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The beginning of November was marked by the barbarous slaughter committed by the Scottish garrison of Carrickfergus in the Island Magee. Three thousand persons are said to have been driven into the fathomless north sea, over the cliffs of that island, or to have perished by the sword.
Early in August, Mountjoy had arranged what he hoped might prove the finishing stroke in the struggle. Dowcra from Derry, Chichester from Carrickfergus, Danvers from Armagh, and all who could be spared from Mountjoy, Charlemont, and Mount Norris, were gathered under his command, to the number of 8,000 men, for a foray into the interior of Tyrone.
Rapin has written an account of William's campaigns in England and Ireland; but with becoming modesty he says nothing about his own achievements. We must therefore supply the deficiency. Before the siege of Carrickfergus, he had been appointed ensign in Lord Kingston's regiment. He was helped to this office by his uncle Daniel, who accompanied the expedition.
The effect of this determined resistance, on the part of the little garrison at Carrickfergus, was to impress Schomberg with the fact that the difficulty of the task he had undertaken was vastly greater than he had supposed.
Oh, civilisation, with your million conventions, soul and body withering prudishnesses, vain education for the little ones, going to church in best black clothes, unnatural craving for cleanliness, feverish striving after comforts that bring no comfort to the heart, are you a mistake altogether? Candelaria and that genial runaway John Carrickfergus make me think so.
The transfer of the troops from Victoria Barracks, where they would have been useful to support the civil power in case of rioting, to Holywood, where they would be less serviceable for that purpose but where they would be in rapid communication by water with the garrison of Carrickfergus on the opposite shore of the Lough; the ordering of H.M.S. Pathfinder and Attentive to Belfast Lough, where they were to arrive "at daybreak on Saturday the 21st instant" with instructions to support the soldiers if necessary "by guns and search-lights from the ships "; the secret and rapid garrisoning of strategic points on all the railways leading to Belfast, all this pointed, not to the safeguarding of stores of army boots and rifles, but to operations of an offensive campaign.
It was such defiant rovers as he that provoked the "Morning Chronicle" of London to splutter "that the whole coast of Ireland from Wexford round by Cape Clear to Carrickfergus, should have been for above a month under the unresisted domination of a few petty fly-by-nights from the blockaded ports of the United States is a grievance equally intolerable and disgraceful."
The O'Neills ever ready for a fray, and the nearest in point of distance to Scotland promptly made overtures to the Bruces, and Edward Bruce, the victorious king's brother, was despatched at the head of a large army, and landing in 1315 near Carrickfergus was at once joined by the O'Neills, and war proclaimed.
Andrew Jackson, the father, and Elizabeth Hutchinson, the mother, were married and had two sons before they left Carrickfergus. They were poor, and doubtless came to America for no other reason than to better their fortunes. They were still very poor when, in the early spring of the year 1767, the husband died.
The fourth and fifth were dangerously wounded at the battle of Minden; the second was hurt in the reduction of Guadaloupe; lord Wallingford, the eldest, received a shot at Carrickfergus; and the third was slain in this engagement.
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