Camila discovered that she was pregnant.

President Rosas gave the order that Camila and Uladislao be put to death. There was no trial or any type of judicial process. The authorities in Santos Lugares were shocked and argued that the sentence be commuted, citing the couple’s youth and the fact that Camila was carrying a child. Rosas’s sister-in-law, a friend of Camila’s, also tried to intercede, but to no avail. Rosas’ mind was made up, and he threatened the lives of the appointed executioners if they did not comply with his orders. On 18 August 1848 the pregnant Camila and her lover were shot by a firing squad. In a grotesque charade of sanctity, a Catholic priest, Father Castellanos, baptised Camila’s unborn child moments before her death.

While the Irish did not emigrate in such large numbers to other Spanish-speaking parts of the continent as they did to Argentina and Uruguay, the fact that many Irish soldiers who took part in the wars of independence retired in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia and married local women ensured the existence of Irish surnames in those countries to this day. Because of geographical and language barriers, and the fact that they had a common religion, the descendants of the Irish settlers in Latin America were more rapidly integrated into their host culture than those in North America. But members of this Irish community remained conscious of the achievements of their illustrious ancestors and were to contribute to the historiography of the revolution.