On September 4, 1607, a big boat set sail from Lough Swilly bearing ninety-nine passengers. Among them were earls whose families had dominated the north-western part of Ireland for centuries; priests and clerical students bound for Louvain; a Spanish sailor who had been stranded in the time of the Armada and had married and settled in Ireland; and a bardic historian named Tadgh Ó Cianáin, who kept a vivid record of their progress. Foremost of the company was Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, who had in the previous decade sought to unite the disputatious leaders of Gaelic Ireland against the expansionist policies of English monarchs. He had led his troops to a tremendous victory at the Battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598, the only serious military defeat sustained by English forces on Irish soil: but that had been followed by the wholesale slaughter of the Irish at Kinsale in 1601.
After that, the power of the Gaelic princes was curbed and they seemed a spent force. Their departure in 1607 was so hurried that some men's wives and other men's children were left behind in the confusion. O'Neill's son was seized by the English and raised as a Protestant....Ó Cianáin's wife and children were left as virtual hostages, soon to be stripped of cattle and lands which were his inheritance as a man of learning....
In the canon of Irish nationalist history, the Flight of the Earls was the moment when Gaelic Ireland finally collapsed, that conjuncture which saw an entire people robbed of those natural leaders who might have given shape to their aspirations....
The image of their boat taking to the waters entered Irish iconography as an emblem of desolation: "with these/our very souls pass overseas." Subsequent accounts develop the emotion in Mac an Bhaird's poem: "it is said that, as the ship that carried them away set sail down Lough Swilly, a great cry of lament and farewell went up from their followers left upon the shore." With that sentence the Celtic scholar Robin Flower brings his study of Gaelic literature towards its conclusion in a chapter entitled "The End of a Tradition." But... the radical novelist Peadar O'Donnell laughed out loud on reading Flower's lines: for, according to the folk memory of his people, the peasantry of Donegal and Derry stood on the shores of Lough Swilly and cheered as the boat moved away.
--Declan Kiberd (1951- ), Irish Classics (pub. 2000)
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