Many of the captains of emigrant ships at that time were thoroughly unscrupulous. A few years before the incidents just referred to occurred, the captain of a vessel, who had undertaken to carry a body of emigrants from Dunleary (now Kingstown), Ireland, to Charleston, S. C., landed eighty of them on the island of Inagua, near Dominica, in the West Indies, telling them it was well inhabited, and that provisions were plentiful. When, after having landed, they found that they had been deceived by the captain, and attempted to get on board the vessel again, they were fired on and one of them killed. They were, however, rescued a short time after by a passing American vessel, being, as might be supposed, “all in a most distressed condition.” It was not only the poorer people of Ireland who even then sought a free home in this land. Many persons of means were always to be found among those who came direct from thence. In 1798, a ship arrived at Norfolk, Va., from that country “with 426 passengers, chiefly tradesmen and persons of property.” In the absence of any authentic records of immigration during the thirty years preceding 1820, we are justified, when endeavoring to form anything like an approximately correct estimate of the arrivals from Ireland during that period, in taking into consideration the strength of the Irish element here at that time, and the importance attached to the movements of Irish Americans in aid of their struggling kindred in the Old Land. Branches of the United Irish Society were established here soon after the organization of that body in Ireland. “Its headquarters were in Philadelphia, where Mathew Carey and other good men gave it aid and impulse. The publications of the Irish society were reprinted in the city just named as early as 1794, and funds were collected and arms promised.”