Ulster emigrants created waves in Boston Harbour in the 18th century...

Co Antrim historian  Dr David Hume relates the story of the voyage of the early emigrant ship Friends Goodwill and an unlikely event in Boston in 1930.

  THINK of Ulster-Scots settlement patterns in the United States and the name of Boston, Massachusetts, is unlikely to rank too highly on your list of places of interest.

  Yet it was into the harbour there that a small ship carrying around 50 Ulster emigrants limped in September 1717.

  The Friends Goodwill set sail from Larne around May 1 that year and the long journey at sea for her passengers had been arduous and anxious.

  The passage had been blighted by sea water damaging supplies, strong adverse winds, and near lack of food and fresh water by the time September had been reached. She did,however, safely reach land with only the loss of one on board, and the passengers, about whom we sadly know very little, began to search out a new life for themselves in a city which was non too welcoming.

  Economic conditions in the city had been causing concerns around the time and the arrival of numbers of new settlers was not welcomed.

  From 1701 to 1715 some 250 new arrivals were warned to leave town immediately, and for the next five years figures show that a further 330 were similarly warned. Among them were said to be 49 passengers who had arrived on a single ship from Ireland, but we have no record of its name. It is conceivable, given the closeness in numbers to those on the Friends Goodwill, that it was her passengers who were being referred to.

  James Leyburn in his 'The Scotch-Irish. A Social History' (Chapel Hill, 1962) notes "Treatment of the Scotch-Irish by New Englanders was little different from that accorded other outsiders by the Puritans. The policy of the New England colonies was clearly one of exclusion of all who differed from them in religion and in national background."

  Perhaps, not surprisingly, in one of the satellite towns around Boston a Presbyterian Church in the process of being built was torn down at night.

  The Dissenters got the message. Although there was to be a large settlement at New Londonderry in New Hampshire, many settlers began to move south, arriving at Philadelphia, Wilmington, Charles Town and other ports. Those who remained, apart from the folk at New Londonderry, began to be assimilated into the general society.

The Memorial to Ulster emigrants in Larne's Curran Park mentions the emigrant ship Friends Goodwill.

  The history of Boston shows, however, that there was a nucleus of Ulster-Scots in the city. In 1737 they helped celebrate St. PatrickÕs Day in the city and formed a
benevolent society known as the Irish Society. Another group with which they involved themselves, along with Roman Catholic settlers, was the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, which sent considerable financial assistance to starving patriots holed up at Valley Forge during a low point in the Revolutionary War. The second Masonic lodge to be formed in New Hampshire called itself St. Patrick's Lodge and consisted mainly of Presbyterians from Ulster.

  Little trace remains of the folk who arrived on the Friends Goodwill, beyond an impersonal account of the ship's arrival in one of the Boston newspapers. Bolton's Immigrants to New England covers a period between 1700 and 1775.

  In 1717 there are a few references to Boston. One of them concerns a Margaret Allen, who arrived from Ireland in 1717 and was to become an indentured servant for four years to an innkeeper named John Langdon, of Boston. Margaret had been unable to pay her fare and thus sold her labour for four years as an indentured servant to the ship's captain, who then sold this indenture certificate on arrival.

  Was Margaret one of the passengers on the Friends Goodwill from Larne? Unless a ship's list appears we shall probably never know.

  We do know that others arriving in Boston in September 1717 included a John Patterson, who settled at Lancaster County, and later Cumberland County, in Pennsylvania. A James Patterson, who was probably another family member, is also recorded, as is a Thomas Brennan, William Bell, Captain Robert Temple and a Thomas Crawford. Three of these men appear to have been from Carrickfergus.

  We know little, however, about whether these could be passengers who travelled on the Friends Goodwill and can only speculate on the basis of timings of arrival in
Boston in 1717.

  We do know that the following year the Friends Goodwill returned to Boston, although the port from which Captain Edward Goodwin sailed on that occasion is not so clear. On board were passengers including James Hannah, Anne Harrison and William Hinks, we glean from Bolton's listings.

  Several years ago, while attending a conference in Boston, I took the opportunity to visit some of the cemeteries in the central area of the city. But although I came across the gravestone of a George Vaughan from Ireland, there was nothing more local and none of the names which I had sought. Those early Ulster Bostonians remained a mystery.

  As part of the international twinning conference I attended that summer, we had a parade of nations through the city to Copley Square. At some point in the proceedings a police pipe band played what appeared to be 'The Wearing of the Green' while our delegation held their Ulster flag high. It seemed somewhat symbolic. Ulster emigrants may have been in Boston in 1717, but the city had changed much over the generations and Irish America had staked a strong claim.

  It was only some months after returning home that research turned up something rather surprising.

  In the Weekly Telegraph newspaper of August 2, 1930, there is an account of the 240th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of the Boyne in Boston. I was amazed at the coincidence when I learned that Orangemen and women and their bands had gathered at Copley Square before parading  to the South Station.

  July 12 was a Saturday in 1930 and the parade was led by Royal Black Knights and the McGregor Ladies Pipe Band, followed by Ladies Orange Lodges and the Woburn Fife and Bugle Band.

  There were in total six Black preceptories and 16 ladies lodges, and there were followed by Orange lodges, numbering 20, and including Diamond True Blues LOL 85, George Washington LOL 267, and Apprentice Boys LOL 701. At the South Station they all boarded buses for the Twelfth venue, Mayflower Grove, where speeches, sports and a concert was held, lasting until 8pm.

  It was hard to equate this 1930 account of an Orange Twelfth, clearly respectable enough in terms of numbers, and our view of modern Boston as speaking with an Irish lilt. But then it was also apparent from my short time there that Boston was a city of cultures and various strands and that while the more vocal might be more noticed, that was not the whole story.

  Some years ago on an internet auction site I purchased an old photograph of a Boston Orangeman. He has no name, and is in that sense as mysterious as the early arrivals on the Friends Goodwill from Larne. But the key thing
is that his presence, like their arrival, is recorded. There was an Ulster-Scots chapter in Boston's history, which awaits further exploration.

  In Larne's Curran Park the Ulster American Memorial specifically mentions the Friends Goodwill and 1717. The unknown emigrants of the Friends Goodwill are in some senses Ulster Pilgrim Fathers. And in a very real sense we do not need to know exactly who they were since we know the stock of which they came.

  They would be followed by hundreds of thousands of other Ulster settlers, most of whose names we do know.

  The following year, for example, the Rev. James McGregor led five shiploads of passengers from Londonderry, Macosquin, Aghadowey and Coleraine. They were Ulster-Scots emigrants who would name their settlement in New Hampshire after the city which they had left behind: New Londonderry.

  McGregor was accompanied by 700 people, including 95-year-old John Young, and history records that the first child to be born there was the son of John Morrison, the second the son of John McKeen. Around New Londonderry there was an Antrim and a Hillsborough.

  Maybe news of the Ulster settlement with the names and the people from home attracted some of the 1717 passengers; were that the case it would not be a surprising circumstance, although James McFarlane of Co Antrim, who had arrived in 1717, moved in the opposite direction and was one of the founders of the Derry Presbyterian Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

  I have crossed the Atlantic on a few occasions and the Friends Goodwill is always with me when I go. I look down at the vastness of the ocean which she faced for five months in 1717, and am filled with awe.

  The story of her passengers is that of a journey of courage and of faith. They feared they would not reach land before supplies ran out, and accounts detail that even the crew was weary. It must have been a testing time.

  In an important sense we need not worry about who they were or whether a passenger list will ever turn up these long years after the voyage. We have no need to know their names. They represent Every Ulsterman and Every Ulsterwoman who ever crossed the waves towards and beyond the horizon. They are the sons and daughters of a proud people.

  The memorial statue at Larne's Curran Park was unveiled by Professor Bobby Gilmer Moss, a proud Ulster-Scot academic from South Carolina. At the ceremony the late Rev. Lambert McAdoo, of First Larne Presbyterian Church, did something very symbolic. He stood in front of the statue of the family group and removed his shoes, standing on the grass to face the emigrant boy, who
was also carrying his.

  The footsteps we have taken as a people through history are there for all to see. We do not need the names of the travellers to know the importance and significance of their journeys...