The Irish in Colombia and Antioquia
The presence and impact of the Irish in Latin America dates back to the era of Spanish rule; throughout various historical periods, the Irish travelled to the Iberian Peninsula and from there to the Americas, joining expeditions centred around colonisation, trade, military pursuits and administration.
In the Archivo de Indias archive in Seville, within the files for Nueva Granada, we find people with Castilian surnames but who are registered as Irish, such as Simon Ruiz and Guillermo Leon, and others with Irish surnames that have been adapted to the Spanish language, such as Juan de la Espada (Swords). In addition, we find evidence of other Irish people that participated in local government and society, such as Stephen Bodquin (a treasurer in Santa Marta), Miguel Nagle (Mayor of Buga), Patricio Warnes (a businessman in Cartagena) and settled families such as married couple Cornelio and Maria Neil. In addition, women like Beatriz O'Donnell, daughter of Irish citizens Joseph O'Donnell and Isabel Bolton (who was wife of Viceroy Carrion and daughter of Enrique Bolton and Maria Sutton, both born in Wexford) are also to be found in the records.
Darien
The Irish had a particularly important impact on the colonisation of Darien (by the Gulf of Uraba) in 1788. Here, 64 families and 50 single people who had come from North America decided to settle, and they were joined by more families from inland Colombia. Of these families, 28 were of Irish origin, which shows their numerical importance and value as an emerging social group within the Hispanic world.
Independence campaign and its aftermath
There is no doubt that the greatest contributions of the Irish to Colombia occurred during the independence campaigns; to understand their impact, one only needs to look at the list of the 6,808 participating Europeans drawn up by the researcher Matthew Brown. Of these, Irish people represented 48% - in other words, more than 3,000 Irish people fought to bring freedom to Colombia.
These Irish soldiers mainly arrived to Colombian shores as part of the Irish Legion, which boasted famous officers like Casey, Devereux, Egan, Ferguson, Foley, Lanagan, Rooke, Larkin, McCarthy, Murphy, O’Leary, O’Connell, O’Connor and Sanders. But they were also present in the British Legion, as well as the Albión, Carabobo and Rifles battalions, the Húsares cavalry regiments, and in various other units of Bolívar’s armies. For example, in the Rifles batallion, which was noted for its courage and dedication in combat, most of the officers were Irish: Ferguson, Frin, MacGuire, O'Reilly, Sandes and Trim, among others.
Once the wars of independence ended, a large proportion of these men are thought to have remained in Colombian and joined the national army. Others abandoned the military life and integrated into society as businessmen, traders, musicians, doctors, poets, miners and settlers.
Particularly noteworthy are cases of travellers like Joseph Brown and William Duane, who both wrote of their impressions of Colombian society, culture and geography in their memoirs; businessmen like Federico O'Byrne, the founder of agricultural companies in Cauca; Diego Davison, from Dublin, a businessman in the salt industry, who in 1855 obtained three patents for his inventions; and the brothers Eduardo and Paul Nicholls Hughes, who founded a beer company in Antioquia in 1858.
They were fully integrated into their host societies, and indeed many Irishmen became a very important part of them: prime examples include doctors like Lucius Davoren, Thomas Fallon, Jorge Williamson Troop, Guillermo McEwen, Hugo Blair and William Porter Smith; businessmen like Juan Conquet, John Farrell, James Duncan and Enrique Higgins; and miners like the Davis, Fitzgerald, Glullans, Kenedy, and Nicholls families.
We also find men of the arts, including poets and intellectuals who descended from Irish citizens: José Joaquín Ortiz, grandson of Pedro Nagle, born in Waterford; Professor Gabriel Didimedom Hall, son of Irishwoman Anna Hall; Diego Fallon, son of the naturalist Thomas Fallon (in fact, a town in Tolima is named "Falan" in honour of his surname), and Rafael Pombo, grandson of Beatriz O'Donnell, who was a relative of the Irish nationalist hero Red Hugh O´Donnell.
Antioquia
The relationship of the Antioquia region with the Irish was different from that of the rest of Colombia, as this territory was not the scene of the great battles that were fought during the independence campaign. The only major skirmish in Antioquia in which the Irish participated was the battle of El Santuario in 1829. This occurred when Bolívar mobilised an army division under the command of the Irish general Daniel Florence O'Leary, with the purpose of defeating the rebellion organised by Antioquian José María Córdova. This division was made up of four sections commanded by the Italian Castelli, the German Lutzow, the Englishman Crofton and the Irishman Guillermo Fergusson. It was O'Leary himself who captured General Córdova, and one of his subordinates, Rupert Hand, also Irish, who fatally wounded the Antioquian hero. After this battle, besides Commanders O'Leary and Fergusson, the Irish officers Hand, O´Caw and Murray were decorated for their efforts.
Due to episodes like this, the Irish were not necessarily viewed in a positive light in the Antioquia region; however, the situation changed as more people of Irish origin arrived, forming families and companies and contributing to Antioquian society in sectors such as medicine, music and engineering. Doctors like Hugo Blair Brown, born in Donegal; Jorge Williamson Troop, from Dublin, hired in the Marmato mines and based in Rionegro; and the Irishman Fergusson, who also practiced medicine in Medellín.
Without a doubt, the economic sector in which the Irish participated the most in Antioquia was mining, they formed a number of small mining colonies in the north and south of Antioquia. In the mid-19th century, the English miner Tyrell Moore presented to the State of Antioquia a project that involved 200 families from Ireland settling in the area of Norte y Bajo Cauca. The proposal apparently garnered no local support, and other logistical problems prevented its completion. Although perhaps not to the extent envisaged by Moore, in this area we can nonetheless find strong evidence of an Irish presence, especially in Santa Rosa, a town where the miners Juan Kennedy, Ricardo Glullans and Carolina Tracy settled. The latter came with another young Irish woman, about whom we have no further information.
However, the largest such mining colony was established to the south of Antioquia, around towns such as Marmato and Supía. Among the hundreds of British, French, German and Swedish miners who lived in these communities, we also find some Irish names such as Eduardo MacAllister, Joseph Raphson, Nicolas Fitzgerald, Juan O'Byrne, David Davis and the Nicholls.
In western Antioquia, we also find people of Irish descent, such as Martin Nuget, a civil engineer who drew up a geographical map of Urabá in 1846, and Edward Cullen, a doctor and member of the Royal Geographical Society of London, who was in charge of drawing up the plans for the transoceanic canal project.
In the north-west of the province, we see some Irish people linked to the construction of the Antioquia railway, a company that since its beginnings has employed immigrant technicians, operators and other workers, most of them from the United States - as Francisco Cisneros, Director of the railway, was American. Among the railway employees, we can identify Irish roots in the names of engineers such as James Doyle, John Stack, the brothers John and Jeremias Dorgan, George Butler and John Daugherty.
Other Irish people present in Antioquia at that time were: Juan O'Brien, Víctor Cork and David Davison, as well as others carrying surnames such as O'Byrne, O´Donnel, O'Sullivan and Tracy – though these surnames soon died out, as they were carried only by women: Cecilia O´Donnel, Carolina Tracy and Marie O'Sullivan.
The Irish phenomenon has been highlighted in dozens of literary and academic works, of which some of the most important are: Irish Blood in Antioquia (Sangre irlandesa en Antioquia), by Aquiles Echeverri, an author of Irish descent; The Mysteries of the Mines (Los místeres de las minas) by Álvaro Gartner, and El Santuario: Global History of a Battle (El Santuario: Historia global de una batalla) by Matthew Brown.
The above research shows that Irish immigration has had a significant impact on Colombia, with its footprint shaping an important part of Colombia’s past and its historical and cultural heritage.
The above text was drafted by in Spanish by Antioquian historian John Alejandro Ricaurte, whose research specialities include the part played by foreigners in the struggle for Colombian independence. His most recent publication, La Dimensión Internacional en las Guerras de Independencia de Colombia (The Foreign Dimension in Colombia’s Independence wars), contains more information on the role of the Irish in this context. (Twitter: @JohnAle06977018, Instagram: johnalejandroricaurte, Facebook: Alejandro Ricaurte Historiador).
