But it was to Maryland and Pennsylvania that the greatest flow of Irish immigration directed its course. In the celebrated "Account of the Voyage to Maryland," written in the year 1634 by Mutius Vitellestis, the general of the Jesuit Order, it is related that when the _Arke_ and the _Dove_ arrived in the West Indies in that year, they found "the island of Montserrat inhabited by a colony of Irishmen who had been banished from Virginia on account of their professing the Catholic faith." It is known also that there were many families in Ireland of substance and good social standing who, at their own expense, took venture in the enterprise of Lord Baltimore and afterwards in that of William Penn, and who applied for and received grants of land, which, as the deeds on record show, were afterwards divided into farms bought and settled by O'Briens, McCarthys, O'Connors, and many others of the ancient Gaelic race, the descendants of those heroic men whose passion for liberty, while causing their ruin, inspired and impelled their sons to follow westward "the star of empire." After the first English colonies in Maryland were founded, we find in all the proclamations concerning these settlements by the proprietary government, that they were limited to "persons of British or Irish descent." The religious liberty established in Maryland was the magnet which attracted Irish Catholics to that Province, and so they came in large numbers in search of peace and comfort and freedom from the turmoil produced by religious animosities in their native land. The major part of this Irish immigration seems to have come in through the ports of Philadelphia and Charleston and a portion through Chesapeake Bay, whence they passed on to Pennsylvania and the southern colonies.